Tag Archives: Solaris

More Of The Same

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I’ve been testing PGP10 with GnuPG2 again, and noticed that GnuPG2 seems to embed the filename of encrypted files incorrectly – they’re always called “-&25″. Whilst they decrypt fine using GPG which I guess ignores the embedded filename and uses the actual filename, PGP cannot handle it. The fix is to add: set-filename "" to ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf

I installed my Corsair H50-1 watercooling system the other day, and on the final step found that I had a mis-manufactured part so am awaiting delivery of a replacement – which is being helped up getting between the US and Europe due to bloody Icelandic ash! So I had to put everything back together again, wasting about three hours of my time. I did at least confirm that I can get a 2-fan setup into my case, its a bit tight with the graphics card and PCI bracket though.

I installed Solaris 10u8 under VirtualBox yesterday and found that they’ve improved security by default – a lot of policies that had to be manually tightened are already set, such as SSHv2 and no root SSH. I meant to test them before applying the patch cluster, as the fixes could be due to the cluster. Update 9 should be due next month, which is the first post-Oracle release.

I’ve been playing with Nessus 4.2 exporting to Excel, using custom XSLT’s and writing more NASL’s. I installed 4.2.2 but it still doesn’t cache the SWF object.

I’m awaiting a replacement hard disk caddy for my laptop as it recently stopped working. I’m pretty sure its not the disk that’s dead as its barely been used and works fine the 10% of the time it actually does boot.

My Samsung F3 hard disk has started humming and vibrating like all the F1′s did, so I expect that is on its way out, so backing up regularly and will probably order a WD Caviar Black 1Tb next month, I’m fed up of Samsung, they’re the new Maxtor/Deskstar of the hard disk world I reckon!

Movie Monday

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I tried out Debian 5.0 “Lenny” today, quite impressed that VirtualBox guest additions worked flawlessly once gcc/make/kernel-headers were installed. Its funny though, only Debian would make a new release where most of the software is already a year out-of-date! Screenshot.

I also tried OpenSolaris 2008.11, which I guess is what will become Solaris 11 – not as Linuxesque as I thought it would be, although we do have bash as root’s shell, and a proper package manager, not just useless old pkgadd. I was quite impressed with TimeSlider, which is essentially a rip-off of Apple’s Time Machine, enabling time-based backup/restore based on ZFS snapshots – all nicely integrated into Nautilus. Also VirtualBox guest additions worked much better than under proper Solaris 10. Screenshot.

I watched Killer Movie, which was a really quite poor slasher flick, nothing new really. Oh and I can’t believe they’re doing another Friday The 13th remake!

Next up was The Day The Earth Stood Still, which was disappointing. Quite a short film too, they could have gone so much further with the premise of an alien coming to rid the Earth of the destructive humans.

I also watched Doubt which was a story of a nun who thought that her priest was abusing a boy, the ending was disappointing as was the rest of the film.

Finally I watched Red Sands, which was another film which had a good plot but went nowhere with it – basically an evil genie or “djinn” had been let lose in Iraq by American soldiers, but essentially nothing happened until the last five minutes of the film.

I’ve also started to watch another three films, but they’re so bad I’ve given up for the moment.

We got some more wood today, I’m feeling better so might try out the bike again tomorrow.

I’ve been playing a lot of Urban Terror lately, its a Quake3 engine-based First Person Shooter like Alien Arena or OpenArena that you play online.

Virtual Updates

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I tried to install Solaris 10u6 in VirtualBox the other day, but whilst the install went OK, it never managed to boot – I even tried going back to using an IDE drive instead of SATA (which was the fix for 10u5 apparently) but that failed with the same problem – I think the virtual BIOS was not setting the disk ID’s consistently by the looks of the error message. I might try 10u5 later today.

M&D came over the other day and we watched Mamma Mia!, which was very good actually. Good music and very cleverly worked into the story.

Much better than Burn After Reading, which I’ve still not managed to finish watching after about four attempts. It seems to be the story of a failed spy whose memoirs are ransomed by a bungling personal trainer.

I also watched Taken, which was a very good action flick about a spy whose daughter is sold as a sex slave, and he has to rescue her.

I also noticed that Transporter 3 is out, hopefully that will be better than 2, although 1 was brilliant (and was also set around Nice, which was familiar).

Update: well I got Solaris 10u5 installed in VirtualBox, but GuestAdditions don’t work – they install and even appear to start as a service, but Xorg won’t start now! Also installing a newer kernel completely killed the install, so it would appear Sun’s xVM doesn’t like Sun’s Solaris.

Funnily enough, even though a five month old Solaris distribution doesn’t work, a beta version of Windows7 worked fine – screenshot. At the moment its a glorified Vista though, almost nothing new except IE 8 and what looks like a Windows port of gDesklets!

VMWare Server 1.0.8 was released, just a security fix now that 2.0 is the so-called “stable” branch. Installed without issue on Fedora7/2.6.23 kernel.

Update 2: turning off VT-X which switches Solaris into 32-Bit mode allowed me to install 10u6 as well as patch cluster and additions, however the additions don’t work very well. Screenshot