Illumos Story

FTP Transfer. Pretty simple, but not for me. I’m a little slow. This actually took me a solid month of pain to figure out. #Wordpress instance running on #SmartOS

Slightly frustrating day today, trying to get ssh to work. I've made progress though, which is good enough to call it quits for the night. Long story short, after a failed attempt to update OpenIndiana from dev to hipster, I realized that the reason restarting ssh kept failing was because... The restarter wasn't running! I guess Illumos has a restarter! What a way to spend a few hours. Honestly! It's times like this where I pick up on little things about the system that make me feel accomplished at the end of the day.

Making progress with OpenIndiana. Just wanted to document some issues I’ve been chewing through. So I installed OpenIndiana (OI) in June2016 and whatever that release was - is the version I’m using now. I discovered an interesting bug that prompts me with "No directory! Logging in with home=/" if I log in using the user account I made during installation. This becomes a problem as I’m unable to use the ping, or zoneadm commands unless I cd into the /usr/sbin directory. Totally not an issue when running as root or a newly created user. To paraphrase some help received in IRC, maybe the account that I installed the system defaults to /home/user instead where it should be , in /export/home/user and have wrong path for commands in bash. So the workaround was to just make a new user account using ‘useradd -u 1002 -g 102 -m -d /home/export/heru -s /bin/sh foo’, where foo is the username you want. It got picky with the -g flag so I removed it and it worked great. Went ahead and make a password for foo as well using ‘passwd foo’  Ping works now. Mission accomplished. To end on a great note, I got the recommendation from IRC to report my first bug! Bug #7616 is my first contribution to the Illumos community, and it feels like I’ve done something tangible with my life today.  Awesome.

Watching Anthony Bourdain today, I discovered his "parts unknown" series taking place in Japan. The scene I wandered into while channel surfing was taking place in Kanazawa ramen haunt; a conversation between Bourdain and sushi expert Masa Takayama: Bourdain, to Takayama in a great back-and-forth: “Is umami a flavor or a sensation?” Takayama explains: “Umami is essence, strong essence.” Bourdain: “So it’s a mysterious force?” Takayama: “Yeah. Much bigger than the universe.” Bourdain: “Bigger than flavor?” Takayama: “Of course.” It's my dream to bring the Umami to software design, but I struggle with the concepts of simple algorithms and data structures. It feels like being able to appreciate great ramen, yet struggle with making noodles. I've much to learn.

organic spice plantation, Goa, India

M