sysmgr.org/blog

A New Machine

josh@sysmgr.org (Joshua M. Clulow) — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

It has been almost three months since I said my goodbyes at Joyent, having spent seven years with the company. A lot has changed for me over that time: I moved to San Francisco, made a lot of friends, got married and started a family. I also spent seven years working on cloud computing and object storage infrastructure!

NodeConf 2013

josh@sysmgr.org (Joshua M. Clulow) — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This past weekend I was fortunate enough to be able to attend NodeConf 2013. The event was held at the fantastic Walker Creek Ranch in Marin County. The Ranch certainly knows how to look after conference-goers — an amazing variety of good quality food, beautiful grounds and friendly staff made for a most enjoyable four days.

Interactive Manta Jobs with mlogin(1)

josh@sysmgr.org (Joshua M. Clulow) — Tue, 25 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

It is 6am on Tuesday the 25th of June, 2013 — at least, it is in US/Pacific — which means we at Joyent are finally lifting the covers off of our new product: Manta. Manta is a brand new system that spans the twin pillars of Object Storage and Compute to provide a revolutionary new way of operating on data in the cloud.

Sending Postfix Mail Via Comcast SMTP

josh@sysmgr.org (Joshua M. Clulow) — Sat, 25 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I recently had need of mail output from a cron job in a zone on my SmartOS server at home. My connection is via Comcast cable, and unfortunately they seem to block outbound SMTP (port 25). As it happens, they have an SMTP relay host that you can use from Comcast IPs, but unfortunately that service requires authentication.

DTrace and JSON: Together at last!

josh@sysmgr.org (Joshua M. Clulow) — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In August of this year I jumped on a plane and moved from Australia to San Francisco to work for Joyent. It’s been busy and exciting, from learning about a new city to finding my stride in a new role. I thought I’d take a moment to talk about a new DTrace feature that I just added to illumos-joyent, the core of our SmartOS operating system!

Disable the Swoosh animation for Mac OS X Spaces

josh@sysmgr.org (Joshua M. Clulow) — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

So, as it turns out there’s a way to disable the motion sickness-inducing Swoosh! animation that happens when you switch between Spaces (virtual desktops) in Mac OS X.

OpenIndiana Automated Install Server

josh@sysmgr.org (Joshua M. Clulow) — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This is a draft set of steps for getting an automated install server configured on almost any platform using only Apache, DHCP and TFTP. It’s very rough at this point but it functions well enough to PXE boot and install a copy of OpenIndiana (OI). First up, you should make a directory /export/install and:

Forcing PXE Clients not to broadcast for extra DHCP options

josh@sysmgr.org (Joshua M. Clulow) — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

We have a site-wide PXE boot setup that manages workstations everywhere (using Altiris). Occasionally I want to netboot a specific non-managed boot loader from a specific TFTP server just by configuring the DHCP options for that host.