The other day I opened a fresh bottle of water and had a few sips. After putting it on the table and conversing with a co-worker, one hand knocked the full bottle over emptying a lot of water directly onto my laptop keyboard!! In a panic I decided to lift the laptop to make the water fall off onto the desk. All that did was make the computer turn off :( I immediately unplugged it, took the battery out and wiped it dry. Then I removed the hard drive. My boss has an identical laptop which conveniently has blue screen of death problems while booting so he lent it to me. I put my hard drive in and was able to continue working.

After waiting 24 hours I put my hard drive back into the computer and turned it on. It worked! Luckily a bit of water didn't cause any permanent damage and I'm back to normal again.

At home I'm having a real nightmare with my Sun Ultra 24's network interface which is built onto the motherboard. The computer shipped with Solaris 10 08/07 which is a solid server OS but outdated for desktop use. I used it for a couple weeks and the networking features worked well. I formatted and installed Solaris Express 01/08 and used it for a couple weeks. Networking in it also worked well. One day I decided to check out the "Sun xVM Hipervisor" GRUB boot menu item. It booted my regular Solaris but with no networking support. I rebooted back into my regular GRUB boot menu item and still no networking. Over the last week or two I've formatted and re-installed the OS, tried different versions of Solaris, and even Ubuntu Linux. Every time the installer tells me that the network card was not detected so it doesn't configure it. There's not even a link light on. Sun support won't help much because they only support Solaris 10, not Solaris Express. They helped me reset the bios using a jumper because I think the on-board network interface is disabled even though the bios says it is not. That didn't make a difference. Right now I'm installing Solaris 10 so that I can get some help from them.

One support person said they might send me a new motherboard. That may sound like a good solution but I'm pretty certain it will only happen again because I had this exact problem last year on a home built computer that had an ASUS motherboard with onboard network. It worked fine in Solaris 10 for a while and one day the network interface just disappeared. No link lights, and even after formatting the network interface was no longer available. I thought a recent lightning storm ruined it, but many months later when I installed Linux it worked again! Too bad installing Linux on my ultra 24 doesn't have the same result. I've also read about other people having this problem on their laptops, and other computers that have onboard network interfaces. I think Solaris has some magic bit of code that turns off the network interface on motherboards. Now that I think about it, both Sun's motherboard and my ASUS motherboard use nvidia chipset for the network interface. Since Sun doesn't know what the problem is I doubt it will be fixed any time soon. I may have to resort to installing a PCI network card like I did in my home built computer last year. What a nightmare.

A few weeks ago I ordered a Sun Ultra 24 workstation to use as my primary workstation for work. One of the reasons I bought it is because I need to gain experience using Solaris for one of my future ventures. It came with Solaris 10 pre-installed which is great for servers, but is too dated for desktop use. A lot of the software is from 2003-2004 such as NetBeans IDE 5.0, Star Office 7, etc. I downloaded Solaris Express Developer Edition to install but aborted once I found out that a new version will be released next week. Solaris Express is where the development of Solaris 11 happens. Twice a year many of the innovations are backported to Solaris 10 in an update release. Solaris Express has the latest versions of all desktop software which is perfect for me.

In the spring of 2008 Solaris Express will be replaced by the first official OpenSolaris distribution from Sun, code named Indiana. Indiana is to Solaris what Fedora is to Red Hat. It is a frequently updated distribution that will become the next version of Solaris every three years. The new Image Packaging System (IPS) will debut in Indiana replacing the old System V packaging system. The old packaging system doesn't know how to resolve dependencies and doesn't use network based package repositories. I think this was one of the last major hurdles in Solaris adoption.

There are a couple of things that I don't like about the Sun Ultra 24. The keyboard is missing the right Ctrl key which is replaced by a "Compose" key. There are a bunch of UNIXy keys on here, such as a black diamond? I use the right Ctrl key + arrow keys to quickly move around text skipping entire words with each key press. Now I have to use the left Ctrl key which requires re-training my "finger memory". The other slight annoyance is that the hard drive makes noticeable sounds every time it reads or writes. Other than that I really like this computer. I'm sure I'll get a good 6-7 years out of it like my last computer.

I also purchased a Cisco 871 router with built-in VPN client, VPN server and QoS features. Our network admin configured it so that my home network is permanently attached to the IJW network allowing me to work from home once I'm in Toronto. I hope to use the QoS features for prioritizing VoIP packets if IJW replaces our old PBX phone system with an Asterisk based PBX.