SX:CR Build 57 is out!

Solaris Express Community Release Build 57 is already out. You can download it by following the links to the far right under OpenSolaris. This build includes many new features and fixes. Here is the flag-day heads up changelog. Looks like I'll be upgrading this weekend:)

Niagara III and Rock have taped out!

I came across this article that reports the Niagara III and Rock have taped out. The Niagara II (a.k.a. T2) will ship in the second half of 2007 performing at ~35 times that of a USIIIi. Then in the first half of 2008, Niagara III (a.k.a. Victoria Falls) will ship performing at ~65 times that of a USIIIi. Followed by Rock in the second half of 2008, which will perform at ~16 times the USIV+. Both Niagara III and Rock will be 16 core dies. Niagara III also appears to be the first generation to have dual sockets. I assume Rock based servers will have a larger number of sockets. You can read more details in this pdf.

Updated Nicstatus

Well it's been a while, but I've finally updated nicstatus. This is a script that I've been maintaining for a while that displays status information about NIC's. I added support for the e1000g interfaces, tested against the Fujitsu FJGI's, and cleaned up the script. Next I have to add support for more x86/x64 NIC's. I've found the biggest hurdle is the lack of consistency between ndd and kstat outputs which are dependent upon the driver version and OS. For Solaris 10 and above, I may clean this up a bit by using dladm, which lists all interfaces with speed and duplex information. Here's the link to the latest version of nicstatus.

Telnet exploit.

Not that I ever enable telnet for anything these days, but apparently a bad putback has exposed Solaris 10 and above to a telnet exploit. Basicly, it allows you to telnet into a machine as any user, even root. There are some built in features to prevent this exploit from being a big issue. First off, telnet is disabled by SBD (Secure By Default), and secondly CONSOLE=/dev/console is set by default in /etc/default/login. Sun already has a Tpatch available and the fix has been committed to the Nevada tree. Read more here.