Random footnotes of Engineering

So the time has come for me to move on. I'm leaving Sun and headed off to try a few new things. It's been an incredible experience here and I will miss many of my current and former colleagues.

In case the blogging bug sticks I will be trying out blogging at a new location. So check it out, it will likely continue to be random ramblings based on what I come across...

So today I had my wisdom teeth removed. I'd put it off for ages subscribing to the theory it was really just a gimmick that dentists/oral surgeons used to make money. I've never had any orthodonics done so there hasn't been a money motivation to keep my great teeth. I ended up just deciding to do it since I'm now taking better care of my teeth. It seems correlated to having both of my front teeth broken and replaced from being hit with a field hockey stick in the mouth during a game...

Anyway, everyone has passed on their stories, typically nightmarish. I get a chance to see what it's like. So far so good though.

On my laptop I have a number of non-Solaris filesystems that have useful things on them. I have an ext3 filesystem from my Linux/Ubuntu install, a fat32 filesystem to transfer things between Windows and other OSes and a NTFS for Vista. In the past when I've added these things to vfstab it created problems with OpenSolaris booting. Now I know I should really debug that problem, but I'm lazy...

In the past I hacked my .bashrc to handle the mounting, but this is a terrible solution. I have since come up with a slightly less terrible solution that has the added benefit of me digging into SMF. So I created a simple SMF service that would mount these filesystems at boot.

So the first part is to craft a config. I put the manifest in

/var/svc/manifest/system/filesystem/pete-fs.xml

/lib/svc/method/fs-pete

pfexec svccfg import /var/svc/manifest/system/filesystem/pete-fs.xml

So now that means my non-Solaris filesystems are mounted at boot no problems at all. I do still need to dig into the vfstab problem though, but that's likely to be on a different day..

Honeycomb was recently named the "Best Fixed Content Archiving Solution". It's really satisfying to know a product that I and many others worked long and hard to develop is thought of so highly. I raise a glass to the at-large Honeycomb team!

It's on!

I've just spent some time updating the agenda. We've got a huge range of talks from Cloud Storage to IO monitoring in HPC environments, Crossbow, ZFS Cache Architecture.

So come along, bring your friends and well behaved pets and learn something new about Storage and OpenSolaris for free.

For whatever reason my forehead is huge hear. I think I can probably get satelite with it. When I check it out in the mirror I'm sure it's not that big...

We're going to have another Storage Summit. The original was held prior to the SDC event in San Jose in September. We will do the second OpenSolaris Storage Summit prior to FAST on February 23, 2009. Hope to see you all there. If you have ideas or want to participate get in touch with me.

It turns out that I'm Aragorn.

What LoTR Character Are You?

Map reduce is getting a lot of publicity these days. I came across an article in Harvard Business Publishing that specifically described this as Google's secret weapon. This problem set seems to fall squarely in the realm of what people want to solve with cloud computing.

In the same vein there is a different project, Hadoop that is attacking this problem as an Open Source project. I came across another article that talks about Hadoop and how it works. We even have an OpenSolaris Project that provides a live Hadoop CD.

So fundamentally these technologies are interesting when we have problems that are inherently separable and parallelisable. An common example is indexing text files. Hadoop grew out of the Lucene project which does that sort of thing.

Anyway, I'm going to take some time and look into this because it all seems very cool.

It's hard to believe that 40 years ago Engelbart first demonstrated a computer with a mouse and followed hyperlinks like we use on the internet today. It was a tremendous view of the future. What would be today's equivalent?