Since the project I was working on throughout 2008 has now been axed shelved, I don’t want to do any “tech research” using the X4200 M2 that’s in my “home data centre” [aka under the stairs, and yes, there is enough space and ventilation!] Essentially, it means I don’t have anything “decent” that I can use as a testbed for new OS builds or just generally figuring out new, bleeding-edge tech.

So when I hear about things like this [from Blog O’ Matty]:

The long awaited IPMP rearchitecture bits just got included into the crossbow integration in OpenSolaris build 107. A new command, ipmpstat has been introduced.
…
That is, all of the IP data addresses associated with the IPMP group will instead be hosted on an IPMP IP interface, such as ipmp013. With this new model, data addresses will no longer be associated with any specific physical underlying interface, but instead will belong to the IPMP group as a whole.
As will become clear, this addresses many outstanding problems and vastly simplifies the implementation. There will be a one-to-one correspondence between IPMP groups and IPMP interfaces. That is, each IPMP group will have exactly one IPMP interface. By default, each IPMP interface will be named ipmpN , but administrators will be encouraged to specify a name of their choosing, as described in section 4.1.5. Since an IPMP interface’s name will not be fixed, the system will set a new IPMP flag on all IPMP interfaces to indicate that the interface has special properties and semantics, as detailed throughout this document.

In a nutshell, OpenSolaris provides a network abstraction between the hardware and the operating system and its applications – providing virtual network interfaces, efficient load sharing on both inbound and outbound traffic and improvements in network availability and utilisation. The newly-included IPMP support is part of Project Clearview – Sun’s effort at making IPMP support more robust and realistically – more useable. Traditionally IPMP has been a bit of a bear to work with.

OpenSolaris already has killer features like ZFS and DTrace [yeah they’re in Mac OS X 10.5, but I, er, learned the hard way in the past about using OS X Server for real work, and I don’t intend to let it near any data centre that I have a say about.] So another feature like IPMP added to Crossbow [Sun’s name for their network virtualisation technology] just keeps making OpenSolaris more and more compelling for Unix sysadmins – at least in my book.

If you’ve ever had a need to use link aggregation/trunking/bonding/IEEE 802.3ad with multiple ethernet connections on any OS, this stuff will probably blow you away. There’s no longer a necessity for there to be a 1-to-1 correlation between the physical interfaces (NIC) and the logical interfaces (e.g. eth0). VMware does this in its own way [don’t know about Xen], but this is AFAIK the first time it’s really been adopted in a mainstream OS, rather than in a virtualisation solution.

All that now remains for me is to find consistent employment so I can buy new toys equipment to play with research new technologies. Updated CVs being digitally thrown at multiple parties in the coming hours…if you know me and you know of work that might suit, give me a shout.

Update: After a query from a mate, I’m clarifying my statement about Mac OS X Server – I’ll only use it where it’s the only option for certain tasks. For instance, AFP file sharing and running a NetBoot/NetInstall environment are quite simply no-brainers for OSXS…you can use other OSes+software to do it, but it’s pretty damn fiddly. If your time is worth a non-zero amount, then using the right tool for the job – whatever it is – is almost always the right way to do it. (The only exception I could possibly see was if you had some weird constraint to meet, or were doing something for your own education/edification.)

Update 2: More stuff in the following article…“IPMP Re-architecture is delivered”.