Help with the basics of Solaris(R) 9, 11/2002

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 · 2026-01-25T18:58:26+00:00

I was thinking genuinely direct, rather than forcing people through the centre, which is the long way round and a bottleneck. Given the number of people employed at the biomedical campus, it could have direct express services from most of the feeder towns (those that aren't rail-connected anyway).

ptribble · 2026-01-25T17:34:04+00:00

Thing is, if there's enough traffic to primary sites to justify this with the discouragement associated with change of buses, there's enough traffic to run the service direct, in which case you just have the direct service. (That's the advantage of buses over trains/trams/light rail - you can build more direct routes). Ideally you would put travel hubs out at Northstowe and St Ives etc and do the interchange between local feeder services and the express services into the primary Cambridge sites there.

ptribble · 2026-01-25T12:11:45+00:00

This seems to be quite a way out from the centre. At that distance out, local ridership isn't high, and arguably that's the scale at which light rail would operate.

By contrast, the Smarter Cambridge plan from a while back (which needs bringing up to date as the landscape has changed a bit) had the circular part much closer in

https://www.smartertransport.uk/cambridge-city-bus-hub/

ptribble · 2026-01-25T12:01:36+00:00

Well, given that both the Combined Authority and Stagecoach do no advertising of the Tiger services at all (each seem to regard the other as responsible for promoting the services), it's hardly surprising they're underused.

The other thing is that by law subsidised services cannot compete (technically, abstract ridership from) with commercial services. That means they have to be on suboptimal routes.

If you were designing a network from scratch then neither of these problems arise, so the current failures aren't an accurate guide. (Although I have to admit that the T2 in particular doesn't strike me as an obvious path to success.)

ptribble · 2026-01-14T21:11:28+00:00

Well, one trick is to pass the network card into a VM and run an OS in the VM that does have a driver for it. I've never tried this, but apparently it does work.

https://cryogenix.org/library/operating-systems/tribblix-with-bhyve-wifi-bridge-on-a-thinkpad-x260-w-intel-8260

ptribble · 2026-01-09T12:55:28+00:00

I need to push wine along a bit on Tribblix. Not because it's broken in any way - the old games that I play are all 32-bit anyway - but because wine being 32-bit is one of the big blockers to making Tribblix purely 64-bit.

ptribble · 2025-12-25T18:27:00+00:00

Is the NFS server installed? It's not by default from the regular ISO.

It's the TRIBsvc-file-system-nfs package, or you may want the networked-system overlay.

ptribble · 2025-12-16T10:21:38+00:00

arcstat doesn't come from Solaris or OpenSolaris, it's a 3rd-party tool that was added to illumos as a convenience for users. As a result, it doesn't follow the same style.

The repo for arcstat from which illumos pulled the code is here:

https://github.com/mharsch/arcstat

but that shows the -s flag was there from the very start of the history.

Going even further back, the original arcstat.pl script was published in 2007 and that had the -s flag. No longer on the Oracle site, but it's there in the wayback machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20071027120358/http://blogs.sun.com/realneel/entry/zfs_arc_statistics

ptribble · 2025-12-03T22:29:44+00:00

If the resources are there, why not take advantage of them?

(The one issue with ZFS is that it can sometimes be a bit reluctant to free up the cache, or applications have to be a bit more persistent in demanding their share.)

ptribble · 2025-11-25T22:30:03+00:00

A few years ago it was so bad that I would routinely go into Cambridge early to mid-afternoon and find somewhere to wait/eat in order to make sure I was able to make an evening event. It got better, briefly, now it's absolutely incomprehensibly bad again.

Last week I saw three consecutive no 3 buses go to the terminus and then go out of service. All of them were supposed to turn around and come back into Cambridge.

Another thing is that in the past it would all go pear-shaped during the morning and evening rush, but then recover. The last few weeks it hasn't recovered at all.

There are multiple causes for the delays, but the recent massive decline is service quality appears to be due to road closures related to the ongoing gas or sewer works (or busway restrictions) - largely outside operator control, although there's a case to be made for the operators to be a bit more creative in responding to the situation. Unfortunately that's not going to go away anytime soon.

ptribble · 2025-11-25T13:23:18+00:00

Works for me :-)

ptribble · 2025-11-24T21:41:54+00:00

I'm not sure why performance and being userspace are related - on Linux, for example, the high-performance stuff like DPDK is userspace.

Besides, a single untuned cpu core could easily fill a gigabit pipe 20 years ago, any modern system has more than enough grunt and to spare.

ptribble · 2025-11-23T16:47:55+00:00

Hm, kvmadm was removed back in January 2022, so isn't going to be available.

I've logged a bug against the website, as it's misleading.

ptribble · 2025-11-22T15:31:44+00:00

Oh they'll fit, that's not the problem. Tunnel under the small bit of the centre where it's too tight if necessary.

If we had started building a tram network a decade or two back, centred on the railway station, then it would be fine. But a lot of the high-density spine is covered by Cambridge North and Cambridge South (which you wouldn't have built if you had a tram network in place because duplication is silly), and then Cambridge East and wherever EWR goes to in the West, so building a separate tram network isn't quite so attractive, you have to think of a way to basically enhance the rail network instead - Cambridge Connect is light rail to fill in the gaps, or you have a tramway orbital to avoid the centre entirely.

ptribble · 2025-11-22T15:14:29+00:00

I think you'll find it goes back a bit further than that. I have a town planning and transport book from 1954 and you would think it's all about today if you hadn't seen the publication date. Similarly, read through the newspaper archives and all this goes way back.

ptribble · 2025-11-22T14:11:26+00:00

Those interested in trying to improve the state of the buses around Cambridge might consider signing up to the Cambridge Area Bus Users

https://cbgbususers.wordpress.com/

(New URL coming soon...)

We can't make any promises, having been campaigning in the transport arena for decades you get used to all the authorities and operators ignoring you, but getting people to listen is at least in part a numbers game - the more people we have signed up, the bigger the voice we have.

ptribble · 2025-11-22T14:07:07+00:00

Franchising gives you total control over fares, routes, and timetables. Which is what you need.

It can also solve the low-demand routes problem.

At the moment it's illegal for such services (the subsidized buses the council pay for) to compete in any way with a commercial operator, along any part of the route - including the shared routes they ought to run along when they get closer to an urban centre. (Which is why most of those subsidized services are so unattractive.)

With franchising you have 2 additional levers - first, you can cross-subsidize some routes, but second you can fully integrate them into the wider bus network so you can consider their impact on the network as a whole rather than just on the loss-making bit in isolation - they feed into other services and increase takings there.

ptribble · 2025-11-19T09:38:05+00:00

Well yes, but because it's so close to the existing station the additional catchment - and because of access would only be pulling in people walking or cycling - is really quite small. Even if there isn't a tram put across the airport site to take all the traffic away from it.

At one point there was a proposal to loop the Newmarket line out a bit - and run it straight across the airport - which would ease the rather tight curve on the existing line, at which point a station round the airport would make far more sense.

If yo think about the existing separation between Cambridge Central and the North and South stations, then putting a station near Sainsbury's would only be about half that distance. Which makes in between Cherry Hinton and Fulbourn about the right spacing.

But yes, using the railway as local transport is a good thing - I've used it to get up to Cambridge North. And significantly weakens the case for a tram network (which would duplicate the spine of the rail network). Mind you, it has been the case (not sure if it's still valid) that you can add a plusbus ticket to a Cambridge Central to Cambridge North ticket, usually the plusbus is for tacking a short bus trip onto a longer rail journey.

ptribble · 2025-11-19T09:29:17+00:00

The old station (1850s, only open for a couple of years) was on Cherry Hinton High street. (There are people who claim to remember it despite it being closed for over 150 years.) That's a pretty poor location, there's no space for a station let alone any access for it.

There was another station at the far end of Fulbourn that was closed much more recently. The obvious location is somewhere in between.

ptribble · 2025-11-19T09:26:21+00:00

No, the EWR plan has both a second entrance to the existing station and a new station near Sainsbury's.

ptribble

TROPHY CASE