/dev/dump

Well, as you may have read , Oracle has decided that at some point very soon, we're going to lose normal regular access to the source code for OS/Net. (I.e. the Solaris kernel and supporting programs.) While I would have vastly preferred for Illumos to have a cooperative and collaborative relationship with Oracle , it appears that Oracle doesn't value this. In fact, the exact words were from the management at Oracle were as follows: Solaris is not something we outsource to others, it is not the assembly of someone else’s technology, and it is not a sustaining-only product. While I understand the need to own the technology, there are few things that could be stated that show a stronger NIH attitude than this. Its unlikely that there will ever be a way for Oracle and the greater community to have a collaborative relationship. This is a dark day for OpenSolaris -- its effectively dead now. (Its parent, Solaris, lives on however.) How unfortunate. For Oracle that is. Because...

My company, DEY Storage Systems , is in the process of creating a new product around the illumos operating system.  As you might imagine, this product includes a variety of open and proprietary source code.  The product itself is not delivered as a separate executable, but as a complete product.  We don't permit our customers to crack it open, both from the sense of protecting our IP, but also to protect our support and release engineering organizations -- our software releases consist only of a single file and we don't supply tools or source for other parties to modify that file. One of the pieces that we wanted to integrate into the tree is an excellent little piece of software called Zookeeper , produced by the Apache organization.  Like illumos, Zookeeper has a nice non-viral copyleft license, which makes it nice for integration into our product. However, I discovered that as part of our integration, one of my engineers had decided to integrate GNU grep. ...

As a PSA (public service announcement), I'm reporting here that updating your Yosemite system to 10.10.3 is incredibly toxic if you use WiFi. I've seen other reports of this, and I've experienced it myself.  What happened is that the update for 10.10.3 seems to have done something tragically bad to the WiFi drivers, such that it completely hammers the network to the point of making it unusable for everyone else on the network. I have late 2013 iMac 27", and after I updated, I found that other systems started badly badly misbehaving.  I blamed my ISP, and the router, because I was seeing ping times of tens of seconds ! (No, not milliseconds, seconds!!!   In one case I saw responses over 64 seconds.)  This was on other systems that were not upgraded.  Needless to say, that basically left the network unusable. (The behavior was cyclical -- I'd get a few tens of seconds where pings to 8.8.8.8 would be in the 20 msec range, and then it would start to jump up v...