OpenSolaris User Group - Jan 08

I attended the Advances in OpenSolaris Network Administration talk hosted by LOSUG over at London Bridge last night. And no one mentioned MySQL.

I came out of the session with a couple of pages of notes but two things really stuck out - the talk covered the new developments as a sequential feature list rather than showing you something cool or interesting and then explaining how the new technologies made it possible. A couple of slides had command lines on them to illustrate a point but they were little tweaks and changes rather than something that made you sit back and say “I want that.” This is in no way uncommon but it is often an opportunity wasted.

This leads to my the second point, a lot of the topics covered were about incremental improvements and addressing concerns from previous versions of Solaris. While these are probably great things if you are stuck with older Solaris installs and looking for a way out the ability to sniff loopback traffic and rename nics didn’t really inspire me much, we’ve had those abilities in the Free and Open worlds for a fair while now.

I should also note that I -really- dislike the term “vanity naming” when it comes to changing the name of a network interface. It just makes the process sound so pointless and frivolous.