Tuesday February 14, 2006

One to watch!

With the version of roller we are now using on blogs.sun.com we can now have weblogs that many people can work on as a team. I am really excited about This one . I expect some really interesting items to appear on it over the weeks ahead.

Wednesday December 07, 2005

Doing our bit to save the planet.

I make no apology for writing this item as I am a very proud employee seeing us release some awsome technology yesterday that is clearly light years of what anyone else has - but we won't be resting on our laurels...

The nice thing is this is the second range of machines we have released recently that show our determination to champion Eco responsibility and help the planet when politicians seem reluctant to do so.. We have also setup a new buzzword everyone should care about: SWaP (space, wattage and performance). We developed this to measure the effectiveness and impact of our rack-optimized servers in a typical datacentre environment in response to the potential constraints on deploying more racks of servers caused by power and space shortages. Forty ISV's including Oracle have endorsed this product at launch, the largest number for a new Sun server ever. If that was not enough we have also announced the CoolThreads Competition for Innovation for folks to develop new products to run on this server under Solaris10.

The Niagara chip inside the box which is its multi core processor uses less power than the average light bulb in most houses ! It uses half the power of chips from IBM and Intel. I am interested in what the last computer that used as much electricity as this machine was- I think you will have to go back a long time... Think about that in terms of reducing Co2 emissions. Other startling facts about the T1 processor can be found here . This guy could be said to be the proud father of this multithread technology.

Of course in a product support role we have seen these machines before you all have and tested them and even staged some that have gone to beta customers in EMEA. The other cool thing about this box is that it is being released to customer before the expected date which was next year.

Not forgetting the already announced x64 boxes themselves, they are faster, smaller, cheaper and use less power than offerings from other vendors who I won't embarass by mentioning their names.

To me this new technology from us at Sun goes back to the ground breaking days of the Sparcstation1 ( remember the giant killer box that it was ) and the Sparcstation10/20 with four CPU's in a pizza box to name a few from the hall of fame. One thing is for sure. We are back in the headlines for all the right reasons.

Friday November 04, 2005

What makes a good manager?

In my time at Sun I have had excellent managers all the time, I think I am honest and say I would work for any of them again. Of course it is slightly different when you yourself become a manager - you need a different sort of support from your own manager. I was lucky when I became a manager at Sun I was then managed by the same person who recruited me and I learnt a lot about how to become a good manager. Of course it could be viewed that as my friend this was an easy manager to manager relationship but I would say it is more difficult when you are friends you have to make sure the friendship is not allowed to get in the way.

So as a manager I like to have the following in my own manager - not in order of importance:

Honesty. I dont' care how bad the news is cut to the chase and tell me.

Trust. I have to be able to trust my manager to keep private things I have to tell them and not use it for any other purpose than what was intended.

Tell me off! This might seem strange. But I think an occasional straight talk "you were wrong there" is not a bad thing. It is like a racing driver. If they don't fall off the track now and then you know they are not pushing hard enough. To never be told you were wrong I think makes people feel they are invicible and flawless.

Support. This is so important. There is nothing worse and this has happened to me outside Sun where in front of a customer your maanger questions your judgement or decision. By all means do it privately but not in public.

Stretch tasks. We all need a bit of shoving along and I like to be given difficult things to do. Ok I like identifying these myself but I also like it when my manager rings me up and says "Paul I would like you to try and do this, it will be difficult..."

Monday October 24, 2005

US Trip

So I have just returned from a week trip to the Bay area or Silicon Valley. I fly on the Virgin Atlantic VS19 flight to San Francisco returning on the VS20. We took off by the T5 building under contruction at Heathrow and as we passed over London we saw below the new Wembley stadium also being built. Sadly at this time of the year we could not see any amazing ice and snow formations on Greenland and Iceland which look fantastic in winter. I amused myself with three films; Layer Cake a film of a drugs gangster played by Daniel Craig whos empire takes several knocks which he has to respond to. He plays his part well and I think he will make a good James Bond especially if they stick to the Casino Royal Story by Fleming and drop all the gadgets. I saw Batman begins quite a good film long at two hours twenty minutes! Michael Caine plays his butler very well and Tom Wilkinson is an excellent baddie. The third film was the Interpreter with Nicole Kidman again enjoyable. Virgin do not have the same number of films, TV shows and cd's available as Singapore airlines but it is all on demand.

The first time I flew for Sun was to this area to attend the yearly technical symposiums held for engineers in technical support. During these we got to listen to Scott and other senior execs plus of course engineering presentations on new products etc. I remember the first symposium which was held in downtowm San Francisco in a hotel right next to the red light district. We were all given Sun jackets. Clearly one person decided a local down and out needed some protection from the weather and donated his to that man. It just looked bizarre seeing this guy with a Sun jacket on him. I hope I also won't cause offence in that one enterprising member of our support team had a special T-shirt made. It featured Network the dog. It had the words on it; "Buy our computers or the dog gets it" The dog had a gun held to its head on the shirt. We all wore on of the T-shirt's on our arrival at the symposium. I heard a rumour one was given to Scott or he saw us wearing them. That was never confirmed!

One these trips we had a free day. So me and my friend decided to walk to the Golden Gate bridge. This was from the pier area where the seals hang out. I don't think we realised how far it was. but it was a great walk and when we got back no one believed we did it.

Nowadays I drive down to Newark where my boss and my peer work. I trundle down 101 and then cross the bay over the Dumbarton Bridge to the Newark. 101 amazes me it is such a mess. Potholes, cracks and no one cares. I find driving in the US quite relaxing as everyone is so polite. As long as you watch out for red light jumpers. ( not red lights with wooley suits on ) However I find on my last day here that is the day I try and get in the car on the wrong side and perhaps make silly mistakes. This time I was given a free upgrade to a Pontiac V6. I can only assume I got this free upgrade as no American would want to hire a gas guzzling car like that with the price of gas as it is. When we had our office in Mountain view I used to have a regular string of restaurants I would visit on the El Camino Real . In Newark the choice is not so good but it seems excessive to drive over the bay for dinner. I also do not come over so often so have had less time to find nice places.

I suppose like any imigrant or non visa holding visitor the pain in entering the country is the imigration control. It seems that several jumbo jets land when we do meaning the imigration hall is jammed pack with people trying to get through it. This time was no exception, but the imigration folks did allow many of us to move over the US nationals lines to ease the wait. This time I had my fingerprints and picture taken.

The other story I would like to tell is when I stayed here years ago. I was trying to sleep early evening and this dog outside my door was barking and yelping. In the end I got fed up. I opened the door to shout at it and I looked down at a poor little dog with only three legs. I closed the door and went back to bed - I could never shout at that animal.

West of Silicon Valley is the coastline which is very beautiful. It is very rugged and often there is an atmospheric fog about. You can walk along the beach for miles and I love looking for shells and often take some home as they are so different from the ones we find on our beaches. My favourite beach is Half Moon bay but I avoided it this time as it is pumpkin season and the area on the way to the beach will be jam packed with cars of people buying Halloween pumpkins.

So at the end of the week I was then driving back down 101 to the airport. On the West the familiar fog was rolling in over the hills. After we took off and went over the city the fog could be seen making its way over the city. We did not have a good view of Golden Gate bridge as it was partially shrouded by the fog but not in its well known photo shot where just the piers poke through the fog. We then saw Alchatraz with the prison just visible from the height we were then at. Ten hours later we arrived in a very cool UK. I was home.

Friday September 16, 2005

Sunray at Singapore

During my recent stay working in Singapore the guys over here setup a Sunray on a public network so I could utswitch to the server I use in the UK. I have to say it worked very well. The fact that I picked up my UK session as it was when I left it at home on Saturday morning was just awsome. The usual 'delays' in reading my email over Sun's network using imap are just not there and not having to keep my Singapore home directory up top date with all the things I have changed since my last visit here; having moved to Gnome, Mozilla, gaim and so on is just so good for a productive fast start working in a remote country from you own.

The only issue of course was the clock on the Gnome panel showing UK local time. The next clever thing the Sunray software needs is for my session to be made available to me when I login/insert my smartcard in any server on Sun's internal network and the internet without doing the utswitch Also a policy so that when I establish a new session it gets setup on the right server near where my /home is.

If by magic the recently released version of sunray software 3.1 does just that...

Monday August 29, 2005

The picture that I should have sent...

You may remember me telling you about the poster that was to be printed with me on it. Well the posters of me and the others who got this honor are now being put up in Sun offices. I got three copies a couple of weeks ago and one of those was signed by Jonathan and Scott. That copy is now framed and is hanging up in my office. Meanwhile I realised I missed out on an idea. I had wanted my lab folks to be on the picture but that was not possible I was told. A way around this would have been to take a picture of them and superimpose it on the Raffles T-shirt as above. I am sure a better job of it would be done but you get the idea. The folks in the picture are all of the EMEA lab folks, the engineers from Germany, France and Sweden visited us last week. Sadly the folks who work for me in Singapore are not in picture - maybe one day will will all meet together in one group with their American peers.

Friday August 05, 2005

Students the first month

So our new batch of students have been with us for a month now. I wonder what they think of it. I have asked them and they are still smiling. The old generation of students are doing a great job of teaching the new guys. Last week back from their Solaris10 Admin course they are in the lab working hard. The sort of work they have been doing is setting up new machines in the lab and thus building up their knowledge of the labtools and infrastructure. We also needed some console and network ports so they have seen how to do that. We are already learning about their characters and nicknames seem to be forthcoming. The great news is they will see the new servers that some of you have heard about on the The Register and the like and are looking forward to seeing these and other new offerings as they appear. The thing I really like is how proud the old generation of students are of their lab when they show the new guys around and how they want to make sure standards they aspire to will be kept. It is interesting to also see the new guys making suggestions feeling already their ideas and thoughts are there to be listened to and not ignored as "they are just students". One job I warned them is not a fun job but is important.

The Lista rack we store cards in needs sorting out every year. Older cards can be removed and I get the new guys to do it. I tell them to decide how they want it set out and then off they go. The students are also booked on a Solaris10 admin part two course and some will attend a E25K course and the rest a Storage area networks course. The latter is a common setup we have to build in the labs nowadays. The new students are also taking most of the servicedesk tickets even though they do not often know how to deal with them. But they are learning fast. Meanwhile the current students are leaving in dribs and drabs, some at the end of this month, the rest end of September. Meanwhile we have been hearing how last years students have been doing and how they are getting on finding jobs. I hope they will come and visit the new lab and see how good it is. Using a chat room we are also uniting the lab team around the world and also customers like Chris and his peers can pop in and ask quick questions.

Thursday July 28, 2005

Ditch the /usr/ucb/ps command.

I wonder how many admin's really know the p commands like pstack pfiles and so on. Before they appeared the ucb ps command with the -axlww flags was one of the only ways of finding the full set of arguments a program was using; I stand to be corrected of course. But now pargs does the job very well indeed, even for arguments a mile long..

ps listing..

    root  6375  6322   1 16:41:09 pts/8      
 0:09 /share/cpr-local/bin/tclsh 
/usr/local/share/sh/niscp serialports.admin_dir.eu.c

# pargs 6375
6375:   /share/cpr-local/bin/tclsh 
/usr/local/share/sh/niscp serialports.admin_dir.eu.c

argv[0]: /share/cpr-local/bin/tclsh
argv[1]: /usr/local/share/sh/niscp
argv[2]: serialports.admin_dir.eu.cte.sun.com.
argv[3]: serialports.local_dir.socal.cte.sun.com.

Worth a look Ithink.

Thursday July 21, 2005

Publicity is good.

I can now let you all see the face behind the weblog. I was lucky enough to be picked for a poster campaign in Sun. "Making a difference". I have no idea who nominated me but I am pleased they did as I am using it as a vehicle to publicise the labs my folks run for Sun. I had to pick an informal title that hopefully you can read and a few words at the bottom that you cannot.

The words read: "After being a Solution Centre Engineer, I was then handling customer escalations and finally became a Lab Manager in PTS. Together with my peers, lab staff and motivated support engineers, we have developed a series of globally available labs offering unrivaled service to engineers in global customer services and competitive advantage to Sun."

So the posters appear in Sun buildings over the next few weeks and the finalists plus me are on a web page only visible in Sun I am afraid. But the main thing to say is, I maybe the lab magician but my assistants do all the real hard work like any magic show. Finally what we achieve is real not an illusion and we do it with just good lab management and execution.

Wednesday July 06, 2005

New Students the first few weeks

I think its really important to prepare well for any new starter who joins your company. Even students who are only with us for a year. I want them leaving Sun in a year saying what a great time they have had and also that we really treated them like full timer folks as much as we can. So what do we do?

Well first thing is to make sure they know what day they are starting, when and where to turn up and what to bring with them. Ours always start on July 1st ( except when that falls on a weekend). Secondly we prepare their Unix login details and have a desk ready for them with a working Sunray. There are three courses they attend in quick succession of joining us. These courses are booked for the students well in advance. The first day is quite tough on all of us. It is made easier by assigning each student a buddy who is one of our existing students. This spreads the workload of questions. Before the new students arrive we organise a set of one hour TOI's (transfer of information) courses on various subjects like introductions to the lab tool and the environment etc. All the UK folks (including existing students) are involved in giving these courses - again to spread the load. I do an initial TOI where I describe the organisation they have joined, various business details and also a Health and Safety tour of the lab. I give them my mobile/home number for them to use in case they have an emergency and they need to get hold of me.

There are various things the students have to do themselves. So we explain what they are and how to get them. I also instill in them two what I consider important things; one write everything down in a notebook for later reference, there is nothing worse than being asked something again and again. Two, share information so if one of you finds something out tell the others. I also tell them that the reason the lab is as good as it is is because people have suggested things to us. So I tell these 'newbies' that if they think of anything which they think makes the lab better they must tell us! This years students joined us on the day I have my regular weekly conference call with their EMEA peers. One of the things we went through was the Sun FY06 playbook which describes the goals for the company this financial year (which started July 1st).

So I think it is a good way to introduce someone to Sun and it makes them feel welcome. I look forward to seeing how these new guys develop over the year they are with us. The existing bunch of students remain with us until Late August/September so have plenty of time to help their peers get up and running.

Friday June 10, 2005

What to do with ninety six cores and two hundred gigabytes of memory?

We got a request for a large E25K from Gary and Clive a few weeks ago. It took some organising but we did it. Twelve Ultrasparc IV system boards ( 1.2ghz) which makes a total of ninety six cores and two hundred gigabytes of memory all in one domain. One of our students built it and handed it over to the engineers. We talked to Clive yesterday and I said after you finish with it what can we use it for before we tear it down?

We came up with the following suggestions:

Run Seti on it

Run a linpack benchmark on it

Try it as a Solaris Build machine

If you have any ideas let us know. I'l publish the winner!

Tuesday May 17, 2005

Managing tools in the lab..

Tools in labs is a problem that is not easy to fix. You need to have tools available for us lab folks and the engineers to use. The problem is they just go walkies. Some you find some you do not. I have thought about all sorts of ideas to stop this problem but none of my ideas has yet to make it past the drawing board. Fixing tools to benches by long tethers, buying each engineer their own set of tools have all been discussed and disgarded.

The latest is being tried now. We have three 'work' benches. Each has a set of tools which will live in their moulded tool case. The tools and the case are colour coded , red , green yellow etc. The tools will be pretty much what anyone should ever need. Specialist tools will be kept locked away. We then have a tool hunt once a week ( when we have our lab tidy ) and put the tools back where they belong. It will be easy to see what is missing and then see if we can find them, if not replemish from a spare tool 'set' we have locked away. Lets see how successful this idea becomes.

Wednesday April 27, 2005

A job opportunity in the lab for students.

I decided this year to open up the way we find the students who work with us for a year to my weblog. Basically if you are a UK student and meet the requirements below and think the job sounds up your street please email me at paul.humphreys@Sun.com by Friday May 6th and attach a covering letter and your CV please. The job starts in July 2005 and runs for one year. It is in Surrey, UK. I would stress you must have some kind of Unix knowledge. Ideally having loaded it on your home PC tinkered with it, setup some kind of services, upgraded it etc. Although I cannot discriminate based upon the sex of the candidate I would say we do not get many female candidates. Over the years we have had very successful female students in the team. So don't be put off by any stereotypes you might have on the word 'lab' or feel it is a closed off, male dominated environment. Anyway here is the Job description:

The student will gain knowledge of Suns hardware range, system and application software. In addition he/she will benefit from working within a highly experienced software/hardware team and indeed be part of that team.

The position will be working in the two labs in the Camberley ( Surrey ) office and the successful candidate will have exposure to Sun's latest hardware and software offerings as they are released.

Tasks undertaken by the student may include the following:

Installation, configuration (hardware and software) , tuning and system administration of lab systems and project work in the lab. This will enable the student to gain hands on experience and knowledge of Unix hardware and associated system software.

There will be oppertunities for students to undertake project work in the lab. These may include ongoing planning and development or expansion of the laboratory infrastructure.

Requirements

Willingness and ability to absorb a large amount of information within a short timeframe.

Ability to co-operate and communicate effectively with other individuals.

The candidate MUST have at least one years experience of using Unix, for example Solaris, Linux or similar. The experience must cover installing Unix and other administration tasks. These would cover network (lan/wan) setup, user adminstration, software upgrades/patching and file system maintenance. You should grade yourself as having a good theoretical and practical understanding of your preferred unix platform.

Experience or knowledge in the following technical areas would be a distinct advantage:

Unix skills (user/administration) (essential)

Networking (essential)

Shell scripting (essential)

Experience of PC or Sun Hardware (essential)

Structured programming techniques (preferable)

Scripting languages (perl/tcl/php) (preferable)

Training in some of these areas WILL be given where required:

Typically: Solaris admin, Sun hardware etc.

We also expect applicants to write us a covering letter to accompany their CV explaining why their skills make them a suitable candidate. The letter should also cover what they would expect to get out of the one year working in Sun in this position.

I look forward to hearing from you ! If you are unsure about the job I am happy for you to talk to one of our existing students.

Tuesday April 26, 2005

Nine day fortnights ?

No I have not lost my limited mathematical ability completely. When I worked at BT and then HR Wallingford we had flexi time. In these times of stress, busy people, crowded roads etc I think flexitime should be considered by management for many reasons. I basically worked at BT from 8am until 5.30pm and got every other Friday off. That is not 'real' flexitime but a version that provides the employer with a longer working day, and the employee with twenty four extra days holiday. At HR it was more flexible and I can understand employees gasping at the abilitiy of employees only having to be during 'core hours' and being able to carry forward a deficit or credit of ten hours to the next month. You could also take 1.5 days off per month.

I cannot believe some kind of flex time is not more openly available to everyone. I think it offers great benefits and in a carefully managed environment could be made to work. It would cut down on crowded trains, roads and mean with flex desk working employers could reduce the amount of office space they need. Of course employees benefit too.

Thursday April 07, 2005

A change for the good

The lab team look after two labs in the UK . Now we have finished moving the larger one to the new building it is time to concentrate our efforts and give a little TLC to the smaller one. Incredibly the lab had hubs for its network. You can imagine the traffic a labfull of kit generates. Four separate subnets instead of one hassle free supernet. Time to change.

So the students have been working like crazy to plumb in new EDGE switches. Already the network is becoming quieter. The core switch will be changed soon and the supernet introduced. However during this goodness an existing core network switch blew up. Suddenly we had to replace it. Was it a switch or a hub? A load of unlabelled cables went into it. Eventually we got the network back then found a network loop. I fancy in the previous network setup this might not have had any impact. The students found it and started labelling things up, removing unused cables etc. This made me think. Our users who knew we were introducing these switches and must have been wondering what were doing - are these guys amateurs ?

It reminded me when I made additions to strowger telephone exchanges years ago. Despite testing new switches it was too easy to introduce crossed lines. A little drip of solder and bingo you had a three of four way conference call without wanting it. So I suppose the moral of the story is as you change things keep good records of what you are doing in case things go wrong. Make sure everyone knows what is happening so they can react to problems. In the students case above there is not much they could have done beforehand. Tracing the rats nest of cables before they did anything would have taken ages and of course most of those cables are now removed. Good intentions can sometimes lead to bad fortune