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Did you know you can use Sun Connection and baselines to update your Solaris and Linux hosts?

A baseline is a dated collection of patches, patch metadata and tools -- Sun releases them for Solaris every month. By using baselines, you can easily track the patch level of your hosts.

Let's say you create a test host on which you deploy a particular baseline. You could test this host for a period of time to ensure that the patches in this baseline are stable enough to be used on your production host. When the testing reveals that this baseline is stable, you can install the same baseline you tested on your production host.

Learn more about baselines on sun.com -- and you will no longer have to worry about figuring patch dependencies...

» Read the full article: How to Use Sun Connection and Baselines to Patch the Solaris OS

If you're in Ireland and if you're looking to attend Solaris, Java or Enterprise Training Courses, Horizon Open Systems is running a special offer to celebrate Sun's 25th Anniversary...

If you book and attend any four Dublin training courses by 31st December 2007, you'll get the cheapest absolutely free. You can also avail of this promotion, if you send four employees (from the same company) on four different courses -- Again, you get the cheapest course free. Or also valid if you book four seats on the same course, you will again only pay for three.

For further details, visit : www.hos.horizon.ie/promotions

Available courses:

Solaris 10 Courses:
» UNIX Essentials Featuring the Solaris 10 OS
» Intermediate System Administration for the Solaris 10 OS
» Advanced System Administration for the Solaris 10 OS
» Transition to Solaris 10 From Solaris 8 and Solaris 9
» Solaris 10 for Experienced System Administrators
» Solaris 10 Containers
» Shell Programming for System Administrators
» Network Administration for the Solaris 10 OS
» Dynamic Performance Tuning and Troubleshooting With DTrace
» Solaris System Performance Management
» Administering Security on the Solaris Operating System

Solaris 9 Courses:
» UNIX Essentials Featuring Solaris 9
» Intermediate System Administration for Solaris 9
» Advanced System Administration for Solaris 9

Java Technology Courses:
» Java Programming Language
» Developing Applications for the J2EE Platform
» Sun Java System Directory Server 5.x: Analysis and Planning
» Sun Java System Directory Server 5.x: Maintenance and Operations

Enterprise Systems Courses:
» Storage Management with Backup
» Solaris Volume Manager Administration
» VERITAS Volume Manager Administration
» Sun Cluster 3.1 Administration

The Wiki for DTrace, published by SolarisInternals, is very, very cool. Check it out and bookmark it:

» Wiki: DTrace Topics

Sun has recently published an article on how to install the latest Kernel Update (KU) patch, or any patch, to a post-GRUB x86 based miniroot image for the JumpStart installation programme.

In some cases, Sun provides hardware support through driver patches. These driver patches are released to suport third-party hardware, but they can also enable the installation of a particular release of Solaris on newer hardware without necessitating the re-engineering of that particular Solaris release. The procedure will require the installation of a particular driver patch. And most often, the process involves installing the latest KU patch for the OS in question.

This article describes how to patch an x86 GRUB miniroot image to create a modified GRUB based miniroot that contains the latest KU. The version of Solaris that is used in the artice is the Solaris 10 1/06 release, which is the same release that introduced GRUB-based booting on x86 based systems (Note: you can use this procedure for all subsequent Solaris 10 releases that implement GRUB-based booting).

» Read more: "Patching an x86 Miniroot Image for the Solaris OS"

There are many tools out there to help developers find memory-related errors at runtime. But none of them is perfect. Dmalloc is a valuable open-source debugging package for C, C++ and Fortran developers that will supplement your other debugging tools.Dmalloc is especially useful when you have large applications that more powerful debugging tools can't handle well.

In a recently-published article on sun.com, Sun Engineer Greg Nakhimovsky explains how, with a few relatively minor adjustments, you can use Dmalloc on Solaris with Sun Studio compilers to locate memory-related application bugs...

Have a look at Greg's step-by-step article and happy debugging!

»Read: Using Dmalloc With the Solaris OS and Sun Studio Compilers (by Greg Nakhimovsky)

If you couldn't attend this year's JavaOne Conference, fear not! Sun has made available videos of the general sessions on its website. Here's a selection of technical highlights:

» Announcing Java FX (34:26)
Rich Green, James Gosling and Christopher Oliver unveil JavaFX -- a new Java innovation targeted at the billions of consumer devices and computers powered by Java technology.

Evolutionary Java Technology: A Look Forward at the Future of the Platform
» Part 1: JRuby Demo (30:19)
» Part 2: Glassfish V3 (14:44)
» Part 3: Nasa World Wind Java, GL Studio and Iris (23:05)
» Part 4: JavaFX and JavaFX Mobile (22:00)

Mobility and Device General Session: Discussing The Latest Trends...
» Part 1: Laurie Tolson (Sun) is joined by Jason Ling (MySpace) and Martin Wrigley (Orange/France Telecom) (11:10)
» Part 2: Mashup, SVG, mSOA, Mobile & Embedded Community (19:42)
» Part 3: GEM, Service Convergence, Common Developer Platform (14:45)
» Part 4: JavaFX Overview, Architecture, Devices, Big Picture (7:28)

To view more replays, visit the 2007 JavaOne Conference website.

Enjoy!

If you're looking for ZFS Best Practices including Storage Pools Recommendations, Storage Pool Considerations, General ZFS Administration Information and more, the following SolarisInternals wiki entry is a must-have bookmark:

» View ZFS Best Practices

To commemorate the largest NetBeans Day ever, NetBeans.org has put together a special issue of NetBeans Magazine with a whopping 84 pages of in-depth technical articles. Issue Three showcases the flexibility and versatility of the IDE and Platform, and the upcoming features in NetBeans 6.0.

You can view the magazine as a whole or as individual articles. You can also access simplified HTML versions of each article. Though for the full visual experience, I recommend the PDF :)

» View & Download NetBeans Magazine - Issue Three - May 2007

This is a Sun video about the NetBeans Mobility Pack which is used to write, test, and debug applications for Java-enabled phones and mobile gadgets.

Watch Video: Billions of Devices, One Tool Set (8:24)

Sun has expanded its $1/CPU-hr, pay-per-use Network.com utility to Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

If you are a developer, ISV or simply an end-user from any these these countries, you now have access to Network.com's powerful, on-demand computing infrastructure (powered by Solaris 10), as well as to the open source and ISV applications published in Network.com Application Catalogue.

Plus! Users signing up for a Network.com account get 200 CPU-hrs free for a limited time...

Sounds good? Visit www.network.com for details!

If you have the Solaris and Windows operating systems on your system, there is a way to mount read-only NTFS partitions under Solaris and read Solaris UFS partitions from Windows... Thanks to the Mount-ntfs and UFSRead project.

This project consists of two tools:

• mount-ntfs is a tool that allows mounting read-only NTFS partitions under Solaris
• ufsread is a tool that lets you read Solaris UFS partitions from Windows (NT/2K/XP but not 3.x/9x/ME).

To learn more, visit: http://mount-ntfs.sourceforge.net/

Additionally, check out Pradhap Devarajan's blog on sun.com for a step-by-step guide to mount-ntfs: http://blogs.sun.com/pradhap/entry/mounting_ntfs_partition_in_solaris