polymorphnick: a blog by Nicholas Solter

As I wrote previously, we had a great Open HA Cluster Summit in San Francisco at the end of May of this year. I gave a talk about high availability clustering for OpenSolaris (codenamed Project Colorado), and I'm happy to report that the edited video is finally available for viewing.

I'd like to thank Abhilash, a student at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri campus in India for working on the first bug fix contributed to Open HA Cluster by someone not employed by Sun!

Some other university students in India have shown some interest in OHAC as well, and written about it here, here, and here. It's nice to see the slides I wrote getting used!

Our release of over two million lines of code last week has generated some interest in the blogosphere. In addition to the links I posted last week:

• OpenSolaris in review May 2008 -- Tim Foster
• Open High Availability Cluster -- parolski.com
• Hey, man (Pages)! Sun Cluster Is Now Completely Open Sourced! -- Tech Dogg's Dox Tox
• Solaris Cluster, AHORA OPEN SOURCE -- Sun is shining...
• Open High Availability Cluster CG: Multilingual -- Jim Grisanzio
• [IT][セキュリティ]Solaris Clusterのソースコードが追加公開 ...
• Cluster-Software für OpenSolaris -- OSNote
• Sun veröffentlicht Open High Availability Cluster -- .:: 0 : 3 : 8 : 1 ::.

This announcement yesterday marks the culmination of my work for the past 1 1/2 years or so. In summary, we open sourced over two million lines of code!

I've learned quite a bit about the legal and business side of open sourcing in the process of getting this code open sourced. But hopefully now I can stop spending so much time with lawyers and get back to programming :-)

Here's a roundup of the various blog entries so far mentioning this release:

• Open HA Cluster completely open-sourced -- c0t0d0s0.org
• Sun Cluster Core Is Now Open Source! -- DanT's GridBlog
• Open High Availability Cluster -- My Learning Curve
• Open HA Cluster<-->Open HA Cluster -- Bob Porras' Blog (My Vice-President)
• Solaris Cluster is now OpenSource! -- Matthias Pfützner's Weblog
• Solaris Cluster code is now completely open source! -- Out of Sync
• OHAC Core がリリースされました。 -- Kazuhiko's weblog
• Open HA Cluster Announcement! -- The Open Waters

There have been some exciting developments in the Open HA Cluster open-source community over the past couple months. Specifically:

• An HA-PostgreSQL umbrella project has been created, with an active subproject to support WAL Shipping.
  


• The HA Clusters community has agreed to co-sponsor a Test Development project. Other sponsoring community groups are OS/NET, Storage, and Testing.
  


• The HA-Informix agent being developed in the Cluster Agent: Informix Dynamic Server Project has been completed and is available for download from the project page.
  


• The HA Clusters community group now has four sponsored projects, with some more on the way.
  


• A third-party agent repository has been created to collect cluster agents developed by third parties.
  


• The #OHAC IRC channel has been created for 24-hour Open HA Cluster discussions.
  


• We've made available some technical presentations for building agents as well as open-sourced the GDS template under the CDDL.
  


• We have seven non-Sun participants working on bug fixes.
  


• And last, but not least, the HA Clusters community group now has a "fun" page, hosting the "Open HA Cluster acrostic puzzle."

The source code for the Sun Cluster Geographic Edition product is now available in the HA Clusters community on OpenSolaris.org! In addition to browsing the Open High Availability Cluster Geographic Edition source code, you can download it and build it with either the Sun Studio or the gcc compiler.

This source code release represents the second phase of the complete Sun Cluster open-sourcing roadmap. The first phase, the Sun Cluster Agents, occurred last June, and the third and final phase, the Sun Cluster core gate, will happen sometime next year.

I'm particularly pleased that, in addition to product code, this release of the Geographic Edition source includes test code, man pages, and globalization source.

• OpenSolaris
• Ubuntu
• Apache HTTP Server
• Apache Tomcat
• Apache Roller
• WordPress
• MySQL
• WAMP
• WinSCP
• FileZilla
• Ghostscript and GSView
• PuTTY
• Mozilla Firefox
• Thunderbird
• OpenOffice.org
• Perl
• Java
• PHP
• Drupal
• Joomla!
• GNU emacs
• XEmacs
• gcc
• bugzilla
• gftp
• 7-zip

A great resource for replacing proprietary applications with open-source is Open Source Alternatives

I wrote last week that I was in Boston for the kickoff event of Sun Tech Days 2007-2008.

I thought the OpenSolaris day and Installfest went well. If you're interested, you can check out the slides (PDF file) from my talk on Open High Availability Cluster.

Here are some photos

Giving my talk


Continuing my talk


Stephen Lau, multitasking Solaris installs across four laptops at the Installfest

I'm in Boston this week for the Sun Tech Days conference. Today I will be giving a presentation on Open High Availability Cluster as part of the OpenSolaris track. Here's the complete conference agenda.

The first release of Solaris Cluster Express is now available for download.

Solaris Cluster Express 7/07 is a complete version of Solaris Cluster that runs on Solaris Express Community Edition build 68. You can install and run Solaris Cluster Express 7/07 on SPARC based platforms and on 32-bit or 64-bit x86 based platforms.

As the tech lead on this effort, I'm particularly pleased that we were able to release it so quickly after our first Solaris Cluster source-code release last month.

My colleague, Thorsten, wrote a great summary of the reasons that this is a particularly exciting release.

You can also browse the installation instructions.

Please check it out and give us your feedback!

I'll be presenting, "Discovering Open High Availability Cluster" at two different OpenSolaris User Groups in the next few weeks.

• Thursday, July 26 at the Front Range OpenSolaris User Group (in Broomfield, Colorado)
  
• Tuesday, August 14 at the Thirteenth Irish OpenSolaris User Group Meeting (in Dublin, Ireland)
  

Both meetings are open to the public. If you’re in the area, please come by!

We've open-sourced some more Solaris Cluster code under the Open High Availability Cluster umbrella. The globalization (G11N) source code for the Solaris Cluster Agents is now available.

Browse the source

Download the source