Day 59 of 60: Final thoughts

This system will be going back to Sun soon, while I wait to find out whether or not they've decided to grant me the system. In the meantime, here are some final thoughts on the last 59 days.

Day 37 of 60: Instrumenting queue processing time

Previously I've written about variables that may affect how rapidly Sendmail can process the mail queue. I've now started working to gather data on exactly how much influence these variables have.

Day 27 of 60: Instrumenting Sendmail queue file creation (pt 2)

It's time to run an instrumented Sendmail, throw some messages at it, and see how it performs. Specifically, does the number of queue directories (on a single disk) make a significant impact on the time taken to create new entries in the queue?

Day 20 of 60: Running Sendmail in the zones (pt 2)

I've now got Sendmail built and installed, and adjusted the SMF so that it uses my local version of Sendmail (with DTrace probes) in favour of the system version.

Day 19 of 60: Running Sendmail in the zones (pt 1)

Now that Sendmail is building and correctly installing in to a custom directory it's time to start looking at how I get my version of Sendmail used instead of the version that's supplied with Solaris.

For that, I need to delve in to the Solaris Service Management Facility (SMF).

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.

Day 5 of 60: Building test zones

I've spent a bit of time today preparing some zones that I'll be using for testing my changes to Sendmail.

Day 4 of 60: The learning zone

One of the new features that Solaris 10 has that I'm interested in is zones. A zone is lightweight virtualisation environment. Unlike VMWare, or Xen, the whole environment is not virtualised. You still have one running OS kernel which arbitrates access to the hardware, for example. A zone is more like a separate instance of the userland, with its own IP address, users, running processes, and so on.

In this respect Solaris Zones are very similar to FreeBSD Jails, and if I was going to sum it up I might call it "chroot on steroids, with a much better management interface."

I'm quite familiar with FreeBSD's Jail system, much less so with Zones. I've offered up a Zone to some of the pkgsrc developers so they can experiment with pkgsrc on Solaris 10, and I'm planning on using Zones for testing the changes that I'll be making to Sendmail, so I need to learn how to create and manage them.

raison d’être

It started when I read a number of posts at Jonathan Schwartz's blog (in order: here, here, here, here, and here).

Jonathan is Sun's CEO (although he wasn't at the time he started this series). The essence of it is that Sun are so stoked about their new hardware that:

So... here's an invitation to developers and customers that don't want to move to Solaris, want to stay on GNU/Linux, but still want to take advantage of Niagara's (or our Galaxy system's) energy efficiency - click here, we'll send you a Niagara or Galaxy system, free. Write a thorough*, public review (good or bad - we just care about the fidelity/integrity of what's written - to repeat, it can be a good review, or a poor review), we'll let you keep the system. Free.

That sounds like a good deal to me. So I started thinking about how I might take advantage of this offer.