My Experiments with OpenSource Kumar Abhishek's Weblog

On 9th of July, 450 members of GLOSS got to experience one (or I should say two) of the most amazing things of our ages! It was the OpenSolaris in Second Life!

Thanks to Terri, GLOSS got a chance to be a part of the OpenSolaris Chat in second life and we got a VIP pass! You can see the chat presentation here.. Now that we have many technical restrictions in Second Life and also that we have some network issues at SASTRA, I decided to pull all the crowd into TIFAC CORE auditorium and do a live screencast of the event, so that everyone would get to experience the chat as well as ask question. My initial expection was a crowd of just (now it sounds "just" :P) 200 students but thanks to Anand, who offered help to get it arrange for the girls in Nirman Vihar audi also. In a very short notice, we got everything arranged, and before I could realize, I was coordinating a crowd of 450 students spread across two different auditoriums (something I was doing for the first time!)

My team was present in both the auditoriums and I was coordinating everything via my cell phone! And soon the chat started! The moment everyone in the audience heard Heidi welcome, they just couldn't stop being amazed! But unfortunetly it did not last long as the experimental sound systems which was employed, crashed   So the chat was moved to Text mode... And you know how we students are.. The moment something went wrong, no one could let the opportunity to exchange some fun go :P But once the chat caught up flow, everyone was completely into the chat! I was explaing the text line by line to all the students in the audi.. And then came the part of the question and answer. Now who could let the chance of asking question to people like Tim Cramer, Stephen Hahn, David Comay and Glynn Foster! 

All this while I was in the Nirman Vihar auditorium, and then towards the end I switched to TIFAC audi! The moment I walked in, I was welcomed with so many question!! It was from every area of virtual worlds and OpenSolaris. IPS was the hot topic again in the discussion! By the time, the last set of students bid me goodnight (who eventually walked with me till my room) the time was 11:30 PM! I distributed OpenSolaris wrist bands to all the participants who stayed after 10 (and unfortunely this number was also so large that I almost exausted almost all the wrist bands I had)

Because the chat was scheduled at 8:00 PM local time, most of the students who attended the chat missed out on their dinner. I must appreciate their curiosity and desire to learn new stuff! Also any thanks to Anand and team would be less for helping me out with so many stuff! We at GLOSS never miss out of taking picutres of the events, but unfortunately this time I could not manage  

Everyone in the Sun SL team did a great job... Check out Terri's blog for the complete transcript of the OpenSolaris chat and also Angad's blog for the pictures.

After almost a month long vacation, when college reopened, we at GLOSS could not wait to do something exciting!! And what could be more exciting than Open High Availability Clusters (OHAC). I attended a talk on OHAC by Tirthankar during my recent visit of Sun India Engineering Center at Bangalore. I was completely taken by the technology and I knew I am going to do something with it, the moment I get a chance. Anyways... the day I landed in college, I sat down to set up a one node cluster on my laptop! Million thanks to Tirthankar again, who spend almost whole of his Sunday with me over the phone helping me out in setting it up. I would be blogging how set up a one node cluster on Solaris SXDE some time very very soon.

Now about the talk! There was a decent audience of more than 40 students who came to attend the talk. I started the talk with playing the Big Bucks Bunny movie, which set up the mood of the audience and also allowed me to introduce them to Network.Com and from there pick up the topic of difference between grids and clusters.

 Then I moved to the slides and I explained the architecture of OHAC and details of its functioning. It was an engrossing session, as explaining the functioning of a cluster and concepts like Disk Fencing can get tricky But it was nice to see every one interacting and asking questions to me!

Then was the turn of the Demo.. something which I was very eager to show. For this demo, I had prepared a single node cluster on my laptop. I had a zone running on which we had a cluster resource name movie-rg registered. The cluster agent was basically written to start RealPlayer on cluster and in case of a failure, it would make it failover to a functioning node of the cluster. The experience of setting up the cluster and getting the agent to work was truely amazing! As I said, I would be blogging about it soon, so check back soon. Here are two screenshots which shows how cluster took care of availability

 Now when I reboot the zone, the cluster resource becomes online on the physical node

I will soon be doing one more follow up talk on OHAC where I would discuss how to setup clusters and write agents for OHAC! Once again... thanks to Tirthankar and Swathi for helping me out with OHAC!