Posts by ptribble@mastodon.illumos.cafe
(DIR) Post #AxIc92FpDhUdG6hzwu by ptribble@mastodon.illumos.cafe
2025-08-18T10:31:18Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
A brief #introduction and potted history about how I ended up in the illumos world.I was a Theoretical Astrophysicist, and that needed these computer things. So I used (and helped maintain) VAXes and other odd boxes as a student in Oxford, moved to Sun (mc68k) and SGI and others in Toronto, back to more Sun/VAX/Alpha kit in Cambridge and ended up running that because somebody had to.Then some years as a sysadmin at an institute related to the Human Genome Project, where we ran mostly Sun/Solaris with some IBM kit, and then x86 Dell boxes mostly running Solaris. I logged so many bug reports against Solaris that Sun insisted I become a beta tester, which culminated in the Solaris 10 platinum beta. On which I was one of 4 people outside Sun who ran the original ZFS, the first prototype that got thrown away.Then Sun wanted to open source Solaris, I ended up on the pilot for that, led a couple of communities, and got elected to the Governing Board. Which didn't go so well in some ways, as one of our key actions later was to shutter the project to make it clear that it was going nowhere and a reset was needed.Out of the ashes illumos was born, after a break I went back to my project to work out how to build a distribution from scratch, learning a lot of obscure details about the inner workings, and ended up creating Tribblix.
(DIR) Post #AxNDzgiEW4KEjSo1Sa by ptribble@mastodon.illumos.cafe
2025-08-20T17:18:52Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
@ra @joel Well, illumos on sparc is a fairly niche, but when it does work it works very well. (Sadly, there are reasonably common cases that are known not to work.)Anyway, my notes ought to make a starting point:http://www.tribblix.org/sparc/
(DIR) Post #AxdNc1p0UMgbK2gqAq by ptribble@mastodon.illumos.cafe
2025-08-28T11:02:31Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
Have my Tribblix on SPARC server (a T4-1) running, catching up with all the package builds I've fallen behind on while it's been a bit warm to turn the machine on.
(DIR) Post #AxfRwoNqR0fFrJ4RSS by ptribble@mastodon.illumos.cafe
2025-08-29T16:32:09Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
I like to think that the software I write is done with care and attention to detail. Yet the defect density (most defects, fortunately, are fairly minor) is really quite high.I find it hardly surprising that a lot of software that is simply cranked out without such care is literally riddled with bugs.Does anyone really expect AI generated code (which is basically guesswork trained on garbage) to do any better?
(DIR) Post #AxhicUZ0VCDQ8L6lwO by ptribble@mastodon.illumos.cafe
2025-08-30T10:14:16Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@stefano Good morning from Tribblix Towers, where elevenses is in progress.
(DIR) Post #AyJFaB7mQxS0phFRqa by ptribble@mastodon.illumos.cafe
2025-09-17T21:05:41Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
Most of the reviews of Tribblix, and the feedback I get, are useful. I've now got a list of good improvements, all I need now is some time to implement them.One coming up in the next release is that the installer requires explicit direction as to what the install target is. The -G flag means whole disk with GPT, -b means whole disk with legacy MBR+SMI, and now you'll need -p to install to a partition - if you don't specify, it won't blindly hope for the best, which has occasionally tripped up the unwary.
(DIR) Post #AyJFaJRZVG2GdOZMo4 by ptribble@mastodon.illumos.cafe
2025-09-17T21:08:51Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Yes, I know, the options are a mix of upper and lower case. That's an unfortunate effect of past decisions having used the other case of the flag for something else, a decision that's now difficult to undo.
(DIR) Post #Ayq9igHV664dgZlrOa by ptribble@mastodon.illumos.cafe
2025-10-03T14:38:09Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
A bit of tweaking knocked a millisecond off the execution time of some of my scripts. They're used a lot in Tribblix, so that will quickly mount up.Patience may be a virtue, but performance is important.
(DIR) Post #AzDV0IcUNM1JBcuP4a by ptribble@mastodon.illumos.cafe
2025-10-14T20:32:57Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@kzimmermann Hm, well, technically not. I have plenty of kit that would be, but it's all had a real OS on it since the day I got it and has been working perfectly fine ever since and will continue to do so for a while yet.#EndOf10 #Tribblix #illumos
(DIR) Post #AzFes4rn0uFu4ZhgMi by ptribble@mastodon.illumos.cafe
2025-10-14T12:07:00Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@stefano This was one of the commonest use cases when we first started using zones back in 2004; it was so trivial to run up a whole populated system in a couple of minutes for people to test things out on, even without zfs (although we didn't have to worry about certificates because https wasn't really a thing back then!).
(DIR) Post #B0iXCQqS3hQNfLOQpE by ptribble@mastodon.illumos.cafe
2025-11-28T09:14:48Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
Tribblix Black Friday special offer: install one package for free, install as many packages as you like for free!*Offer also available before and after Black Friday.
(DIR) Post #B2Vi67k9UziTz7oY88 by ptribble@mastodon.illumos.cafe
2026-01-21T11:25:06Z
2 likes, 0 repeats
10 years or so ago, this happened:Me: I'm going to disable telnet on all the servers and use ssh everywhere.Users: Can't do that, our client software doesn't support it.Me: Oh, what software are you using?Users: Something called putty.Me: ...A quick walk round the office to reset everyone's putty back to defaults and telnet was very quickly disabled.
(DIR) Post #B2Vi69L3ZGpYvs5XI8 by ptribble@mastodon.illumos.cafe
2026-01-21T11:29:31Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Actually, my memory of time is a bit off. Make that 20 years or so ago.