Peter Baer Galvin's Blog

New column posted – Appropriate uses for Sun’s T-Servers

admin — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:03:16 +0000

Sun T-servers (also known as “CMT” or “coolthreads” servers) are low-cost and high capacity. But they are not a perfect fit for all workloads. My latest column goes through the details and how to determine if the T-servers are a good choice for a given application workload. It’s available here.

Nice list of software that works / doesn’t work on Snow Leopard

admin — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 20:18:19 +0000

I’ve started updating my systems, but first checked the compatibility list published at http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/ to be sure there are no known problems with applications that I care about.

I’m starting from least import and moving toward my most important systems. For my main desktop I’ve ordered a new hard disk to install as the boot drive. I’ll first install it externally, have the Snow Leopard install disk copy my current boot disk contents there, and then perform the upgrade there. Provides a nice safety net in case there are problems with Snow Leopard…

Bigger and faster

admin — Fri, 22 May 2009 17:03:20 +0000

Just upgraded my macbook pro with a newly-available 500GB 2.5″ SATA 7200 RPM drive. It was simple and quick and now I have more, fast space on my internal hard drive.

Here are the steps:
- Purchase the drive – I got mine from macsales.com otherwise known as Other World Computing.
- Attach the new drive as an external drive in an external chassis. Fortunately I already had one, but OWC also sells those. Something like this would do the trick. (Note that Firewire is faster than USB but that both would work.)
- Use Disk Utility (it comes with Mac OS) to format the new drive. I chose partition-> 1 partition, Mac OS X Extended (Journaled), then pushed the “options” button and chose “GUID Partition Table” as this is an Intel-based Macbook.
- Use Disk Utility to copy the internal drive to the new external drive via the “Restore” option along the top of the main window. This step took ~2 hours using FW400, copying about 200GB of content from the old disk to the new.
- Halt the system, remove the old hard drive and replace it with the new drive. Fortunately on the new MacBook Pros, this is easy. The old systems were challenging to get into and to change disks in. Although again OWC has the directions.
- Boot the new system and revel in its speed and free space!

Upgrade memory – get out of jail

admin — Sat, 02 May 2009 15:42:51 +0000

Upgraded the memory on my Mac Pro from 5GB to 12GB and I feel like I’ve been let out of jail. Now I can have Entourage, Firefox, Aperture, and Vmware running at the same time and not be swapping to disk – life is much faster. I used 2 X 4GB kits from Other World Computing – a great company. Removed the 2 X 512MB DIMMs that were the original memory in the box.

Sun 7000 FAQ published at CTIStrategy

admin — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 19:07:21 +0000

The Sun 7000 is a new NAS storage line from Sun. It contains lots of new ideas, and some of those new ideas can be a bit confusing. My colleague Jesse St. Laurent has taken the lead on clearing up the confusion by writing the Sun 7000 FAQ. Have a look at it and feel free to add questions (or answers) via the form at the bottom of the page.

Teaching at the Usenix ATC conference

admin — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 18:20:23 +0000

I’ll be teaching two days of my Solaris tutorials at the Usenix ATC conference in San Diego during the week of June 15th. Hope to see you there!

Column – The Sun Virtualization Guide

admin — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:52:45 +0000

My April 2009 column has been published in ;login: Magazine. This month it’s The Sun Virtualization Guide- making sense of and decisions about the various Sun virtualization options. LDOMs, Containers, Domains and Xen are all options worth considering, and this guide leads you through what each does and when to use them. Some ;login: contents is freely available at ;login:, but my column this month is not one of them. I’ve posted the .pdf here for those without a USENIX membership (although I strongly recommend you get one if you are interested in all things Unix).

Usenix 2009 Registration open

admin — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 21:27:13 +0000

Registration for the 2009 Usenix ATC conference has just opened. The conference is top notch, for and buy Unix administrators. It’s in San Diego, CA the week of June 15th. I’ll be teaching two tutorials there (covering Solaris 10 administration, virtualization, file systems, and security) and hopefully will be around for the whole conference. One of the keynote speakers is David Brin, and I’d love to meet him.

Full information, schedule, and information is here. Hope to see you there.

My blog picked as one of the top 100 Mac resources

admin — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 19:08:20 +0000

Thanks to Becoming a Computer Technician for picking my blog as something useful to Mac users. I guess that means I should update my “Best Mac Resources” page – it’s sorely in need of one.

Sixth NEOSUG meeting rescheduled

admin — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:29:45 +0000

We’ve rescheduled the sixth NEOSUG meeting for March 11. Dave Miner will talk about the state of OpenSolaris and demo some new functionality, and I’ll talk about what’s new in the Solaris 10 update 6 (11/08) release. Hope to see you there. For full details and registration info have look at the NEOSUG discussion forum.