Random Thoughts !!!: Its a all random !

Reached the venue right on time for the presentation with KNR [Director RPE & Site Lead Sun India Engineering Center], Ganesh Hiregoudar & Anil Gulecha. It was a huge auditorium with a capacity of around 1000 and filled about 1/4th with students from Computer Science, Information Technology and Computer Engineering departments.

The Open Source Day started off with a Welcome talk by the HOD Computer Science department, SRM followed by the Key Note Talk by KNR. Abhishek (CA from Sasthra College) & Anil gave their respective talks after the keynote. Anil also showcased a demo on the robot he made using Sun SPOT. I was amazed by the kind of cool stuff these CAs come up with !!! The day forked in to two tracks one Workshop on Open Solaris and the other one on Java/Netbeans.

I was part of the Open Solaris track and Anil started the session [after a delay of about 30 mins .. we were actually waiting for the projector to be setup till then Also we were promised a few laptops for the hands-on session for the students to try out a few demos that we were planning to put up which Never H appened !! ] with an Introduction to Open  Solaris, its Salient Features, where is it being put to use and leading up to what would the student community gain by keeping track of it calling it the "Planet`s most stable Operating System" [I love saying this statement ]

After a brief 10 min break, I took over the presentation starting off with an Introduction to DTrace. I spoke in length about What DTrace is & How and when was Dtrace conceptualized and how much real world production environment can capitalize by using DTrace technology. I started the demo for DTrace with a simple program .. "Factorial of a given number N" Showed them how DTrace could help them figure out the call flow at a user program level and then went on to show the typical demo DTrace scripts that trace all the system calls that are made on the system. My talk was followed by an another Campus Ambassador from SRM, Univ Bipallav on ZFS followed by a Demo on ZFS. I took the stage again for the demo session. I spoke in detail about the features that are offered by ZFS like ZPools, Filesystem creation in constant time, Quotas & Reservations, Volume Management and Snapshotting !!!

And finally after about 3 hrs of information dump I ended the day with a Rapid fire Introduction to Solaris Zones technology and also portrayed the famous  ZFS Snapshot + Zones Clone use case where one can create a virtual instance of Solaris OS within a minute .. (We should probably have an advertisement on this )

Another interesting topic I covered during the presentation was High Availability and Clustering.  I was dragged on to this topic when I was pointing to one of the statements that Anil quoted during his preso. "Solaris is rock solid and these servers can say with out a reboot for years" .. I said .. "Yes, This statement is true in an ideal world !! But in a world where there are unexpected interruptions due to natural calamities and hackers how do we deal with these situations in real world" .. Bingo brought up the slides on Clustering and showed them how Open High Availability Clusters can keep applications alive even after a crash !!! (In the process I also gave the a little gyan on what a Failover was and How a Scalable Application balance the load across mutiple servers) ... There was a sudden gush of questions from the students .. I was more than happy to answer all of them !!!

Overall it was a very interesting and eventful workshop !!! I was amazed by the amount of Solaris knowledge that these college students have and how closely they follow the latest happenings on OpenSolaris.org !!!

Way to go Sun !!! Project Red October is really paving way to evangelize and educate about all of the planet`s coolest technology to the emerging talent in India !!!

Thanks,
Ganesh Ram N
Solaris Cluster Engineering