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1st OpenSolaris User Group Report

The 1st OpenSolaris User Group meeting took place yesterday evening, or is that earlier this evening, time is relative...;-)

There was about 40-50 folks that showed up, all of which left with a t-shirt at minimum, plus other SWAG. All in all, this was a pretty good showing for our first meeting, and the comments from the attendees were very positive.

Here are some pictures:

Jan kicked it off with a demonstration of the new boot architecture. Here he's showing the non-verbose version of the new boot architecture!

Chris Baker, Solaris x86 Product Manager proudly showing off his Sun/AMD shirt!

Bart Smaalders, Solaris Kernel Performance engineer, along with Tim Marsland, CTO of the Open Platform Group and co-architect of the AMD64 port of Solaris look on from the back of the room.

Dan "the birdman" Price, Solaris Kernel Engineer was there to help field questions.

Bryan Cantrill, the ace of DTrace, with the standard issue Ferrari running Solaris on AMD64 in mobile form.

We were fortunate to have Ben Rockwood there to take video, which we'll be working to get online for others to stream.

Bob Palowoda is not actually sleeping here, this is how Bob looks when he's thinking!

Liane Praza speaking on the Service Management Facility. I must say for SMF being such a controversial feature added to Solaris 10, it has been most well received, and there was even a comment to Liane of, "it's about friggin' time". Good to see that folks like this technology, it is really this type of technology that makes Solaris what it is today.

Alan Coopersmith, Solaris X Server Engineer.

Stuart Kreitman, Solaris X Server Engineer who works with AlanC.

Lloyd Staley, Adobe Systems.

Jan and Bryan having a friendly boot-off between old and new boot!

Ben Rockwood was taking pictures also.

Liane during a piece of her presentation, the SMF tour.

Liane describing things in detail, and fielding questions from the audience.

Thanks to Phillip "Flip" Russell, we were able to get beverages/snacks for the attendees.

Chris Baker talking with David O'Brien of AMD.

Phillip "Flip" Russell. Much thanks go to Phillip for helping me organize and assist with the grunt work. I'm sure that the attendees appreciated his hard work.

Max Bruning, device driver writer extrodinaire, and instructor at SunU.

Eric Bruno, Flip, and Simon Phipps, Sun Open Source Evangelist.

Tex, paying close attention to what Liane is saying.

Well, we hope to see all of you again next month when Darren Moffat, Solaris Security Engineer explains how to harden up Solaris from a view as a developer as well as an administrator. Darren will be including information on using the Role Based Access Control (RBAC) as well, one of the Solaris 10 additions. Hope to see some more of you as well, don't be shy now!;-)

( Apr 27 2005, 04:15:46 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [8]

REMINDER: OpenSolaris User Group Tues. 04/26/2005

Just a reminder, don't forget to attend the 1st OpenSolaris User Group which is meeting in Santa Clara, see my previous entry in my blog for a link to detailed directions.

I've acquired some nice t-shirts to give away, plus other SWAG, and we have an evening of great info planned which includes Liane Praza speaking on the Service Management Facility (SMF) as well as a brief demo of the new boot architecture for Solaris on x86/x64.

Hope to see you all there! 7:30pm, SCA03, at the Sun Microsystems Santa Clara Agnew Campus. ( Apr 26 2005, 02:08:39 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

1st OpenSolaris User Group to meet this Tues. (April 26)

Hear Ye! Hear Ye! Hear Ye!

1st OpenSolaris User Group

Sun Santa Clara Campus (Agnew)

Tuesday - April 26

7:30pm-10:00pm

Liane Praza presents SMF

(Service Management Facility)

The 1st OpenSolaris User Group will be meeting on April 26th at 7:30pm-10:00pm. This meeting will discuss the Service Management Facility (SMF) which was put into Solaris 10.

As a bonus, we will also have Jan Setje-Eilers doing a short demonstration of the New Boot Architecture for Solaris on x86/x64. Be the first person on your block to see this great technology which will be available in Solaris Express any build now.

Directions:

Take 101 to Montague Expressway, exit towards Agnew Center (there will be a sign). Take ramp from Montague on to Lafayette St., Turn right into campus on Palm Dr. The user group will meet in the upstairs room of the Auditorium, building is located on the right side of the street, plenty of parking is available around the auditorium with a large parking lot next to it.

We will meet in SCA03, the Auditorium. You can find directions in more detail at this link.

( Apr 25 2005, 01:20:08 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [3]

MySQL BOF Shows off Solaris 10

Earlier this evening there was another successful Birds Of a Feather session (BOF), presented by Dan "The Birdman" Price, who inserted another feather in his BOF hat. I just say that this was another session where the attendees could give us feedback on what they like and don't like, or problems that they might have been having with Solaris. All of the attendees were able to get some nice OpenSolaris t-shirts, and other SWAG ($#!T We All Get) to take home with them. Nice USB memory sticks and Solaris 10 DVD kits, to go with those nice t-shirts.

Here the folks are priming up before the presentation, once again nobody was complaining about actual free beer![wink]

Claire Giordano, the person responsible for managing the OpenSolaris pilot until recently, and the person responsible for getting the CDDL license OSI approved. Much thanks go to this woman for the work she's done to help Sun move forward with their open source initiatives.

Before the presentation folks are minglin' with the Sun engineers that showed up, along with Stephen Harpster in the front on the right, who took the torch which Claire Giordano handed off to him to manage the OpenSolaris program. I have no doubt that Stephen will do a bang-up job as Claire did previously, bringing with him quite a bit of open source experience from the past.

Andrei Dorofeev, one of the excellent Solaris Kernel engineers working in the performance group. Andrei was responsible for creating the excellent PXE scripts I posted on my blog a while back.

Here he is folks, Dan "The Birdman" Price shmoozing the audience with another spectacular presentation.

Jonathan Adams, one of the Solaris Kernel Engineers who has worked on many pieces of Solaris 10 including SMF.

Eric Saxe dressed in GQ with his classic Sun/AMD shirt, and sportin' a Ferrari running Solaris 10 in 64-bit mode. It just don't get much better than this, unless you're drivin' a Ferrari on the Autobahn!

Claire was well liked as she handed out SWAG when folks asked questions. I was doing this at the USENIX conference and it's really nice as few people are unhappy getting free t-shirts and other SWAG.

Here's Dan "The Birdman" Price once again, and you can see there's some DTrace snippets to display MySQL clients information. A very nice touch for Dan to add to his presentation!

The audience was asking some good questions, and Dan was giving them good responses to answer those questions. Dan also leveraged the knowledge of some of the other Solaris Engineers also, and all in all it was a wonderful BOF which ended up in the bar as usual...;-)

Don't forget, there's the 1st OpenSolaris User Group meeting in Santa Clara next Tuesday, April 26th, 7:30pm-10:00pm, don't miss it as there should be some nice give aways there as well!

( Apr 21 2005, 03:35:16 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [3]

USENIX pictures!

Folks, many of you have asked to see some pictures of the USENIX BOFs, and I've uploaded some of the ones I took. Unfortunately I'm not an expert with my camera, and have a difficult time in various settings, and this was one of them, so there was many pictures that were not clear enough to post.

I must say that we had a couple great BOFs this year at USENIX, and I think all attendees were happy, everyone received t-shirts and other swag, as well as some media was given away. But more importantly, folks were really excited to hear about the new features of Solaris and were even more appreciative to hear it direct from the engineer's mouths. We were very honest and upfront about what we have and where things are going. The attendees really seemed to appreciate that.

John Douglass, long time advocate, also came to Boston last year and was here at Anaheim again this year. All Solaris advocates are welcome at our BOFs! (even the non-advocates, we'll convert 'ya!;-)

Andy Toy, who was giving a session along with Jim Mauro and Richard McDougal.

It seems to me that there's a lot of beer lover's in our Solaris circles, but be careful. This young lady was almost carried off into the pool at the Marriot around 2:00am as we were still talking shop at the bar!;-)

Folks chit-chattin' after the BOF, before we migrated to the bar.

Dan Price giving his presentation on Tuesday to a full house in Salon 4 and 5.

I get so confused about what is free and what isn't, but this beer was free for folks that attended, courtesy of Sun Microsystems and these folks didn't seem to mind that aspect at all.

The early birds are primin' up for the BOF on the 2nd night, which featured Liane Praza.

James Craig, a new comer to the BOF scene, but long time user of Solaris.

Liane Praza and Bart Smaalders giving their presentation on Wed. night.

We had a nice crowd listening in on to Liane Praza

And the folks listened to Dan Price also! This was on Tuesday night.

Sun Microsystems co-architect of the AMD64 port, Tim Marsland (Todd Clayton was the other architect), speaking with David O'Brien of AMD.

Dan Price talks about performance at the Tues. night BOF.

And not to be shown up, Liane had some performance to talk about at the Developer BOF, Wed. night. Did I mention that Performance was one of the main focuses of Solaris 10?

Here, a bunch of attendees are talking tech. Andy Toy could have had a V8 juice, but instead settled for some red wine, not a bad choice, IMO.;-)

I'll see you folks again at the LISA conference, if I make it down there this year.;-)

( Apr 14 2005, 05:45:10 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

USENIX '05, all are welcome to attend our BOF

Please come and join us at the BOF tonight (Wed.), all are welcome wether you're an attendee of USENIX or not, there is nobody checking and we welcome all to attend.

As several others have posted, we had a great turnout last night with 80-100 attendees and there we gave away plenty of swag ($#!T we all get), as well as providing free drinks. I think there were some skeptics in the audience that were definitely convinced that Sun is serious about Solaris and were surprised to see how much improvement has gone into Solaris 10.

To quote one of the attendees, "I've listened to Jonathan Schwartz but wasn't convinced to use Solaris. However, hearing it straight from the engineers is very convincing and you've now got me to want to use it". The general feedback was that people were happy to see honesty from the engineers and there was a great appreciation for the work that was put into the BOF and what the engineers are doing to help Sun.

Much thanks go to Dan Price, Liane Praza, Bart Smaalders, Matt Ingenthron, John Clingan, and several other Sun folks that were speaking at USENIX, but most of all thanks to all of you who showed up and showed us your enthusiasm to the wonderful product that engineering worked on which is knows as Solaris 10. This product truely kicks @$$, and I'm proud to say that!

I have pictures I'll post as soon as I can get a compact flash to USB adapter to get them out of my camera.

( Apr 13 2005, 05:11:54 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

OpenSolaris User Group for April 26th taking shape

I've been getting things setup for the first user group meeting on April 26th, which you might have read about on my blog, not long ago. We have an additional extra to add to the night (~20 minutes), which will be a short demonstration of the Solaris new boot architecture.

Those who are familiar with the current boot architecture have always been critical on Sun as to wether Solaris would be able to survive on x86/x64. Not that it was horrible, it does work, just that the current boot architecture was based on 25+ year old technology when the concept of real mode and protected mode were new ideas to the x86 industry.

Since the new boot architecture will lunge us forward and provide a lot of ease for developers who write device drivers, this is a very exciting addition coming into Solaris. One of the Sun engineers working on the new boot architecture will doing the demonstration.

This will of course be in addition to the main topic of the Service Management Facility (SMF) which Liane Praza will talk about.

Don't think the plans are not moving forward for the follow-up months, because things are in motion already. For the May meeting, we'll be having Darren Moffat give a presentation on Security, Hardening up Solaris 10, for the different perspectives of a user, admin, developer. This will also include using the Role Based Access Control which is built into Solaris 10. Don't forget that you can download Solaris 10 for free at this link.

The May meeting will sport a sneak preview of Project Looking Glass running on none other than one of our favorite systems, Solaris x64, given by the Solaris X team.;-)

The June meeting is also taking shape, and if all goes as planned, we'll be hearing from David Comay, who will be giving a presentation on Zones, or maybe as you know them as N1 Grid Containers.

We will always try to meet on the last Tuesday of each month, so mark your calendars and mark them early, this will be a user group that you'll want to attend! And who knows, we might also have some cool give aways![wink]

( Apr 09 2005, 12:13:58 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]

USENIX - April 12th/13th BOFs

Several of the Solaris Engineers will be heading down to USENIX in Anaheim, CA to hold a couple BOFs on Tuesday and Wednesday of next week.

Please stop by and say hi, we'll have Solaris 10 media to give away, and we'll try to dig up some other swag as well.

Hope to see you there!

( Apr 09 2005, 12:08:04 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]