Jake Goerzen completes tun and delivers package number 1000!
A long time ago, about two and a half years, I was asked if I would step up to the task of hosting and funding the Community Software project for Solaris. The idea had already been tossed around for a long time and I did not know Phil Brown at the time. I only knew that the CSW software project was needed and that with a little work it may be possible to deliver open source software to Solaris users. Software that conformed to standards and was packaged by Solaris users for other Solaris users. A true community effort. We would work together and openly.
We started with very little. We had very little. A small Sun Ultra 1 workstation and an old IBM Netfinity server. Both would run our operating system standard, Solaris 8. We demanded that both the Sparc and Intel x86 architecture were fully supported. We wanted open and public bug reports. We wanted an open door such that anyone that wanted to join, that could step up to the challenge of building within standards, could join the effort.
The first weeks of operation needed night and day work. Our servers were thrown together with whatever we had on hand. I actually grabbed an old Sun SSA Fibre Storage array with thirty 1GB disks and made a three way mirror with each drawer of ten disks. The ugly configuration for this new central NFS server received the name medusa. It was all we had for storage and it had to work. Rich Teer setup the email server and Philip Brown worked night and day to create the first thirty software packages. I struggled to keep up with work during the day and building our infrastructure at night.
Philip Brown had created more than just the first thirty or so software packages. He created a brilliant and wonderful tool called pkg-get. It was modeled after the Debian Linux way of doing things and it would mean that Solaris users no longer needed to download software piece by independant piece. Philip Brown had a vision for tightly integrated software that could all be delivered via a simple command. With pkg-get you can install all of GNOME or KDE or Apache with a few keystrokes. Everything would work. Everything does.
With our own build of Apache we went live with the Blastwave website 26th October 2002.
No one noticed.
On the very next day we had an amazing thing happen. A nice man by the name of Cyril Plisko joined the effort and began working with us. Then, a few days later, on November the 1st we were joined by Andreas Almroth. Word was spreading through the internet and in newsgroups that some bunch of guys were building their own software service for Solaris users. For free. Openly. Within days we were joined by three more people; Anthony Dean, Markus Gyger and then Alan DuBoff from Sun.
That little Sun Ultra 1 was our web server. It was our Sparc build server and it was our email server. We pounded it night and day and I worked to get the NFS server in place. In typical Sun hardware fashion that little Ultra 1 ( hostname blastwave ) is still running fine today and served as our primary secure login server up until only a few days ago. The NFS server medusa has been running flawlessly since the New York blackout ( which was the last we saw of our SSA array ) and serves eighty five active software maintainers. Thanks to Eric Boutilier and Alan Duboff from Sun we have two LX50 servers for x86 build work. My old Sun Ultra 2 named apollo is still the primary Sparc server.
Growth has been explosive. We needed to setup mirror servers in order to deliver the software to a world of Solaris users. We now have some thirty mirror servers and our primary mirror at ibiblio.org reports ten thousand software packages being installed daily. That is just one mirror server. The number of Solaris 10 users doubled in February and then doubled again in March and therefore I can independantly confirm the growth numbers that Jonathan Schwartz reports for Solaris 10. The web site went from being looked at a quarter million times a month to an even half million this month.
The Solaris Community is alive and well and I want to thank the Blastwave software maintainers for amazing success in this project. The release of OpenSolaris gives us unprecedented freedom and opportunity in the future.
Dennis Clarke
Director Blastwave.org
dclarke @ blastwave.org
Philip Brown
Director Software Operations
phil @ blastwave.org
Support Blastwave
# pkginfo -l CSWtun
PKGINST: CSWtun
NAME: tun - Universal TUN/TAP device driver
CATEGORY: system
ARCH: sparc
VERSION: 1.1,REV=2005.03.29
VENDOR: http://vtun.sourceforge.net/tun/ packaged for CSW by Jake Goerzen
PSTAMP: apollo20050329124643
INSTDATE: Mar 30 2005 09:12
HOTLINE: http://www.blastwave.org/bugtrack/
EMAIL: jgoerzen@blastwave.org
STATUS: completely installed
FILES: 4 installed pathnames
113 blocks used (approx)
A long time ago, about two and a half years, I was asked if I would step up to the task of hosting and funding the Community Software project for Solaris. The idea had already been tossed around for a long time and I did not know Phil Brown at the time. I only knew that the CSW software project was needed and that with a little work it may be possible to deliver open source software to Solaris users. Software that conformed to standards and was packaged by Solaris users for other Solaris users. A true community effort. We would work together and openly.
We started with very little. We had very little. A small Sun Ultra 1 workstation and an old IBM Netfinity server. Both would run our operating system standard, Solaris 8. We demanded that both the Sparc and Intel x86 architecture were fully supported. We wanted open and public bug reports. We wanted an open door such that anyone that wanted to join, that could step up to the challenge of building within standards, could join the effort.
The first weeks of operation needed night and day work. Our servers were thrown together with whatever we had on hand. I actually grabbed an old Sun SSA Fibre Storage array with thirty 1GB disks and made a three way mirror with each drawer of ten disks. The ugly configuration for this new central NFS server received the name medusa. It was all we had for storage and it had to work. Rich Teer setup the email server and Philip Brown worked night and day to create the first thirty software packages. I struggled to keep up with work during the day and building our infrastructure at night.
Philip Brown had created more than just the first thirty or so software packages. He created a brilliant and wonderful tool called pkg-get. It was modeled after the Debian Linux way of doing things and it would mean that Solaris users no longer needed to download software piece by independant piece. Philip Brown had a vision for tightly integrated software that could all be delivered via a simple command. With pkg-get you can install all of GNOME or KDE or Apache with a few keystrokes. Everything would work. Everything does.
With our own build of Apache we went live with the Blastwave website 26th October 2002.
No one noticed.
On the very next day we had an amazing thing happen. A nice man by the name of Cyril Plisko joined the effort and began working with us. Then, a few days later, on November the 1st we were joined by Andreas Almroth. Word was spreading through the internet and in newsgroups that some bunch of guys were building their own software service for Solaris users. For free. Openly. Within days we were joined by three more people; Anthony Dean, Markus Gyger and then Alan DuBoff from Sun.
That little Sun Ultra 1 was our web server. It was our Sparc build server and it was our email server. We pounded it night and day and I worked to get the NFS server in place. In typical Sun hardware fashion that little Ultra 1 ( hostname blastwave ) is still running fine today and served as our primary secure login server up until only a few days ago. The NFS server medusa has been running flawlessly since the New York blackout ( which was the last we saw of our SSA array ) and serves eighty five active software maintainers. Thanks to Eric Boutilier and Alan Duboff from Sun we have two LX50 servers for x86 build work. My old Sun Ultra 2 named apollo is still the primary Sparc server.
Growth has been explosive. We needed to setup mirror servers in order to deliver the software to a world of Solaris users. We now have some thirty mirror servers and our primary mirror at ibiblio.org reports ten thousand software packages being installed daily. That is just one mirror server. The number of Solaris 10 users doubled in February and then doubled again in March and therefore I can independantly confirm the growth numbers that Jonathan Schwartz reports for Solaris 10. The web site went from being looked at a quarter million times a month to an even half million this month.
The Solaris Community is alive and well and I want to thank the Blastwave software maintainers for amazing success in this project. The release of OpenSolaris gives us unprecedented freedom and opportunity in the future.
Dennis Clarke
Director Blastwave.org
dclarke @ blastwave.org
Philip Brown
Director Software Operations
phil @ blastwave.org
Support Blastwave
