Day 14 of 60: Minor updates

I've been a bit busy with other work over the past few days, and haven't made quite as much progress as I'd like.

There are a few things that have moved forward though.



First, I now have all three zones running with my home directory mounted read-only. This was trivial to do, and the changes to the zone configuration scripts are in commit 1059 (which also fixed an erroneous entry).

Second, in the post where I started adding DTrace probes to Sendmail I mentioned that it seemed that DTrace couldn't be used to instrument functions that were defined as static.

I asked the DTrace community in this thread. At the time of writing the replies don't appear to have made it to their web interface -- the gist of it is that the functionality is in OpenSolaris and Solaris Express. There's a message from Adam Leventhal announcing DTrace support for static functions, and Bryan Cantrill wrote to me saying:

Just to be clear, that's "Nevada, the current Solaris release under development" not "Nevada, the infamous western US state." Given that there is quite a bit that's "only available in Nevada" (either one), I thought this was worth calling out... ;)

Because it's been in Nevada for a while (since Build 32), you can also get this functionality in Solaris Express 6/06, any recent OpenSolaris build, or the latest Nexenta Alpha (Alpha 5, based on OpenSolaris Build 40), Belenix (based on OpenSolaris ~Build 42) or SchilliX (based on OpenSolaris Build 35)...

I looked in to Solaris Express a bit more, and had some concerns that I might need to wipe and reinstall my existing configuration. Casper Dik set me straight, and explained that I can:

Upgrade (this replaces all of the Solaris bits with newer bits but keeps the configuration intact.

So I'm downloading the Solaris Express ISO images, and will be burning and booting from them later.

Finally, I've been looking at what I'm going to need to do to have Solaris use my Sendmail binary rather than the one that ships with Solaris. It looks as though I'm going to have to get my feet wet with the Solaris Service Management Facility. To that end I've been reading this SMF article from O'Reilly, as well as Sun's SMF Quickstart and the SMF Developer Intro.