Last night I watched almost the entire 5 hour live webcast announcing Oracle’s strategies regarding the Sun Microsystems acquisition. As a near-evangelist for Sun and Solaris, I’m very happy with the deal finally going through and even happier that most of what Oracle said makes sense to me as a customer.

Obviously, it is easy…

As I originally blogged, I was hoping to use EMC snapshots to perform server-less/network-less backups…
To make a long story short, Replication Manager is useless for LUNs with ZFS. According to EMC, this won’t change in the near future. PowerSnap also has no support for taking snapshots of LUNs with ZFS on them so basically…

You can make the executable search PATH variable persistent in several ways:

1. On the system level you can …
2. On a per user level, or for the user root, you can …

You may say, “It only takes me 3 hours to do a full backup of everything”, but over time backup windows are notorious for becoming too small. Backups are split over multiple days, technologies upgraded, etc. When planning a backup strategy, my approach is to eliminate the backup window altogether- that is do whatever…

Someone currently building an internal development environment required some integration between servers using SSH and the webservd user.
He came to me when he saw that the default home directory for the webservd user is /.  He didn’t want to create a /.ssh/authorized_keys file and I didn’t blame him. My first reaction was to change…