Dear Solaris and OpenSolaris Friends :
Here are some thoughts from Dennis Clarke at Blastwave.org Inc. and I
apologize in advance that this is long winded. I rarely write anything so
long anymore but I had to express myself.
The primary mirror at blastwave.network.com
-----------------------------------------------
The primary mirror at blastwave.network.com is still up and running
just fine. While the entire domain Network.com seems to be in flux that
one site and url have not moved and it served out some 2 million software
packages last month. See :
http://blastwave.network.com/stats/pkg_traffic_Jan_2010.txt
http://blastwave.network.com/stats/traffic.txt
* This is wget/pkgutil traffic, no browsers, no search bots. *
Traffic today is moving along nicely with bursty package downloads as
per usual :
http://blastwave.network.com/stats/netstat_packets.png
The disk IO shows the usual continuous reads with sync traffic writes
very early in the morning. This is normal activity also :
http://blastwave.network.com/stats/iostat_rw.png
I see that the usual commercial users from banking, R&D, and insurance
sectors as well as military and government users are still using this site
a great deal and there is no reason to suspect that will change. If the
primary site is to move then it will happen over time slowly such that
corporations ( Thales Group, FBI.gov, LM Ericsson, Viacom Inc, Verizon etc
) can repoint their servers. They still have large numbers of Solaris 8
servers running in production which is why Blastwave(R) still builds on
Solaris 8 with Studio tools. We build on Solaris 10 also of course with a
farm of OpenSolaris servers too. I am sad to say that the IPS repo at
Blastwave.network.com:10000 is down and the port access there has been
shut off at the routers. I'll inquire about that.
Commercial and Open Source Software on Sun Technologies
-------------------------------------------------------
https://library.network.com/CatalogQueryServer/app.jsp#software/86339
You will note that this service site withing the Network.com domain is
also still up ( re branded ) and running. You can browse the software tags
via :
https://library.network.com/CatalogQueryServer/app.jsp#tagclouds/MostUsed
Blastwave has 1807 entries there with overlap in Government,
Healthcare, and Financial Services among others. I could check with some
other people and easily update this, and quite frankly I should.
Secondary Mirrors at Genunix.org etc.
-------------------------------------
I think that everyone would agree that the largest and most active
OpenSolaris and Solaris site outside of OpenSolaris.org would be at
http://www.genunix.org/. This site lives inside ISC and has vast
amounts of bandwidth allocated to it. There is a very busy mirror site for
the Solaris software packages from Blastwave(R) at
http://blast.genunix.org/. In fact, this is the level 0 rsync site from
which all global mirrors sync from. The secondaries at the
following all sync three or four times a day :
United States ( 13 Mirror sites )
Harvard : http://mirrors.med.harvard.edu/csw/
Purdue : http://ftp.math.purdue.edu/mirrors/blastwave.org/
plus many others
United Kingdom
http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/blastwave.org/
Taiwan :
http://ftp.cs.pu.edu.tw/pub/Sun/blastwave/
Switzerland
http://mirror.switch.ch/ftp/mirror/blastwave.org/
Romania
http://mirrors.lastdot.org:1280/blastwave/
Poland
http://ftp.task.gda.pl/pub/sun/csw/
Japan
http://dist.justplayer.com/OpenSolaris/
http://dist.justplayer.com/csw/
China, Beijing
http://blastwave.unix-center.net/csw/
Plus a large collection of others globally.
Therefore you can expect that an update to a given package will get out
far and wide without any issues. The usage of software packages has been
flat at 2M per month from Network.com for over a year now and that is a
good indication of stability across all the global mirror sites also. I do
know that the Beijing and Japan sites are quite busy but I do not have
numbers to report.
What is Blastwave.org Inc. really about?
----------------------------------------
I have always held the vision that quality software for Solaris can be had
freely and with support options. The vision for Blastwave.org is
very similar to Debian and some other software package efforts. Years ago
I formed the "blastwave" site with the blazing sun logo and I had a vision
that software engineers on the planet could gather here freely, use the
resources here, and release open source software packages to the Solaris
market space. From the mid 90's until about 2002 there simply was no way
to easily get an open source package for Solaris users. Often times you
could find a package at Sunfreeware.com or fiver.net but it would be two
years out of date and not for your release of Solaris. Also, you often
could not participate at all. At most there would be a total of one
hundred packages if we were lucky and there was no way to enforce an
update. The situation for Solaris on x86 was much worse. The open source
software market for Solaris users felt very much like a closed door
situation where no one was allowed in.
For better or worse I took action to fix that situation and I stand by my
word.
Since the hardware and software needed for open source development was
quite expensive I funded and created the build farm at Blastwave.org.
Software maintainers would join, often to fulfil their own needs, use the
infrastructure and then submit a software package for release.
I saw a need to grow the operation in terms of scope and quality
assurance. As a business man I felt that quality was needed more than
quantity. The customer, even if they are a free download user, must be
respected. As an engineer I had a desire to do things correctly.
I began to implement strict quality control back in 2006 and 2007. This
caused some problems. Software simply was not acceptable for release if it
did not pass stringent QA tests. The result of the QA policy resulted in
maintainer turnover until finally, by 2008, we had a small collection of
serious software engineers as well as about 1600 software package titles.
It was at this time that Sun Microsystems Inc. recognized the value here
and the "Blastwave Software Stack" was created as a product name.
Blastwave.org Inc. is a "Commercial Software Vendor (ISV)" and some
information can be sen at
http://partneradvantage.sun.com/catalog/search/PartnerDetail.jsf?vendor_id=4031965
The name "BLASTWAVE" has been filed as a Trademark and plans were laid for
a more modern open source service organization. One that would provide a
service level agreement as well as software support. Sun Microsystems
conducted market research and discovered that over 30% of the users here
were government sized organizations, telco, banking, R&D and finance.
Essentially Blastwave.org Inc. was providing a very low cost service to
billion dollar businesses.
The plan for 2009 through 2012 is to continue to provide open source
software to production Solaris users. We wish to also engage in good
business relationships that are mutually beneficial. Blastwave aims high
also and nothing less than the best quality open source software for
Solaris users is the goal.
Please see http://www.blastwave.org/jir/legal_notice.fam
This is the layout and general look and feel of the new web site in
progress. This is still a work in progress but there are some things to
note. A support and tracking infrastructure has been built on Atlassian
JIRA and Confluence, see :
https://www.blastwave.org/support/secure/Dashboard.jspa
https://www.blastwave.org/wiki/display/CSW/Home
New Software Catalog in progress
http://www.blastwave.org/jir/packages.ftd
The software is being broken up into three "trees" or software states. At
the moment everything in the tree is tagged with STATE = 5 which simply
means "no STATE". We will separate the software packages into a
production level state, which is software that has been very well tested,
seen to be bug free and entirely expected to run without issue. This
"production" level state will be considered commercial grade.
The next level is the staging level. Software at this state may change
often . It may be updated without warning and the end user can expect to
see the latest releases there. All software at this state must pass a set
of QA level tests before release.
The final state is only to be used internally by Blastwave.org as well as
by maintainers and users who understand the implications. This last level
is simply called "devtree". Software at this level may be hours old. It
may arrive in the uat stack with incomplete dependencies. Essentially it
is hot from the build stack and only after some testing will it be
promoted upwards to staging. From there it may ( or may not ) be promoted
upwards to production level.
A great deal of work has been done to move forwards to the next level of
service. If you spend some time looking in the new catalog you will see
that every file in every package is being tracked. We record the MD5 hash
and SHA256 digital signature of every file and every pathname we release.
This data is collected such that we may begin to meet Minimum Security
Requirements for Federal Information and Information Systems requirements
as documented in NIST FIPS-200 ( "Federal Information Processing
Standards 200, March 9, 2006" ). That document describes the minimum
security requirements for federal information and information systems in
seventeen security-related areas. United States federal agencies must meet
the minimum security requirements as defined in FIPS-200 as well as one
other doc, NIST Special Publication 800-53, Recommended Security Controls
for Federal Information Systems.
Most of the 17 areas that FIPS-200 describes are for internal security
procedures. However there are sections related to the handling of, audit
of, and tracking of software or processes. The four sections are :
1 - Configuration Management
2 - Identification and Authentication
3 - System and Services Acquisition
4 - System and Information Integrity
We at Blastwave.org aim to provide the basic data required for each and
every software package and component such that you always know where it
came from, how to identify it and how it relates to other software
components in the software tree.
Much like the management at Sun and Oracle I aim to ensure that the end
users ( or resellers ) are in a position where they can identify and track
third party software easily. Again this is a value added
feature that separates us from other possible providers.
The last word on this entire subject is that we live and breath in the
open source software world. This is what we do best. We are proud of the
fact that we have one of the largest and most widely available software
services in the world. Blastwave has become a world wide supplier from
California to Switzerland and into Beijing. We now plan forwards to be
world class.
You are free to join, free to use and I have never backed away from my own
vision that UNIX(r) is the most stable and respected trademark in the
software world. I have been involved in the OpenSolaris project since day
zero and I plan to always support open source facilities for Solaris
users.
Dennis Clarke
CEO Blastwave.org Inc.
Blastwave is a registered trademark of Blastwave.org Inc. in the
United States and Canada. UNIX is a registered trademark in the United
States and other countries, exclusively licensed through X/Open
Company, Ltd.
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