Capitan Holy Hippie's ramblings

FreeBSD! Che suggested trying to install Plan9 or one of the BSD's on my W2100z. I've tried Plan9, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD, and the only one where the install worked was FreeBSD 5.3 (amd64). I'ts a bit touchy - FreeBSD doesn't always seem to recognize my USB keyboard. And I haven't been able to get X to start yet.

Mild dissappointment OpenDarwin 7.2.1 doesn't install on my Sun Java Workstation W2100z. Not that I expected it would. Any non-mainstream OS like this would have to have drivers for all the hardware, and it looks like OpenDarwin doesn't have drivers for the SCSI bus or disks, since it didn't recongize them as valid install targets. However, I do currently have a bit of a hodepodge of OSes on the W2100z: Solaris 10, Red Hat Enterprise 3, JDS 3, and Windows XP 64. I'd also like to have Solaris 9 on there, which would make a 5 way multi-boot ... I've got one partition reserved for a sixth OS, any suggestions?

Joining the party

This seems to be the popular thing to do these days - get a blog on blogs.sun.com, and start posting snippets of stuff you are doing. I know several other people who are blogging here, and I've got some stuff to say myself - so I might as well join.

My name is Alan Nichols, and I am a engineer in Sun's Solutions Deployment Engineering group. I am have experience with deploying and maintaining a lot of the products in the JES suite, but my main focus is on Access Manager (previously known as Identity Server).

Deployment Engineering can be a funny business to be in. I don't code the product (that's Engineering's job), and I don't deploy it either (that's the job of the customer, our partners, or the consultants in Client Solutions). I do sit between the two, and try to explain to Client Solutions and the customer in terms the customer understands what the product does, how to make it do what they want to do with it; and then explain to Engineering in terms they understand what customers want (as opposed to what they ask for), and what they need to do to make the product easy to manage and administer.

I'm not sure yet what will end up in this blog - expect some snippets of sysadmin like stuff, and tidbits of stuff I am working on. I spend a lot of time tinkering with a wide range of software and hardware - expect a few postings talking about that soon.