What's in a title?

Speaking of UC lawyers fighting lawsuits, I had a conversation today with a colleague to change 'resource-sharing' to 'file-sharing' in the title of a paper we submitted today. The paper was aimed at an audience who probably wouldn't understand what 'resource' is, but would understand 'file' - so I thought it'd be best to change it.

Part of our research into decentralized architectures can (and does) apply to file-sharing applications. I don't view file-sharing as a terribly interesting decentralized domain, but it's one that connects with a lot of the audience. Therefore, we inevitably mention it in our papers. In this particular case, we had a group of undergraduates working on a project to create a file sharing application using PACE. It turned out rather well - all things considered.

What's interesting is that the campus forbids any use of file-sharing software automatically. All BitTorrent traffic is automatically blocked and if you do use it, your machine gets black-holed by the campus firewall. We had one of our servers in the office blocked because we downloaded Knoppix via BT. Lovely. As more and more legitimate uses are found for BT, I'm continually locked out due to the wide blanket NACS casts over the campus network.

We can write the software, write papers about the software, but we're forbidden to actually take advantage of it. Isn't the ivory tower nice?

[/ucirvine] permanent link

Go, go, go into the blinding light...

Now that I've been given permission, I can share that I've accepted an offer to go to Google (as an intern) for three months starting in January to work on Subversion. I can also share that my main goal while there at Google will be to integrate Subversion with Serf.

This isn't the first time I've been offered a position at Google, but, for a number of reasons, this offer was better for me both personally and professionally.

I'm excited because this will grant me the opportunity to work on this problem that I've been talking about for years - and talk about it publicly at the same time! It also helps that I have a lot of former and current colleagues there already (curse them and their boat load of options!).

I still need to find a place to live up there... Grr.

Plus, I've still got to advance to candidacy before I go, so there's a lot of work to be done before I take a hiatus from the ivory tower. (Actually, hiatus is too strong a word - there's a lot of overlap here with my eventual research plan.)

[/ucirvine] permanent link

SAP doesn't get it

Shai Agassi of SAP said:

"But if you look at the most innovative desktop today, Microsoft's Vista is
not copying Linux, it is copying Apple."

But, but, but....

Exactly where does he think Apple is getting some of its innovations from? Just look at Darwin and Safari. Both have strong roots in open source innovation. Apple has been able cherry-pick from successful open-source projects and continue innovating on top of them.

Why do so many pointy heads not realize that Linux isn't the only open source project? Ergh. Open source is now extremely pervasive. And, that's because it continually innovates in ways that commercial products can't.

[/apache] permanent link

IEEE Internet Computing arrived.

Yay. It looks like they spelled our names correctly!

Our article An Architectural Approach for Decentralized Trust Management is in the current issue of IEEE Internet Computing on pages 16-23. This article is an introduction to PACE which is a joint work with Girish Suryanarayana.

Here's the abstract for this paper:

To guard against malicious peers, peer-to-peer applications must
incorporate suitable trust mechanisms. Current decentralized
trust-management research focuses mainly on producing trust models and
algorithms, whereas the actual composition of trust models into real
applications has been largely unexplored.  The practical architectural
approach for composing egocentric trust (Pace) provides detailed design
guidance on where and how developers can incorporate trust models into
decentralized applications. In addition, Pace's guiding principles
promote countermeasures against threats to decentralized systems.
Several prototypes demonstrate the approach's use and feasibility.

You can find out lots more about PACE on our new website. If you have an IEEE subscription, you should be able to read this article. (If not, get one!)

I should also mention the efforts of Scott Hendrickson, Mamadou Diallo, and, of course, our advisor, Richard Taylor.

We have some more papers in the pipeline that we're optimistic about as well.

[/ucirvine] permanent link

Patching Solaris 10 with zones

Sun now requires all Solaris 10 updates to go through the Update Manager. However, note the following blurb:

The Sun Update Connection cannot currently be used on systems
configured with Zones. This is a result of changes to the
low-level Solaris patch utility, patchadd, that rendered it
incompatible with the Sun Update Connection client software.
Updates for these systems must be obtained from SunSolve and
applied using patchadd.

Oops. Zones are by far the killer feature in Solaris 10.

Sun's argument is that because patchadd changed the result code that it is impossible to script it? How exactly did this change get through the ARC? Were they sleeping that day?

In the Update Connection support forum, they've been promising that a fix will come real soon now - I'm beginning to think they just don't care to fix it and produced this lame excuse.

Luckily, it's not terribly hard to script the patching process with zones installed.

Caveat emptor.

[/software/solaris] permanent link

Recall this patch, Sun!

Sun Solaris/10 Intel kernel patches 118844-18 through 118844-23 blow up Solaris 10/x86. Your machine will become a brick and enter an infinite reboot loop. Lovely.

I just spent the better part of an hour dealing with Sun's idiocy. If you have a bad patch, revoke it. Don't keep allowing poor admins to come along later after you know it's broken and fall into the same trap.

Not happy at all.

Here's the workaround so that you can boot:

[...at the Solaris boot prompt; enable kmdb, debugging, and single-user
    so that you can remove the patch and reboot...]
boot -kds
[...wait for it to boot...]
physmax:w
:c
[...you'll see 'stop on write of'...]
physmax/X
[...you'll see something like the following line:

   physmax: bff7f

 this is a hex number; add one; so if you see bff7f,
 your next line will need to be bff80...]
physxmax/W bff80
:c
[...system will boot and go into single user mode...
    now, go toss those patches...]
patchrm 118844-19 120662-03 118345-12 118376-04 \
  118565-03 118886-01 119076-10 118813-01 \
  118881-02 120082-07 119851-02
shutdown -i6 -y -g0 "sun should test their patches"

[/software/solaris] permanent link

You can have him, really.

The Dodgers got permission to talk to John Hart, formerly of the Rangers.

Oh, that's a good one. I can't stop laughing. Sorry Dodgers fans.

[/sports/rangers] permanent link

Why this guy hates Apache

On one of the Unix admin lists I'm on, at the end of a long day, this poor guy just about had it:

And this brings me to the next thing, noticing things. Who the hell set that
up? How could you not notice that it takes apache about 30 seconds to serve
the first page, because that's how long it takes to spawn a single child?
Did you ever look at the log files? How about this for noticing: Before I
fixed the configuration, everytime you restart apache it throws this HUGS
ASS ERROR MESSAGE into your face that says "Proceeding with undefined
results." at the end. What were you thinking when you ignored it? What about
the fact that some VirtualHosts were defined twice? Apache doesn't even
complain about that, it just silently chooses one, apparently at random.
Did anyone ever test the configuration? Notice how every directory with a
.htaccess file came back with Internal Server Error?

Worth the chuckle. I've had that feeling before.

The analytical side of me does wonder what specific version they are using, but I gather the hardware is flaky.

Wonder if Rich is accepting submissions to add to his list of things to hate for the lightning talks at ApacheCon next month.

[/software] permanent link

Game 1: Thrilla in 'Nix

So you say Phoenix had the best home-court record last year? We'll bring it wherever we need to.

Down by 17 with 7 minutes left in regulation? No worries. We got Dirk (and Van Horn) raining threes.

Miss a bunch of FTs that would ice the game in OT? It's just part of the ebb and flow. JET makes another clutch shot at the end of OT.

Don't score 100 points until the end of the first overtime? Phoenix and Dallas? It's just part of a defensive renaissance.

Oh, yah. Screams of double overtime joy.

If only every NBA team could play like the Mavs and Suns. But, then, the NBA wouldn't be worrying about a dress code. By the way, nice coat, Mark! I think he was trying to out-spiffy Craig Sager who looked mellow in comparison.

[/sports/mavericks/2005-2006] permanent link