Damien Farnham's Weblog

Monday Oct 01, 2007

Solaris making teaching Windows/Linux/Solaris easier in DIT

blog.html

Solaris an Open platform for Colleges.

One of the engineers in my team recently attended his graduation and got talking to his ex lecturer ( Mark Deegan ). The topic turned to Sun and Solaris and the faith of their old SunRay lab. The lab was not heavily used and Mark asked if we could help bring it up to date.

A number of the Performance team visited and installed Solaris 10
and configured Samba, ZFS , Containers, Linux Containers , Java
Enterprise Systems etc. and Mark and his team added some Windows Terminal Server so now any lecturer can use the lab to teach on Windows, Linux and Solaris from the same lab.

All platforms can share the same ZFS storage on the new T1000s they bought and backed up using the cool snapshot feature.
Mark was shocked to see what you get for your money ! 

I cannot say how annoyed I get when I read so many stories about Sun that start with Sun Microsystems the maker of "expensive propriety systems", this is a myth, we're open, just check, you get a lot of your dollar, euro , pound and college pricing is even better. I just love people face when you type psrinfo -v on a T1000 32 threads in a 1U.

The lab has all years old SunRay advantages, quieter ( no fans )
use less power ( the SunRay draw a fraction of the power of a PC ) and the T1000 draw a fraction your Dell. Everyone seems to be fighting to claim they are the greenest but this is old hat for us.


DIT have also started hosting Irish OpenSolaris user groups http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/ie-osug/meetings/14/

DIT have also signed up for the Sun's FREE online educational training program which covers, Solaris, Java, Java Enterprise System and even soft skills like time management.  Queen's
in Belfast are also members.

There is a news artical which covers what DIT are doing here.
        http://www.irishdev.com/NewsArticle.aspx?id=5761


   

Posted at 10:06AM Oct 01, 2007 by damienf in Solaris  | 

Wednesday Feb 14, 2007

Venting :)

It is amazing how little things can make you really frustrated where you'll work thru the big issues without too much trouble. Right now I'm being driven round the twist by callers looking for someone in our internal support organization. This person has the same 5 digit number but to reach them from some part of the world you need to add 70. One morning I received 10 calls. One gent from Germany rang launched into his problem, I tell politely that I think he has the wrong number, he tells no he's sure he has not and continues ! I then tell him he has and he needs to put 70. No sorry for wasting your time. So like many of the poor souls that suffer the same problem in Dublin I added a new message to my voice mail explaining that I'm not in support and if you are calling about a ticket you need to redial with 70 in front. So at least when I get in each morning I hoped I will not have to go thru 5 or 6 often long, often rude messages. Fixed ! Of course not I still get 1 or 2 each morning from &^*&^* ( this mornings best was from a Lady in Sweden ) angry I hadn't contacted her about her call ( after sitting thru my message telling her its not me ) It has also shown me that there is no country that Sun does business that is more polite or ruder. People ringing help desks are generally on a short fuse and act the same no matter where they are from and its not a good side of human nature ;) This is why I'd really like Sun to make more use of meeting.central and our REALLY COOL name finder phone book because if you look up someone and ring them it knows when to add 70. 1) Globally people are rude when they ring help desks 2) People do not listen to messages on voice mail 3) People do not care if they give out to the wrong person as long as they find some poor sod. 4) I do not want the guy who shares my numbers job :)

Posted at 10:56AM Feb 14, 2007 by damienf in General  |  Comments[1]

Monday Apr 10, 2006

Zone & HP

I visited a large customer last week with a couple of engineers.  It is always useful for folks from engineering  to meet real customers. It grounds you, let's you understand what the real issues are.

Maybe its just me but most problems within IT organizations are non technical, caused by the organization of a company rather than the technology required to solve a buisness problem.

Throw in outsourcing partners and life can get complex to say the least.

The customer described one non technical issue they had as they rolled out  Solaris 10. They looked at zones/containers and said this rocks  each developer can have a "system" to develop on without impacting each other
at no cost but.......

HP delivers their system adminstration service and wanted to charge them for each zone as a seperate system. The customer was clearly "unhappy" and they are working the issue with HP.

HP seem to view server virtualization as a revenue generation engine, less effort more billing. I know many of the folks that developed zones and I've never heard it described it as a way for HP Professional services ( or anyone else ) to increase revenue ;)

Hopefully this was just one service sale rep thinking Christmas came early and that Sales Junket, a tropical beach, plam trees swaying in the breeze, drink with an umbrella was in the bag.

P.S ZFS ships soon so for the record the self healing, reduced adminstration, increased performance and instant snap shots are not a opertunity to increase charges.



Posted at 11:11AM Apr 10, 2006 by damienf in Solaris  | 

Monday Dec 12, 2005

dtrace & dprofile

I have not had a lot of time lately to update my blog !

We've just added compiler Performance to our test matrix. Compilers have always been tested but we're
integrating Studio and Solaris performance testing so each development team can better understand the effect of their work on the other ( and in turn on the customer )

I have been talking to a lot of ISV ( independent software vendors ) bringing their code and workload into our performance test metrix. They often comment on the pain that goes with upgrading compiler releases. Our goal is to reduce this real pain and provide some positive incentive in terms of increased performance.

One of the numerous killer Sun Compiler Studio 11 features is called dProfile which uses cool some features of the SPARC platform and dtrace. Have you seen those T1000 & T2000 systems yet ?

So do we shout about this from the rafters ? Never !

If you do a search for dprofile on www.sun.com you'll only get 3 hits !
and none would get you interested enough to search more.


So if you love dtrace then you'll love this too. Checkout the developers own blogs,
which is rather gentle in its claims ( Nick you never struck me as shy :)

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/nk?anchor=getting_ready_for_cmt

PS checkout the latest dtrace -z option in the latest Solaris Express.

Posted at 12:00PM Dec 12, 2005 by damienf in Solaris  |  Comments[0]

Tuesday Sep 27, 2005

OpenSolaris Live on My New laptop

Finally got my Ferrari 4k install with Nevada 23. ( Been using a 3200 for a long time ) It rocks, rocks I tell you. Fast, quite and with the frkit its got everything you'll ever need from an OS.

Posted at 03:30PM Sep 27, 2005 by damienf in General  |  Comments[0]

Wednesday Aug 03, 2005

Sun Again.

I was speaking to an engineer in my team yesterday while getting a tea.
We were discussing road maps ( which I cannot go into here ) for really
cool new hardware coming out of Sun both SPARC and AMD over
the next little while.

I have been around here a while and was a customer long before that and
expressed my view that these systems design were very "Sun".  he asked
what I meant.

Well the the boxes are simple, pack in a HUGE amount and have a high
build quality ( even for the prototype units we have ). Just to show him I
 put one of our 2u rack mount systems next to a new IBM Xeon 2u system
( yes, we test Solaris x86, Java and of course JES on NON Sun hardware really )
and the difference was amazing. The IBM has got so many additional components
which make it look like a KIT built from spare bits and I'm just talking the
packaging.

I'd love to post pictures but you'll have to wait a while longer to try one
for yourself,  even  with the system packaging we're back to where we
started putting standard bits together better than anyone ;) if you run a datacenter with 100's of rack mount unit you'll LOVE these.

P.S. The IBM runs Solaris x86 just great. J2SE runs fine on it with XP
( yes we test Java on XP ), and RH & SuSE too.

Posted at 11:59AM Aug 03, 2005 by damienf in General  |  Comments[0]

Wednesday Jun 29, 2005

Sun and U2

fred

I have worked in Sun for a long time now ( 12+ years ) and taught
I had seen it all !  But never did I expect to see a PRESS RELEASE with
Sun Microsystems and Bono ( yes of U2 fame ) working together !

I was lucky enough to get a ticket to see the Vertigo Tour
home coming opening night in Dublin's Croke Park.  They sold out 3 nights
and could sell 10 more if the venue was available.

The concert was AWESOME. great music a super show and
the band clearly enjoyed playing to the home crowd. The high tech
light show was incredible.

At the end of the concert Bono asked the crowd to text the word 'AFRICA' to 53131.
and that is where Sun come in. We provided the back end infra structure
( and I guess java for all those phones  too )
http://www.electricnews.net/news.html?code=9615617

Maybe marketing could get a Sun Logo somewhere in the venues for the rest of the shows.
I had to update this as it now appears that Marketing we're listening :) checkout www.sun.ie and we see Bono in all his glory.
Croke Park is an 80,000  seater stadium close to Sun's office and home
of Gaelic Football and Hurling, check these out if you get the chance
if you visit Ireland they are uniquely Irish and  great to watch. Checkout  http://gaa.ie.


Posted at 10:16AM Jun 29, 2005 by damienf in General  |  Comments[0]

Thursday Jun 02, 2005

Switch Performance.

/tmp/y A couple of my team mates ( Fintan and Sean ) have posts that deal with
Linus deciding that Performance testing is a good idea and it should be done
for Linux. ( I'm sure reading the artical again he'll see it as a Homer Simpson
moment , D ooh ! maybe we should test it !)

Sounds Silly ?

It seems that Linus may be ahead of some folks.  We do a lot, in fact, a hell of
a lot of network performance testing. Last week we blew a low end 100/1000Gb switch,
we replaced it with a new one, same make, model etc. yet there is a 10 % difference
between it and the original on standard SPECweb99 benchmark. Ouch.

The same hardware now gets 10% less. maybe switch vendors could start testing
their firmware too :)

Posted at 12:04PM Jun 02, 2005 by damienf in General  |  Comments[0]

Wednesday Jun 01, 2005

Solaris Express Install Workarond

/tmp/damienf/dtrace Solaris Express Pains

We install all Sun unbundled software and many ISV applications like Oracle on each build of
Solaris and over the last 12 months we had 10 cases where the install failed directly or indirectly
becuase of changes to the output from uname.  Hard to beleive

10 times we have had to put work around in place, never hard, but time
consuming and not adding a lot of value to the customer ( and boring )

So I am very very happy to see Angelo Rajadurai and Jon Hasalam
have between them come up with a d script to change the uname output
on the fly. Install your software and then change it back :)

Over a number pints in a famous old Dublin Pub ( that doesn't really narrow the search
a lot )  I reminded Bryan that dtrace isn't just for Performance it can help solve
so many QA problems too. dtrace is for everyone not just performance people

 Angelo and Jon wrote it !



#!/usr/sbin/dtrace -Cs
#include<sys/systeminfo.h>

#pragma D option destructive

syscall::uname:entry
/ppid == $1/
{
self->addr = arg0;
}

syscall::uname:return
/ppid == $1/
{
copyoutstr("SunOS", self->addr, 257);
copyoutstr("PowerPC", self->addr+257, 257);
copyoutstr("5.10", self->addr+(257*2), 257);
copyoutstr("Generic", self->addr+(257*3), 257);
copyoutstr("PPC", self->addr+(257*4), 257);
}
syscall::systeminfo:entry
/arg0==SI_ARCHITECTURE/
{
self->arch = arg1;
}

syscall::systeminfo:return
/self->arch && ppid == $1/
{
copyoutstr("PowerPC", self->arch,257);
self->arch=0;
}

syscall::systeminfo:entry
/arg0==SI_PLATFORM && ppid == $1/
{
self->mach = arg1;
}

syscall::systeminfo:return
/self->mach && ppid == $1/
{
copyoutstr("APPL,PowerBook-G4", self->mach,257);
self->mach=0;
}

Posted at 11:41AM Jun 01, 2005 by damienf in Solaris  |  Comments[0]

Tuesday May 24, 2005

I'll never live this down


I have been given the honor of being part of Sun's 2nd "Change Agents" poster campaign. While I greatfull for this honor ( I'll get you Darrin if it takes years ) my choice as a "poster boy" is rather strange as I'm far from Brad Pitt. I reckon that all the good looking folks were used first time round.

My team mates have, showing their usual level of respect honored me further by creating their own version of the poster including a rather nice picture of me in China. ( Brutus I'll get you too. )

Posted at 02:53PM May 24, 2005 by damienf in General  |  Comments[0]

My Intro

b

Day two with an Blog I should really introduce myself.

I manage the Performance QA team in Sun. We're in sunny Dublin ( sunny for the
next 10 minutes anyway ) 4 other members of the team have blogs and I finally
given in.  Fintan Ryan has a couple of excellent blogs that describe what we do here
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/fintanr/20050426

Basically we champion the "Performance Lifestyle".  Sounds like marketing ?
It's not, it is something that grew from the ground up,  first setting performance
criteria for out of the box performance on each releases, not just focusing on TPC-C
benchmark specials,  then implementing a continuous improvement model until it
becomes natural behavior for developers.

Our role is one of a catalyst. We make it so easy to test performance
properly, effectively and cheaply that engineers do. From Sun's view we can afford
to because instead of 20 imperfect SPECweb2005 rigs that are 20% used we have
10 90% used, better return on capital .  Development teams save time and energy
because the developers write code and do not waste time learning how to configure
benchmarks, find and configure the hardware etc..

The good engineers ( the majority thankfully ) use us

    *     To tune their code
    *     Select the algorithm
    *     Check 2nd order effects on platform they do not have access to.
    *     Run against a wide range of  workloads, one size does not fit all
             "Performance is in the eye of the customer"

That not so good ( mostly those that need training and a few well.....)

    *      Make sure they do not eat into gains made by the good guys
    *      Ensure that poor code is noticed and fixed early
    *      Show them its easy to do it right next time :)

The best
    *    People hand over their resources for us to manage and provide
         a service to all Sun.
    *    People outside our organizations provide us with Millions of
         dollars from their budgets in capital and head count ! putting
          their money where their mouth is. ( Darrin take a bow )
    *    Train us on the latest technology thanks Sunay, Bryan, Brian.

Lastly we ensure that the results are visible to management, so those that
do the right thing are noticed i.e. reward the right behavior.

This is not bums on seats engineering, we're a small focused 10 people team
which provides massive ROI to Sun  and its customer base, you've heard
how much faster Solaris 10 and hopefully even seen it for yourself we're
proud to be part of that.

More important if you have cases where Solaris 10 is slower please
drop me a line and we'll try to add your code to the expanding test metric
of over 100+ benchmarks, many of which came from customers.

Interested in developing OpenSoalris ? We'll be there to help you too :)
on http://opensolaris.org





Posted at 09:29AM May 24, 2005 by damienf in General  |  Comments[0]

Monday May 23, 2005

access woes


I had the displeasure of breaking Solaris 10 on my Acer Ferrari 3200
( not its fault tried to BFU to the latest nevada build with a Solaris 10
BFU script ) so I could not use our ip sec based remote secure access service.

For those that like me choose to shoot themselves in the foot from time
to time I suggest you use frkit to upgrade your systems. See just how
good Solaris performs on a laptop, opensolaris.org has or will have shortly
frkit it saves you from yourself.

This meant I needed to go looking for my DES card to use VPN, Of course
I look high and low with no joy, then I see it looking at me thru the
window of the washer !

I have learned 3 important things from this.

1) I do not like windows, nothing religious just Solaris 10
   is better, punchin is much better than VPN !
2) My 4 year old daughter can reach about 4 inches higher than
   I taught ( which is how the DES card ended up in the washer )
3) The DES card worked fine after it dried out ;)

Posted at 02:27PM May 23, 2005 by damienf in General  |  Comments[0]