Chris Armes's Weblog: The Bug Stops Here

Last week I was in Kansas customer visiting, bit of a convoluted route to get to Kansas City airport (MCI). Virgin from London Heathrow to New York JFK, then Delta onto Kansas City, 2 days in Kansas and then on from Kansas City to San Francisco on Midwest and finally home on the Friday night on Virgin to London Heathrow.

Kansas is remembered by many people for a number of things, but primarily the Wizard of Oz and being in what is known as "Tornado Alley". I'm told Kansas even has a Wizard of Oz museum. That said their is a lot more to Kansas than both of these, although it is funny how people fixate on things. This is the second time have been to Kansas and it prompted the usual bunch of sarcastic comments on my facebook page, and of course I had to explain to people that Kansas City is not in Kansas it is in Missouri.

All my daughter of course was interested in was the Wizard of Oz and tornados, I can confirm that I saw neither. The closest I got to a tornado was this sign at Kansas City airport. Last time I was in Kansas, like this time I got to eat some good meat although I have to say the first time at "The Savoy Grill", is some of the best steak I've had in my life.

Anyway onto more important things, why Kansas? well if you read my last posting you'll have noted I said customer visiting.

I first went to visit this customer some 8 months ago and they were not happy at the time (as you'll have seen me comment before this is primarily the reason I get "wheeled" into customers, to visit them when they are unhappy), as the engineering guy most on the hook for support of the customer experience it is very much part of the job.

Like a number of customers they have struggling with patching, update releases and the like and several months ago wanted to hear about what happened and what our plans were to fix it, this meeting was the followup.

Well I'm pleased to say one of the first words they said was, it has definitely improved, in fact it has got a lot better they said, on more than one occasion. So what in particular?

Well starting with Solaris Update 4 we've introduced a lot of technology in the install / patching space as well as improved "other" materials such as BigAdmin and training materials

- Deferred Activation Patching

- LU & Zones imporvements

- BigAdmin patching centre

- "-M" improvements

- Update on Attach

- Training and education materials, such as youtube, SLX Patch Channel and Sun Online Learning Center

The is all documented on BigAdmin and in the patching blog, one particular entry here is sums it up in a public presentation, if anyone reading this feels we've got some gaps in the training and education space feel free to drop me an email.

Coming in Solaris 10 Update 8 towards the end of this year:

- Parallel patching

- Turbo Packaging

We've got other project in the pipeline such as:

- Pre flight checks for patching

- Patch cluster install enhancements

- Changes to SunSolve to make it easier to locate patches

- Sparse file support for lu

- Re-write of the lu-copy code

Equally if you have projects you'd like us to look at in this space, the usual caveat applies that I cannot guarantee to deliver on them, but we are always open to feedback and suggestions

My point is and this was also the point made to me by the customer it is all about progress and one of the big things from their perspective was just that. Months ago I came and said we were going to do this and we have, we have executed on it and delivered. For those of you that experienced the infamous Solaris 10 Update 3 kernel patch 118833-36 and the consequences of that you'll know what I mean directly.

I also often get asked when will I be done with the work in this space, to which my answer is "never", why? people ask, simple, this is all about improving the customer experience and as long as Solaris 10 is around we will have work to do in this space. The fact that we have to do all of this was one of the driving factors behind the Image Packaging System in OpenSolaris.

The general theme of the meeting was continued progress and demonstration of that progress, and they really felt they had a voice and that voice was being listened to and they are right on both counts and we'd demonstrated progress as we said we would.

As well as this we talked about LDoms aka Logical Domains and particularly live migration, an upcoming feature in a future release of LDoms.

We also got into a discussion around dtrace and what to do, when you hit an issue as they did where they had some fibre-based kernel structures that were not defined in Solaris 10 (ctf), the result is DTrace errors out. So armed with a specific example I came back and spoke to one of my team whose reply is as follows when I asked him is this a valid limitation of DTrace? One of them who is currently working a particularly tough SNDR issue came back and said:

Yes and no, if there is no ctf data available you can define the structures in the DTrace script itself.  Case in point, SNDR was not built with ctf.

Overall a good week, a good a constructive dialogue, with no tornados either outside or in the meeting :-)

Now back to writing slides for CommunityOne...