“The profit’s not in the razors, it’s in the blades,” goes the well-known men’s grooming product truism. The principle extends to other industries, including a companies that sell Unix-based offerings. So how can you tell when such a company has gone down that road?
Sun’s JES may be the short end of a wedge the company’s hoping to drive into the x86 space; cooperation between three Linux competitors unearthed a dangerous bug in the kernel; and when hunting for that disk-eating whale of a file, find is your friend.
We’re fairly sure that a sudden emphasis on sensible licensing counts as an indication. It doesn’t hurt if the company buys up an office suite, then turns around and starts selling it to China by the millions. You might be momentarily distracted by its high-profile hardware deals though. Ignore that distraction and focus on what it means when the company says it plans to start selling software for something besides its own cherished operating system and the one it found laying around for free.
The company in question is, of course, Sun Microsystems. This week Sun indicated that Linux and Solaris running on its own hardware are too small to contain the company’s ambition. Sun heralded the eventual release of its Java Enterprise System, AKA JES, (we wish it had stuck with the punchier “Orion”) for Hewlett-Packard’s HP-UX, IBM’s AIX, and Microsoft’s Windows. So much for Sun’s self-destructive insularity of the boom years.
Further strengthening Sun’s newfound software angle is the vendor’s announcement of its own “switchers” campaign: Half off its Java Desktop System (here, too, we wish it had stuck with the punchier “Mad Hatter”) for data centers migrating from Windows, which means enterprises looking for a way off the Windows treadmill (and onto Sun’s) can manage the switch for $50 a user. That’s not a bad deal. StarOffice alone costs more than that, but knocking so much off the top provides an incentive to push through a painful migration.
An impulsive narrator might take this story in the direction of Sun living happily ever after as a Unix-y software company that also writes stuff for Windows. But the allure of a bustling hardware business isn’t lost on Sun: The company is giving JES away for free (except service and support) to enterprises with less than 100 employees that buy Sun hardware. That might give a nice boost to Sun in the x86 market, and it definitely throws an elbow at Dell and other premium white box companies.
Taken with the AMD deal of a few weeks ago, its emphasis on beefing up Solaris x86, and reasonable licensing strategies, Sun’s agressive moves in the low end seem to bring the year to a sensible conclusion for the company. The JES giveaway and the push to bring it to other flavors of Unix and Windows are less about the software and more about positioning for the next wave, when Sun hopes to have its x86 ducks in a row, ready to sell the software Dell doesn’t and the hardware Microsoft doesn’t to customers who have had a taste of JES and are ready to try it out on its home turf: Sun Kit.
We’ll see how 2004 plays out.
In Other News
Just last week we had to go on a whale hunt on one of our file servers. According to a quick scan of the results of df -h, which tells us how much disk space on each mounted partition is used on a system, we were down to, well, less space than we estimated. We were fairly certain there was probably a large backup archive lurking down in the depths of a user’s directory, so we pressed find into service to find it.
Find, is great for finding things by name, and it’s also great for finding them by size (and other characteristics). We found our whale with this simple command:
find -size +1024k|grep .tar..z
The “-size” switch ought to be self-explanatory. “+1024k” means “any file bigger than a megabyte.” The part after the pipe (|) character runs the results of find through grep to make sure only files with the extension “tar.{any character}z” turned up in the results, since we knew we were probably looking for a gzipped or bzipped archive file.
Reading the find man page is well worth it, too, since it can return results not only on size, but also on modification time, group i.d., permissions, and filesystem type (to name a very few). Press find into service, and you’ll have the ideal harpoon for your next whale hunt.
Last week, when covering Neal Stephenson’s engaging “In the Beginning
Was the Command Line,” we mentioned this week’s title, Mike Gancarz’s “The UNIX Philosophy,” as an alternative path for Unix books to follow. If Stephenson’s book reads as a kind of “pro-Unix polemic,” Gancarz prefers to advocate “the Unix way” by explaining how to observe it.
Gancarz divides his book into a collection of nine tenets and 10 lesser tenets for successful Unix use. His focus is on software development, but the benefits expand beyond the developer community: In the process of explaining how to develop good Unix software, Gancarz also explains the reason why much of what we think of as Unix, from dependence on piping output from one program to the next to the strange, vowel-free shell commands, happens to be the way it is.
Some of the tenets Gancarz identifies include an emphasis on code portability (over speed), the ability to use any program as a filter to provide input to another program, and the value of shell scripts as a valuable programming tool. Unix admins who have labored under second-class citizen status in the eyes of their developer friends will enjoy that section, in particular: Gancarz demonstrates how a relatively simple pipe involving six traditional Unix commands can bring thousands of lines of C source code to bear on a task in the form of a simple one-liner that the enterprising scripter might not even bother to save.
“The Unix Philosophy” doesn’t concern itself with programming examples or sample shell scripts, though. It’s about how to approach Unix programming and use. So although we recommend it, it should be considered, along with last week’s title, a foundation piece for a Unix bookshelf, as it provides some sense of why Unix as a computing culture has evolved the way it has to better use the resources it offers. Subsequent recommendations, however, will focus on books that provide concrete how-to information.
Michael Hall is a ServerWatch contributor.
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