OpenSolaris woes

I have played around with OpenSolaris 2008.05 a bit, and found that the updates are still sub-standard (why must I manually update grub when doing "pkg image-update"?). Additionally the fonts get very very ugly so I went back to the original install, which is where I will stay for a while yet.

I reinstalled to get a clean system, and have found some more fun stuff:

• If your system gets an address with DHCP, and the system for some reason cannot keep the IP address, it does not automatically come back online when the network connection is reestablished (but zones do as they are statically configured, unfortunately you cannot come to the global zone from "inside" so it doesn't help much).
• Tried getting a usable VirtualBox instance on my laptop - for some reason it just doesn't work well. Perhaps I am stuck with vmware for this, abeit I'd rather use virtual box as Sun is VERY interested in having this work well.
• The Xming X server runs very well with OpenSolaris (http://www.straightrunning.com/XmingNotes/) also with Windows 2000 (an older version).
• Now I cannot get the Bonjour stuff to work, so no names for me, just new exciting IP numbers to remember.
• The SVC stuff is a nightmare to figure out how to get a simple java process (Jetty) to run at boot time. Sigh sigh sigh.
  

So currently there is progress to be made.

New blogging tool...

Got a reference to ScribeFire. This is the first test. Looks very interesting.

OpenSolaris 2008.05

I got interested in the DTrace technology which might be very interesting for some AS/400 Java stuff we are having problems with (with the Java part running under OpenSolaris).

So after installing OpenSolaris on an old 2xPentium III machine with 1.5 Gb RAM and a new disk, I started playing with it to see what it does.

I had to do the following:

• Enable BonJour/ZeroConf/Rendezvous annoucements with "svcadm enable multicast" - http://opensolaris.org/os/project/nwam/service-discovery/
• Enable network access to the PostgreSQL database by editing the /var/postgres/8.2/data/postgresql.conf.
• Enable ftp with "svcadm enable ftp".
  
• Compile Emacs 22 with gcc.
  
• Eclipse did not install from Blastware, sigh.
• Putty works well as a ssh client.
  

I found the installation to work very nice.

Just for fun I created a lx zone, where the supplied tar-file fitted right in, and the Linux JDK 1.6 ran out of the box.

The Gnome based desktop is nice with just a few surprises:

• the mounted disks do not show up on the desktop
• no trash can available on the desktop
  

Asus WL-167g on OS X 10.3

Summary: Only WPA with TKIP works, not WPA2 with AES

I have several iMac G3's and I have only one Airport card, so I have acquired an Asus WL-167G USB adapter which I now needed to work on one of the machines without an Airport card. The 54 Mbps doesn't matter much as the USB port is 1.1 only, but it is nice anyway as my ADSL provides only 200 kb/s.

This had worked before, but I had removed the drivers when setting up the airport card on this machine, so it should just be a matter of reinstalling the driver and plugging the adapter in. Unfortunately it didn't quite go that easy.

My wireless access point is an Apple Airport Express (which I bought solely for the Airtunes facility) and this combination has worked flawlessly earlier, but not anymore. As a Dell could connect effortless I strongly suspected driver problems., as my previous adventures with this indicated that it HAD to be exactly right to work.

Unfortunately both the latest driver from the Asus website, as well as the driver on the cd that came with the adapter failed utterly despite several reboots. The adapter was found, the very ugly interface window came up, the network preference pane showed the adapter but it assigned itself an IP-adress instead of getting one from DHCP.

After a lot of headscratching I noticed that the statistics pane showed that NO frames were received at all. This reminded me that I had changed some settings in the Airport Express some months back, so it ran both WPA and WPA2, and the software suggested WPA2 with AES as the authentication mechanism. Hmm, changing this to WPA with TKIP gave packets back AND a DHCP address.

Adding the RT2500Replug hack made this work also after a reboot.

Now it works well again, and hiding the status window and giving it a nicer icon helps a lot on the driver icon (why couldn't they just mimic the airport stuff instead, sigh).

Quick taming of log4j

When beginning to create a new application using log4j the dreaded

log4j:WARN No appenders could be found for logger (....).
log4j:WARN Please initialize the log4j system properly.

quickly shows up. Instead of adding lines with BasicConfigurator, just create a file named "log4j.properties" in your source folder in Eclipse with the following content:

log4j.rootCategory=INFO, CONSOLE

log4j.appender.CONSOLE=org.apache.log4j.ConsoleAppender
log4j.appender.CONSOLE.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.CONSOLE.layout.ConversionPattern=%-4r [%t] %-5p %c %x - %m%n

(note the ConversionPattern should go on a single line).

Instant gratification :D