Sun – Week Seventeen & week with Faye

I only spent one and a half days in work this week!  Monday was spent doing some work, while Tuesday morning was spent tying up loose ends and passing other people ongoing work.

I then travelled up to Aberystwyth.  I was delayed in getting to Wolverhampton by 20 minutes, so missed the train to Aber.  A two hour wait sitting by a vending machine so I could charge my phone and I was back on the train, arriving in Aber for about 11:40pm.  I met Mike and we went off to Downies where I met up with Faye, Ben and Lauren.

OpenSolaris & CS101

On Thursday 30th October, I attended the CS101 lecture in Aber uni.  I was there to give a brief talk about OpenSolaris, focusing on aspects like Zones, DTrace and ZFS.  I think it went OK, possibly pitched it a tad too high, and I missed out tonnes of stuff I wanted to put in, like the copy on write feature of ZFS…

If anyone attended that lecture and is reading this, please feel free email me any questions you might have about OpenSolaris.  If I can’t answer them, I can find an answer

Sun – Week Sixteen

OK, writing this from the future, I can’t remember the details of this week…

The main forcus for this week was playing with a blade chassis, and a load of blade servers.  I was playing with a mix of X64 and SPARC systems, I was amazed that you could mix the two in an enclosed unit.  I’m still unsure why you would choose a blade over a 1U unit…

I had a hard time because I needed to liaison with several owners of blades in the chassis to get them moved to other chassis.  After this was complete it was just a case of installing new blades and upgrading some firmware.  Mick (the engineer who I was doing the work for) then installed some new blades which added storage to the blade next to them.

Interesting stuff…But I think I’ll try to leave them alone…

Sun – Week Fifteen

Week Fifteen, subtitled:
The small things

Monday morning started with the subtitle. I saw a pigeon fall from the sky, frantically flapping it’s wings causing some leaves to scatter, it made me smile. This week I shall try to look for the small things that make me smile, and report them here with the rest of my news.

Sun – Week Fourteen

Monday starts off with me looking into this jumpstart image. It turns out to be really easy! All I needed to do was to find the Solaris 10 Update 4 image, this had a file called setup_install_server (or similar), I just used this executable file to install the image to another directory. After this it was a case of using the patchadd command:

patchadd -C <path_to_image> <path_to_patch>

And this installed that patch onto the image for installation at install time! A bit clever or what!?
The afternoon was spent looking at mirroring a machine at install over jumpstart…I didn’t get it to work But I shall keep trying!

Sun – Week Thirteen

Unlucky for some, will it be for me? As you possibly guess, I write parts of entries throughout the week and publish on Fridays, so at the time of writing, I have no idea if it’s going to be a good or bad week, it’s 11:50, Monday morning