Monday February 18, 2008 Alan Perry's Blog
Monday February 18, 2008 By the end of this, I should know something about ZFS
After a couple of years of offering to speak locally about OpenSolaris/Solaris but having no takers, I am now signed up to give a bunch of talks. To avoid strains on my brain, I am keeping the topic to ZFS.
On February 27, I will be giving a talk at the monthly meeting of the Puget Sound Network Users Group. This is going to be in Bellevue, WA and my talk should start around 6:30pm. PSNUG has asked me to speak for a couple of hours and I will probably start with an introduction to OpenSolaris.
On March 6, I will be back out at Washington State University to give the ZFS talk that I was supposed to give on February 7. (I had the flu on the 7th and didn't want to give it everyone on the plane.) This will be a one hour talk with demos.
I have been asked to give a similar ZFS talk for the Tri-Cities Linux Users Group in the Tri-Cities on March 8. I have not yet committed to being there, but I probably will go.
I didn't know a lot about ZFS before I started doing these talks, but I know a lot more now!
This does confuse things a bit for the next Puget Sound OpenSolaris Users Group meeting. It should have been in January, but I delayed it to February because of the Pullman talks. Now, with the end of February, beginning of March activity, the PSOSUG meeting will be delayed until March, I guess. And what will the presentation be on? I am sure that I am gonna be sick of talking about ZFS.
( Feb 18 2008, 06:08:00 PM PST ) Permalink
Monday January 21, 2008 Last Thursday, I presented an OpenSolaris talk at a meeting of the Palouse section of the IEEE at Washington State University in Pullman, WA. The topics of my talk were an Intro to OpenSolaris, DTrace and ZFS.
I didn't select the topics. Sun's campus coordinator, who made the arrangements for the talk, did.
The talk was interesting to prepare, because I had 60 minutes to present on three topics that each could have easily taken up a full hour (or more). I have done presentations on Solaris and OpenSolaris before, so that part was pretty easy. I use DTrace all of the time, so that part was easy to prepare as well. However, the ZFS part ... well ...
I didn't know a lot about ZFS. When I tried to set-up some Firewire disks to get familiar with ZFS, the scsa1394 driver panicked and I didn't get much beyond that. I researching ZFS and started to write a presentation, but I ran out of time and used Eric Kustarz' ZFS presentation.
As might be expected, the introduction to Solaris and OpenSolaris and DTrace portions of the talk went off well. The DTrace part would have been a little better with some demos, but time was short. However, the ZFS portion of a bit of a mess. I had gone through the slides and thought that I understood everything and could explain things, but realized that I couldn't as I was making the presentation and trying to answer questions. At least I got the key points about ZFS out there for the people who were unfamiliar with it.
Fortunately, I get a chance to make up for the botched ZFS presentation. I will be back in Pullman on February 7th to make a 40 minute presentation just on ZFS.
( Jan 21 2008, 02:20:07 PM PST ) Permalink
Monday December 10, 2007 I have been asked to make a couple of OpenSolaris presentations at Washington State University in Pullman, WA. One unfortunate consequence of this is that it will delay the next meeting of the PSOSUG, originally planned for January, until the end of February.
The first of these will be a talk at the January IEEE Palouse Regional Monthly Meeting on Janury 17, 2008. I have sixty minutes to talk about OpenSolaris, ZFS and Dtrace. It should be no problem fitting all three topics into sixty minutes, right?
The second talk will be a couple of weeks later, tentatively on Feb 7. The topic is still TBD, but I suspect that it will be a more in-depth technical discussion of ZFS or DTrace.
Maybe I will see you there.
( Dec 10 2007, 12:16:40 AM PST ) Permalink
Monday October 22, 2007 The PSOSUG: Reaching the OpenSolaris community one person at a time
I just got home from the first meeting of the Puget Sound OpenSolaris User Group. Attendance was a bit lighter than expected. Only one other person showed up.
That isn't great for the OpenSolaris movement, but it was OK for me. I am still working on getting comfortable speaking in front of a crowd and one of the reasons that I am leading the PSOSUG is for experience speaking in front of crowds. But sometimes I think that I am not quite ready yet. Making the presentation to just one person was more like a conversation and easier for me to pull off. I can make the presentation to a larger crowd next time.
And I make get that chance sooner rather than later. Earlier in the day, I exchanged e-mail with someone at the Puget Sound Network User Group about giving an "Intro to OpenSolaris" presentation at one of their meetings.
In the meantime, I need to get ready for the next PSOSUG meeting in three months. At the request of my one attendee at tonight's meeting, the topic will be something about ZFS.
( Oct 22 2007, 08:45:10 PM PDT ) Permalink
Friday September 21, 2007 Puget Sound OpenSolaris User Group to meet Oct 22
The first meeting of the Puget Sound OpenSolaris User Group will be held on Monday, October 22, starting at 5:30pm. The meeting will be held at the Sun office in Bellevue (BLV04, Mt. Baker conference room). The address is 15395 SE 30th Place, Suite 120.
The agenda is simple:
- Discuss organization (where future meetings should be and what topics should be discussed at those meetings)
- Presentation 'Introduction to OpenSolaris' by Alan Perry, Staff Engineer, Solaris x86 Kernel Core Development Team
Attendees will receive copies of the OpenSolaris starter kit.
Since I have no idea how many people to expect at this meeting, please let me know if you intend on attending, so I can plan appropriately.
If you have any questions, let me know.
( Sep 21 2007, 08:32:12 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]
Wednesday August 29, 2007 The new and improved Puget Sound OpenSolaris User Group
The Seattle OpenSolaris User Group (seosug) is now the Puget Sound OpenSolaris User Group (PSOSUG). When I signed up to lead the local OpenSolaris User Group, someone gave it the name Seattle OpenSolaris User Group without consulting me.
The problem is that I don't live in Seattle; I live on Bainbridge Island, across Puget Sound from Seattle. And the local Sun office where my Mail Stop is located (as well as the location for the next PSOSUG meeting) is in Bellevue, across Lake Washington from Seattle.
Since a recent reorganization of the OpenSolaris User Groups forced me to make some changes to seosug's area at opensolaris.org, I decided to take the opportunity to change the name of the User Group as well to reflect the larger geographic scope of the group.
The Puget Sound OpenSolaris User Group is a now an OpenSolaris "project" (currently hidden, but it may be un-hidden by the time that you read this). More information about it can be found on the OpenSolaris website. The next meeting of the PSOSUG (the pSOS User Group? Uh oh.) will happen sometime in mid-October. Watch this space in the future for more info.
( Aug 29 2007, 10:48:29 PM PDT ) Permalink
Thursday March 08, 2007 The OpenSolaris Developers Conference
A week ago, I was in Berlin, Germany for the first OpenSolaris Developers Conference. I was there to present a paper that I wrote that describes my effort to port OpenSolaris to the Apple Mac Mini and port MythTV to OpenSolaris. This is part of a longer term personal project to build an OpenSolaris-based set-top box from ordinary PC hardware (look inside a Mac Mini and you will see that the component are ordinary PC components).
The conference was presented by the German Unix Users Group (GUUG) and was co-located with their Spring 2007 meeting. The organizers tell me that about 35-40 people were there for the OpenSolaris conference.
I thought the conference was very well done. The technical content was very good. The presentations were engaging. And, while most of the presenters were from Sun, many weren't and the conference was organized by the GUUG, not Sun.
My favorite presentation was made by Moinak Ghosh from Sun. He is the guy behind the Belenix distribution of OpenSolaris and he spoke about creating Live Media. When I first saw Belenix last year, I was surprised that it could fit on a CD and boot so quickly. It was very interesting to learn how it works. Moinak is a very clever guy.
The conference organizers tell me that there will be an OpenSolaris Developers Conference next year and I will be definitely be there.
( Mar 08 2007, 10:16:42 AM PST ) Permalink
Wednesday February 07, 2007 Look for me at the OpenSolaris Developers Conference
Just a heads up. I will be at the OpenSolaris Developers Conference in Berlin, Germany on 2 Mar, 2007. I will be presenting on my work Porting MythTV to OpenSolaris and the Mac Mini.
This is actually a personal project that I have been working on in my spare time. I wanted to put together a set-top box type system based on OpenSolaris. I used to work on set-top box software and the systems that I was building my code on top of weren't that reliable or that nice to program for. I figured that OpenSolaris would be an improvement and started the project to see if it would work.
I ended up picking the Apple Mac Mini as the set-top box hardware (yeah, I know, it is a computer, but it is a small form factor box and it has a DVD slot as well as an IR remote) and MythTV as the application (so I wouldn't have to start from scratch on the PVR, DVD, OSD, et. al. code). To find out more, come see me in Berlin. I can't wait to see how it works out!
Anyway, I submitted the idea for a paper on the project on a whim to the OpenSolaris Developers Conference after the conference asked me, as lead for the Seattle OpenSolaris User Group, to post the Call-For-Papers to my user group's mailing list. To my surprise, they accepted it. So, now I am spending lots and lots of time trying to get the project in a state that is suitable to present.
One thing that came out of this work is the complicated process that I came up with for installing OpenSolaris on a Mac Mini so you can still multiboot into MacOS to play Backgammon or something. I'll be blogging about that soon.
After the Developers Conference, watch this space for an announcement for a community project to finish off my MythTV port.
That's it and I hope to see you in Berlin.
( Feb 07 2007, 04:41:52 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [1]
Monday September 04, 2006 Seattle OpenSolaris User Group forming
To coincide with the Seattle Sun Tech Days (including the OpenSolaris Day), we are starting the Seattle OpenSolaris User Group and I volunteered to lead the group. Despite its name, the group is intended to provide assistance and comraderie for OpenSolaris users throughout the entire Puget Sound region. (Hopefully, at some point, we will get enough users throughout the Puget Sound region that we will need to break up the User Group into smaller regions, but we aren't there yet).
The web site for the User Group is at http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/os_user_groups/seosug/.
The first meeting of the Seattle OpenSolaris User Group will be the last session of the OpenSolaris Day. That happens this Wednesday afternoon. If you just can't wait until then to join up, you can sign up for the User Group's mailing list.
Look forward to seeing you (well, seeing those of you who come to the meeting!)
( Sep 04 2006, 06:25:00 PM PDT ) Permalink
