[ug-glug] Thoughts, ideas, and other brainstorming (Was: Announcement: Next GLUG meeting, Feb 1st)

[Eric Boutilier]

Effrat, Alec wrote:

>Hey there is something that should be talked about, blastwave.org... If people don't know how to use it and integrate it into their solaris environment then we should get that info out into our usergroup.
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>Maybe that could be a topic for discussion from the group at the February meeting, Tools for using Solaris more effectively, and I definitely think that pkg-get and Blastwave is huge there.  I wouldn't mind hearing if the community has any really good experience with other tools, such as a webmin or a clone running on 11.
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>I am currently working on bringing the m0n0wall environment over to Solaris, while dummynet's functionality (traffic shaping) can't be ported straight the rest of the environment can be.  And possibly a new traffic shaper module can be written for Solaris Resource Manager (If only I could afford it, wah!).  If you're not familiar with this huge enabling opensourceware check out http://m0n0.ch/wall/, it allows you to boot a standard PC (or a v20z in our case) off of the CDROM and turn it into a firewall/router/wireless auth server/traffic shaper, with real time traffic graphing (based on BSD at the moment).
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>Another topic that I've kicked around mentioning, so I'll do it now, is new ways in which Solaris 11's features can be effectively used.  Currently on my workstation I'm combining ZFS with Zones to make a packaging environment.  ZFS allows me to clone the Zone environment boot up a test zone, and install the package.  If something doesn't go right I simply use a ZFS snapshot to rollback the environment and rebuild and reinstall the package.  While Solaris 11 doesn't make this as easy as could be, and maybe I should RFC this stuff, I really wouldn't mind how other people use the Zone features in a production or non-production "alternative" way.  One area we are exploring right now is SAN based (boot environment and data) zones that are clustered, can we boot a Solaris zone between disparate hardware (15k, 20k, v880, v490s) will it work!???
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>Alec
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It's great to see people jumping in and posting their interests and 
ideas like this!

Alec,

I for one, couldn't agree more. Exploring features of future Solaris 
releases (features that are 99% blessed and 100% integrated, but that 
won't actually ship for quite a while) is indeed _very_ cool.

--Eric

P.S. I also agree with your m0n0wall and blastwave comments, naturally.