Solaris 10: tips and tricks for system administration

I've been meaning to tell you for quote some time now, that SunFreeware website has got its own blog, where you can read about the majority of updates to their Solaris software collection:
http://sunfreeware.blogspot.com.

Today is Monday, and this means it's time for another mini-digest of mine, to give you just a few links to articles which I think Solaris fans might find useful. For the moment, it's just few entries from blogs.sun.com:

Dan Price, as usual, gives us a highlight of the next Solaris Express build features - Nevada b17.

Bryan Cantrill has written a DTrace safety article in his blog.

Darrin Moffat talks about his port of laptop battery status Gnome-applet for Solaris.

I couldn't delay upgrading the blog engine anymore - it's just too dangerous, seeing all them security fixes which came in lately. That's why I've just upgraded to Serendipity 0.8.2

At the moment, only the main page of English blog works properly, all the rest will be restored later today (if you access some old archives/entries at their English urls they WILL work even now, it's just the automatic switch to English for everything rest that I've yet to fix). Thanks for your patience!

Okay, here's the next list of useful, in my opinions, articles on Solaris:

Blog entries of Sun engineers from:
Bryan Cantrill talks about Using DTrace to understand Gnome

Richard McDougall has a short entry on Performance Improvements for the File System Cache in Solaris 10

Liane Praza has continued sharing her knowledge on smf: this time she talks about how smf decides whether a particular service under its control is failing in a smf - fault/retry models article.

I also think you should read a Solaris 10 hardening manual on the CISecurity website. They're going to finish the security evaluation (scoring) tool soon, but before it's ready you're welcome to read their recommentations on enabling/disabling some services and some general system configuration tips. You can download a pdf-file with their manual from this page.

Today I got tired of my inconvenient experience with English-Russian words translations on Lingvo, and it was decided to find a slightly more elegant way of finding words translations than simply visiting this URL and typing the word in the search bar provided.

The search has been crowned with the find of a truly amazing feature of Mozilla-based browsers which is called Smart Keywords.

It's simplycity is shocking. On any search engine page, all you have to do is press the right mouse button on the search bar, and you'll get an option to assign this searh bar a keyword. After this, you can use this keyword in your browser's navigation bar and specify the string to be searched, and your browser will do the rest.

I'm honestly ashamed of not knowing this feature - it's been only five minutes of me using it, and I already can't imagine living without it ;)

pS: you can download the latest Firefox 1.5 for Solaris 10 right here:

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/1.5/contrib/solaris_pkgadd/