After HP refused to purchase it for the company lobby, Sun bought a life-size cutout painting of William Hewlett and David Packard and placed it in various spots around Sun’s Meno Park campus.

After four months, Sun has now donated the piece to the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose.

I just wanted to take a minute to give an update on the site status and to wish everyone a happy holiday season.

The new server (a T1000, graciously donated by the Niagara product group at Sun), is up and online at the colocation facility. Right now it has an OS (Solaris 10 6/06) installed; most of the critical site content is being mirrored daily. I hope to do the official switchover by the first of the year along with publishing a list of benchmark results comparing it to the existing system.

I’d also like to remind everyone that SunHELP is a hobby run in my spare time; I don’t do things in order to make a profit. The tiny revenue brought in from Google ads is used to pay for colocation expenses. The other ads I run are trades for hardware and software, or put up as a “thank you” for vendors who have been long-time supporters.

If SunHELP has been useful or helpful to you in 2006, please take the time to drop me an email and let me know how – the occasional “thank you, I found exactly what I was looking for” really makes all the effort I put into this site worthwhile. If you feel generous, take a look at my Wish List and consider purchasing something.

Everyone have a safe and happy holiday season; drive carefully, don’t drink and drive, and watch out for bad eggnog. July 2007 will mark the 10-year anniversary of the site (started out as SUNHELP.COM), and I look forward to many years to come.

Sun has released Solaris 10 Update 3 (11/06) and it is available for download.

Ben Rockwood has a nice list of new features and enhancements:

NIA Multipath Management API Support
fsstat File-System Monitoring Tool (Very handy indeed!)
ZFS Command Improvements and Changes, including RAIDZ-2, Hot-Spares, Recursive Snapshots, Promotion of Clones, Compact NFSv4 ACL’s, Destroyed Pools Recovery, Error Clearing, ZFS integration with FMA, and much more.
Resource Pools now SMF’ized
Zone Renaming, Moving, Cloning, Import and Export
Logical Domains for sun4v
Solaris Trusted Extensions
Support for PCI Express
Sun Fire X4500 SATA Disk FMA
Adobe Flash Player Plugin for Solaris
Solaris Trusted Extensions Desktops
Solaris Flash Archives Improvements
Secure By Default Network Profile
ST Driver Support for Quantum LTO-2 and LTO-3 Tape Drives
IIIMF and Language Engines Improvements

The What’s New documentation at Sun has the full list of changes.

Sun has announced the availability of Java Platform Standard Edition 6.

Sun has announced general availability of the new NetBeans Visual Web Pack and the NetBeans C/C++ Development Pack.