Solaris, solaris, solaris!

Boy, I have gotten rusty on my Solaris skills. Been doing a lot of lvm. I guess I had just gotten used to the linux lvm, which at the time, was suitably different from solaris lvm that I guess I wound up forgetting everything.

I'm not really sure how you'd set up an lvm mirror of your root disk in linux, and then subsequently boot off it. I know how I'd go and create a logical (mirrored) volume that looks just like root, but I suspect I couldn't boot off it. In solaris, we do:

metadb -af [whatever]
metainit -f d11 1 1 c1t0d0s0
metainit -f d12 1 1 c1t1d0s0
metainit d1 -m d11
metaroot d1
lockfs -fa
reboot
metattach d1 d12

where c1t0d0s0 is of course root and c1t1d0s0 is the mirror.

That, to me doesn't look particularly intuitive. I'm much happier with the vgcreate/pvcreate/lvcreate/e2fsadm approach. However, Sun's meta* commands have been around a lot longer, and I think there's been a sort of "lvm renaissance" since Sun started doing it. I'm anxious to see the Solaris 10 approach. In their defense, the sccli commands are somewhat more intuitive.

Lesson learned: if I don't keep my skills sharp (eg spend a year in a linux shop), they wither. I should probably avoid doing this in the future. On the other hand, having big piles of hardware in my living room sucked a whole lot.

So I was one of the 800 or so people laid off by AOL. I can say this now because people like Bill DeStevens can't, er, "discipline" me again. I am contractually prohibited from making any "disparaging" remarks about AOL, so I will stop before saying anything else.

I will say, however, that I start work tomorrow, and would have started on Monday, had I not been arguing with them over the details of the offer. What this means is I get two months severance for leaving a [adjectives deleted] job and starting another. Ahem. Free Money.

Before I started AOL, I was a contractor. I didn't have any particular allegiance to the company I was with. I didn't believe that the company had any good intentions in mind for me. AOL almost changed my mind of that. It was fun, it was exciting, and I enjoyed it, while it lasted.

Back to bein' a beltway bandit. Switching from Linux back to Solaris, switching from Intel back to UltraSparc. I'll probably be making some Opteron recommendations for our smaller hardware, but I think right now, I'll just go back to the comfortable groove I was in before I became another Running Man.

My apologies to those of my coworkers who did not find a job as quickly as I did. A word to those still looking: mid-career, skilled people can earn as much as $60/hr in the metro dc area as programmers and sysadmins. Don't settle for $30 unless you have to.

Don't worry! Don't worry! I'm not going to do what everone thinks I'm going to do and freak out man!

All I want to know is... who's coming with me?