Let me be the first to point out how ridiculous this is.
I dont want to get into the whole ‘having a ring / not having a ring’ thing but seriously. I can choose a ring up to 125,000 dollars? on AMAZON? Amazon. Seriously. Are they just probing the market? Are people really going to spend that much? I wouldn’t be that surprised – I’d just be terribly dissapointed.
Today the Canadian Space Agency started a recruitment campaign for the next set of astronauts. From the website
“The Canadian Space Agency is seeking outstanding scientists, engineers and/or medical doctors with a wide variety of backgrounds. Creativity, diversity, teamwork, and a probing mind are qualities required to join the Canadian Space Agency’s Astronaut Corps. To withstand the physical demands of training and space flight, candidates must also demonstrate a high level of fitness and a clean bill of health.”
I decided to got through the sign up process. Interestingly enough, the first skill testing question was a CAPTCHA. Seriously – What the fuck point would there be for a BOT to sign up to become an astronaut?
Typical questions may include
Whats the furthest distance you’ve been from home?
Do you easily become nauseous?
Are you comfortable peeing into a tube? But seriously, it’s pretty cool that we’re recruiting for astronauts on the internet. Space travel seems so casual now, but still very very elite. I guess I’ll have to wait until they start mining turbinium on mars.
OpenSolaris 2008.05 came out the other day, and its pretty nice as far as OS’s go. One of the things that’s great about OpenSolaris is by coupling Xen with ZFS you can get a really powerful virtualization system.
Unfortunately because of space constraints in a liveCD, you can’t squeeze all those ‘nice to have’ packages into one spot, so you have to download and setup xVM manually. A few things are broken, too so some minor tweaking is required. Here’s a list of steps required to get xVM setup as a Dom0 in OpenSolaris
1) Become root and install the required packages. This will install the xen.gz kernel, as well as all the other utilities and services necessary for running a Dom0
pkg install SUNWxvmhvm pkg install SUNWvirtinst pkg install SUNWlibvirt pkg install SUNWurlgrabber
2) The package installation doesn’t support adding xvm to the default boot.lst in grub. Additionally, OpenSolaris 2008.05 has ZFS as the default filesystem, so a few things have been moved around. Specifically, the boot.lst file used by grub and bootadm has been placed on its own zfs filesystem. Unfortunately it seems that bootadm has been compiled, or at least the distribution has been put together, without the ability to gracefully handle having the boot.lst on a separate partition.
A workaround is to move the /boot/grub/menu.lst file (which has some explanatory text in it) to /boot/grub/menu.lst-old, and to symlink the /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst file to /boot/grub/menu.lst.
cd /boot/grub mv menu.lst menu.lst-old ln -s /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst menu.lst
Now we can run bootadm without any errors
bootadm list-menu
Time to add the boot entry for our xVM kernel
Update: Kevin Elliot said that running “bootadm -m upgrade” added the xVM entry automatically after performing the linkage steps. You will still need to add the ‘boofs rpool/ROOT/opensolaris lines however. [link] [link]
open up the /boot/grub/menu.lst file and add the following after the ‘bootadm’ section
vim /boot/grub/menu.lst
title OpenSolaris 2008.05 snv_86_rc3 X86 xVM bootfs rpool/ROOT/opensolaris kernel$ /boot/$ISADIR/xen.gz module$ /platform/i86xpv/kernel/$ISADIR/unix /platform/i86xpv/kernel/$ISADIR/unix -B $ZFS-BOOTFS module$ /platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive
Note that if you’ve done a pkg upgrade, your ZFS root will more than likely be different. You’ll have to choose the ZFS root partition that you were using when you installed the packages earlier, otherwise they won’t be available
Note: Make sure to change the default selection to the appropriate placeholder of your xVM entry. The numbering for grub starts at 0. This means that to boot the first entry in your menu.lst file, your ‘default’ value in menu.lst should be 0, and so on and so forth.
Let’s run bootadm and see what our changes look like
bootadm list-menu
The location for the active GRUB menu is: /boot/grub/menu.lst default 1 timeout 10 0 OpenSolaris 2008.05 snv_86_rc3 X86 i86pc 1 OpenSolaris 2008.05 snv_86_rc3 X86 xVM
Pretty. Now its time to try it out. In order to switch kernels you have to reboot your system
shutdown -y -g0 -i6
Your system should reboot using the xvm capable kernel. If your sytem could not boot properly then select the old kernel from the boot menu as your system starts.
To double-check that you’re running the proper kernel, run uname
uname -a
it should give you something like this
SunOS pluto 5.11 snv_86 i86pc i386 <strong>i86xpv</strong> Solaris
The last step is to enable the proper xVM services
svcadm enable store svcadm enable xend svcadm enable console svcadm enable domains svcadm enable virtd
Running
svcs | grep xvm
should print the following
online 2:22:12 svc:/system/xvm/store:default online 2:22:27 svc:/system/xvm/xend:default online 2:22:27 svc:/system/xvm/console:default online 2:22:27 svc:/system/xvm/domains:default
One quick test
xm top
Should work properly.
Hopefully that worked for you. I appreciate any feedback!
Update #2
Some people are reporting problems creating DomU’s. If you’re running into problems, try running the script below
BASEDIR=${BASEDIR:-/}
/usr/sbin/syseventadm list -R $BASEDIR -c EC_xendev > /dev/null 2>&1
if [ $? -ne 0 ]
then
/usr/sbin/syseventadm add -R $BASEDIR -c EC_xendev \
/usr/lib/xen/scripts/xpvd-event 'action=$subclass' \
'domain=$domain' 'vdev=$vdev' 'device=$device' \
'devclass=$devclass' 'febe=$fob'
fi
/usr/sbin/syseventadm list -R $BASEDIR -c EC_xpvsys > /dev/null 2>&1
if [ $? -ne 0 ]
then
/usr/sbin/syseventadm add -R $BASEDIR -c EC_xpvsys \
/usr/lib/xen/scripts/xpvsys-event 'subclass=$subclass' \
'shutdown=$shutdown'
fi
# restart daemon if the package is being added to the running system
if [ "$BASEDIR" = "/" -a $? -eq 0 ]
then
/usr/sbin/syseventadm restart
fiSeriously what the hell is this?
Update: OK I uploaded an image with the same name and wordpress wrote over the old one. Grr. (There used to be a picture here)
Do I have to take you people out back and beat you with a 2×4? Its the freakin’ internet! Everyone’s a citizen! The world at your fingertips, and you’re going to limit where I can see the video from? What’s the matter? To many people want to watch your awesome content? Nahhh fuck ‘em. At least I don’t have to put up with the stupid Yahoo! 60 Minute page, where they break a 15 minute video segment into 10 pieces and make you watch an ad at the beginning of each one. This is the kind of ‘feature’ that somebody thought was neat. Probably the same people that think websites created with Frontpage are ‘neat’. What if I’m an expat and I want to watch the news service I so diligently subscribe to while at home? Nope. It doesn’t matter, you dont count unless you’re within the magical line drawn on the magical paper.
There are ways to get around this problem, but it doesn’t always work. Either way it boils down to using a proxy that exists in the country that actually is allowed to view the video you want to watch. Proxy4Free is a handy list of proxies. One other method I’ve used a few times, but has less than 100% success rate is using google translator to translate the site into some other language. This of course means if you want to view your site in your native tongue, you have to either learn another language or stop caring.
Maybe I’m too idealistic, but is it that hard to not piss off your audience? Get with the program people. The planet doesn’t give a shit where your content originated, if its on the net, it should be out there for *everyone*
