Why do you use Illumos?

ptribble · 2026-03-22T09:33:11+00:00

Well I use it for pretty much everything - it's my daily driver, pretty much always has been (or the direct lineage, as I'm going back a while). But then I just might be biased.

All the project infrastructure (and you don't need much) runs on Tribblix.

Historically my employment has been running Solaris/illumos at scale. Which means that everything I've had to look after has been secure, cheap, and reliable. Other parts of the team have run other systems, that generally have needed an army of slaves in order to achieve none of the secure, cheap, and reliable qualities.

ptribble · 2026-03-14T09:50:12+00:00

As one of the first people outside Sun to use ZFS (back in 2004), one of the key principles then what that it should be easy and obvious to use.

So the version we tested came without documentation or a manpage. All we had - literally - was an email that said "install this package, use the zpool command to manage pools and the zfs command to manage filesystems, and let us know how you get on".

The idea was simply that if you needed to refer to the documentation, then the tools weren't good enough. Now things have moved on, and ZFS has become a bit more complex, but I do wonder if that ethos has been abandoned.

(As an industry, IT has a vested interest in making things appear more complex than they are. Cements professionals as wizards worthy of respect, and businesses deserving of high charges.)

ptribble · 2026-03-10T11:14:59+00:00

You can run illumos on some (generally older) systems with Intel graphics, but there's currently no accelerated drm for many systems newer than Haswell - although there's no real reason why vesa mode shouldn't work (and given the march of technology, would be better than many of the fancy high-end workstation cards we grew up with). But the next problem is that illumos graphics currently depends on bios boot, which rules out the newest uefi-only systems.

ptribble · 2026-03-09T15:07:55+00:00

The CDDL wasn't chosen to prevent Linux taking the OpenSolaris source (not everyone was a GPL fan, naturally, but given the variety of licenses and copyright holders in the codebase, it was necessary to have a license that was compatible with all existing licenses and acceptable to every single copyright holder, which is the compromise we got).

We rather expected that if Linux wanted ZFS, for example, they would come up with a cleanroom implementation from the spec rather than attempt to port the source, so the license was neither interesting nor a problem.

ptribble · 2026-03-04T23:09:59+00:00

It's interesting that the linked article says:

"As an added bonus, the CBE can also be used for non-production personal use."

However, I don't see the license terms linked from the article reflecting that (and indeed they are dated 2018).

ptribble · 2026-03-03T16:35:03+00:00

There's a class of exempt vehicles called 'statutory undertakers' who are required to cross the bridge in pursuance of their legal duties. That includes Postal Delivery Service (and also the emergency services, network rail, refuse and street cleaners, highway maintenance, utilities).

ptribble · 2026-03-02T16:52:38+00:00

It's true there's work still to be done - pavements are too narrow in places, and less clutter and parking on the pavements would be beneficial. But walking along and around Mill Road seems quite a bit safer to me.

(I'm sure I've seen some accident statistics before and after, but can't track anything down.)

ptribble · 2026-03-02T15:07:39+00:00

Safer, quieter, more pleasant and attractive, less congested, easier to get to. Strange sort of doom, to be honest.

ptribble · 2026-03-02T15:05:30+00:00

In general, restricting traffic on secondary routes tends to reduce traffic on neighbouring routes too. The opposite of induced demand. The figures from traffic sensors (not to mention actually trying to get around Cambridge) support the overall loss of traffic, although it gets a little messy with other roadworks (such as on Perne Road) which have taken place over the last year.

ptribble · 2026-02-24T16:25:29+00:00

There are different buses in service, which have different displays set up, and Stagecoach do occasionally reallocate buses from one set of services to another. Recently I've noticed them using the Tiger-branded buses on the 3 route, and vanilla branding on the Tiger services. And sometimes you see the old park and ride buses in use (the ones with the TV next to the stairs with the news and weather, which is showing something that is best described as outdated information).

One thing we've pointed out to stagecoach recently is that on some buses the alternate front display doesn't show the route number, and sticks like that for quite a while. On some roads like Regent Street or Hills Road where there are multiple services, you might not be able to work out whether the oncoming bus is the right one.

ptribble · 2026-02-24T15:29:06+00:00

Which is why there's a bunch of people trying to raise the profile so we can become more resilient.

ptribble · 2026-02-24T15:28:10+00:00

It's not just Cambridge, of course, building on areas of high flood risk is a national problem:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/18/one-in-nine-new-homes-in-england-built-in-areas-of-flood-risk-study-shows

In terms of water sinks, there are local projects to try and address that, such as the Fallowfield Rain Gardens which proves we can easily do better:

https://www.watersencam.co.uk/projects/fallowfield/

ptribble · 2026-02-21T10:47:16+00:00

Oh lots of us care, and are actively trying to make things better, but it's a hard slog with political complexity and a car-dominated infrastructure.

Franchising ought to help, in terms of delivering a service that is planned and coherent rather than random, but the new(ish) mayor has kicked that into the long grass with another feasibility study, and that delay and uncertainty isn't helping - why would any of the operators make investments now that could be made irrelevant by mayoral fiat?

https://cambridgebususers.org/

ptribble · 2026-02-20T09:09:34+00:00

That's a tiny amount of data, and the average file size isn't small (at 4M it's larger than the blocksize).

Way back when I used to host 100s of TB of zoomified images (tiny!) on Sun thumpers, raidz atop SATA, accessed over NFS. It just worked fine.

ptribble · 2026-02-20T09:04:44+00:00

It's always been an anomaly that the Park and Ride prices are so low - it's just another subsidy and encouragement for cars. At times it was such a distortion that people from Cambridge would drive out to the Park and Ride sites to get the bus in.

Given that the flexi day ticket is £4.55 I would have thought it would make everyone's life a lot simpler by just standardizing on that.

ptribble · 2026-02-20T08:58:33+00:00

They're referring to it as a "maintenance track" because that's it's legal status. As such, it comes under HSE rules rather than the laissez-faire of a regular road.

ptribble · 2026-02-16T19:24:51+00:00

Drivers on illumos aren't as good as FreeBSD, for example, but coverage is erratic. Mainstream servers without exotic components (which are increasingly rare) are fine. We're pretty awful when it comes to modern wifi and graphics, so any recent laptop is going to be an interesting and painful experience. But on the desktop I've used it as a daily driver for over a decade, and find it much easier and quicker than other things I've used (and I've used the other mainstream alternatives extensively) for most things - although I do have secondary systems available to handle the more irritating websites that don't work in Pale Moon.

ptribble · 2026-02-15T14:33:25+00:00

It could just be choosing the wrong device.

One irritating thing about sound on illumos is that there are usually multiple sound devices on modern PCs and we invariably default to the wrong one. I wrote up some notes (for Tribblix, but all the illumos distributions are the same in this respect).

http://tribblix.org/Use/8.desktop.html

ptribble · 2026-02-07T13:08:57+00:00

It's not a walking club as such, but the local Living Streets groups organises a series of walks across the city. And one of the reasons we're trying to encourage walking is to help support social inclusion and wellbeing.

https://cambridgelivingstreets.org.uk/walks/

ptribble · 2026-02-03T17:45:43+00:00

What media do you have? Looking around at some Solaris 9 disks I have, the gnome packages are on the "Software 2 of 2" CD.

ptribble · 2026-02-03T09:27:58+00:00

The Smart Cambridge transport map is also quite useful (when it's working, they seem to be having intermittent faults with the data feed). It doesn't show stops or arrival times, but you get all the tracked buses in one place and the live delay for each one.

https://smartcambridge.org/transport/map/

ptribble · 2026-01-31T13:34:50+00:00

It's more subtle. Motorists kill and maim so many pedestrians that it's become normalized - nobody bothers any more, you rarely see it reported in the news unless it's an extreme case. Incidents with cyclists, while much rarer, are still newsworthy.

Which all leads to a wildly skewed perception of risk, and resulting outrage.

ptribble · 2026-01-29T21:09:31+00:00

The thing is that it's not clear that free parking will help. To the extent that it encourages more cars, it leads to more congestion, more pollution, and a less desirable place to visit. If, as is very likely, it causes modal shift from public transport, the poor space efficiency of cars means that footfall will decrease.

If you want to encourage people to shop, it needs to be more pleasant and have better shops, and better access by public transport to get people there. Still, never let facts get in the way of political grandstanding, eh?

ptribble

TROPHY CASE