caurea.org

Then they would be out of business. If you thought the 50MB mail quota was ridiculous, this will blow your mind. The Ilias platform which students and teachers use to exchange information, is down every single night between 3am and 6am. That means it has an uptime of about 87%. Usually businesses measure uptime with the number of times the digit nine appears in the uptime to downtime ratio, such as five-nines meaning 99.999%. But there is no nine anywhere near eighty-seven. I don't demand a five-nines uptime, I could live with 98% or 95% (a bit more than an hour per day). But three hours does seem a lot even for the daily windows server reboot.

The site doesn't even degrade gracefully, sometimes all it displays is MDB2 Error: connect failed, sometimes the error message is hidden somewhere between html markup. And the downtime couldn't come at a worse time, it's right when I am the most productive: a couple hours before a deadline or an exam at 8am. So here I sit from 3am to 6am, writing a blog post, instead of doing what I am actually supposed to do.

And the Linux client was officially announced. So I downloaded the Mac client - but not after spending a few minutes searching the download link. Hint: It's the small button halfway down the main index page. The one where just below it sais: Free 1.5 MB Download. and when you click the link it downloads a 2.8MB file. But hey, that's only 86% off.

Anyway, I dragged Steam.app to my applications folder and started it. But like World of Warcraft Steam requires that Steam.app/Contents/MacOS be created on a case insensitive filesystem. That makes me wonder how it will it work on Linux where all filesystems are case sensitive. Is that the reason why the Linux client hasn't been released yet? Or will Valve require that we install it on FAT/NTFS (or ZFS, which has a casesensitivity property)?

My university gives each student a 50MB mailbox quota. It's hard to find something to compare that amount with, nowadays even USB sticks are bigger than that. 50MB is somewhere between a floppy disk and a Iomega ZIP disk. I don't even remember the last time I was limited to 50MB, not after the year 2000 anyway when I started using CDs (700MB for those who don't remember how big a CD is). Last time I checked (read: right now), harddisks cost less than 0.1 CHF per gigabyte, both Google and Microsoft offer free or cheap email services to universities with essentially unlimited quotas and here I am forced to delete emails from my inbox. Or not, good thing I have a gmail account!

The root pool in my OpenSolaris box is only 12GB. All the important data, as well as everything that needs lots of disk space (home directories, mysql database, mangos, web server etc) is on a separate pool. 12GB is plenty I thought, the root partitions on my Linux boxes are between six and eight GB, and that includes the full Gnome desktop environment.

But the free space was getting smaller because OpenSolaris keeps regular snapshots, so I thought I could free a bit space by removing unnecessary packages. After all, the box acts as a server and doesn't need Firefox, Gnome nor the xserver. First I started with something simple: uninstall Firefox. But first let's check what pkg wants to uninstall so it doesn't remove something I need.

$ pfexec pkg uninstall -rnv SUNWfirefox
None            
Package version changes:
pkg://opensolaris.org/SUNWfirefox@0.5.11,5.11-0.129:20091205T083114Z -> None
pkg://opensolaris.org/SUNWlibproxy@0.5.11,5.11-0.129:20091205T110309Z -> None
pkg://opensolaris.org/SUNWsvn@1.6.5,5.11-0.129:20091205T124829Z -> None
pkg://opensolaris.org/SUNWsvn-perl@1.6.5,5.11-0.129:20091205T124852Z -> None
pkg://opensolaris.org/SUNWneon@0.29.0,5.11-0.129:20091205T113450Z -> None
Actuators:
      restart_fmri: svc:/application/desktop-cache/gconf-cache:default
     reboot-needed: false

Uhm, WTF? It wants to remove Subversion? SUNWsvn depends on SUNWfirefox? Apparently Sun engineers thought that would be a good idea, so here we are. And it gets even more fucked up if you try to remove SUNWxorg-server (the xserver). Amongst all the gnome packages (which have no reason to depend on the xserver, but I'm fine with removing those) you'll find SUNWbash, SUNWsshd, SUNWgzip, SUNWmysql51 - yes, you did read that right, in OpenSolaris all these packages depend on the xserver. What are the monkeys at Sun smoking? Whatever it is, it must be really good!