Thursday September 30, 2004

Sun1, Sun2, Sun3, Sun4, Sunray !

In my working life a proportion of it has been involved in using Sun machines, as a customer and now an employee of the company.

I am sure the world wide web can produce a better historical description of the products Sun has sold over the years but my first machine was a two megabyte 68010 processor based Sun2 workstation. I had Sun Unix 2.0 then 3.0 remember when YP ( oops sorry NIS ) came in and NFS. Diskless clients that used NFS instead of 'ND'. The Sun 3/50 was my next workstation. I never had a Sun4 workstation I went straight to a Sparcstation 10 when I joined Sun. I have always wanted a machine on my desktop called 'betelgeuse'. The reason is simple. The first place I used Sun machines, a CAD/CAM software company in Cambridge called CIS gave me my break into computing as an operator. My manager Ian Barratt had a thing about stars. So everything was called after star . His machine was called aldebaran. Server names of kooshe, asterix and deneb among others.

So what am I rambling about ? Well it is all about desktop 'envy'. Everyone looks at your desktop and makes an assumption about how powerful and wonderful it is. It is a status symbol like swimming pool in the garden or a porsche on the drive. My desktop is still 'betelgeuse'. But it is a piece of metal the size of a cdrom drive set on its side. It has eight USIV processors. I share them with other folks but I wager any amount that the performance I get is as good as it gets. One of these days I am going to paint a smiley on that sunray box. I think we should sell them with the smiley on them !

So my story is I started with a workstation the size of a pedestal you have under your desk and now it is the size of a cdrom drive. The web site Thin Clients will tell you all about Sunray appliances and why they are good, save money and make people more productive. With Solaris10 betelgeuse comes back to life as a Solaris container that I have root access on and can customise as I wish.

The back of the house

On the back of the house is a home made pergola. I built it myself over a long weekend. It runs along the width of the house. It sits on top of a terrace of tired old paving slabs that needs replacing. Growing on it are:

A Clematis. Can't remember the variety. Big white flowers.

Two white grape vines. Which do produce grapes just about edible if we get a decent summer. Either way I give them away or make my own white wine. Never turns out vintage else I would drink it, but it is fine for risotto's or other cooking that calls for a glass or two of wine. Cooks say if you would not drink it you should not cook with it. I disagree. The wine has a lovely golden honey colour.

In the middle of the pergola grows an alledged seedless purple variety. It is not so old as the other two so does not produce so many grapes. They are NOT seedless. I think it may be removed this year.

Also on the pergola are two Wysteria's. Wonderful blooms in the spring. A purple and a white one. Both need careful pruning to keep them in control.

At the side of the house are two lean to greenhouses. I use these to propagate plants and protect frost sensitive plants in the winter. Behind them is my garden shed. This area is used to good effect in an area that would not be used otherwise. I also have four water butts I use as composting containers. I put anything 'green' from the garden or the house in these to compost down. Variety is the key to success here. So don't put all your leaves in one go else you will end up with a sodden mush.

Also down the side of the garden by the pergola is the best blackberry known to man. First it is thornless. Second it produces a bumper crop of LARGE berries which are juicy beyond belief. Evey year the vine gets stronger and produces longer trails which are adorned by wonderful flowers in the spring. As with this type of blackberry this years crop is produced on last years vine. In the autumn you cut back those vines that produced fruit to ground level.

Also on the slabs is a hexagonal wooden herb wheel. I have given up trying to grow basil/coriander in it. So I concentrate on thyme, oregano, chives etc. I also have two pots one with a rosemary bush in it the other a bayleaf tree. I cover the wheel over winter with a temporary plastic greenhouse and put the bayleaf and rosemary in the greenhouse.

At the front of the pergola I have built along its length window boxes. In the spring bulbs come up, all minuture daffodills. In the summer I plant annuals eg petunias etc.

Under the window boxes I have loads of terracota pots. These have geraniums, fuscias etc in them plus other annuals. The geraniums and fuscias are overwintered in the greenhouse - you must not overwater either. Both need repotting in smaller pots and also pruned hard back before their overnight rest. We also have three hanging baskets on the pergola but might not next year as they made the house very dark.

Next installment the main back garden ! ( Sep 30 2004, 01:00:00 PM PDT ) Permalink

Wednesday September 29, 2004

The allotment

An allotment is a patch of land maybe sixy feet long that you rent from your local authority for a small amount. Basically you can grow whatever you like ( as long as its legal ) and you usually end up joining a local association who can sell you seeds and other gardening stuff at a discount. Our plot is about a mile our house beside a church and graveyard. Sadly a lot of the plots are unused which means they spread weed seeds over ours which we are trying to keep clear.

As per the house garden the soil is poor and I think this year I need to get a load of manure on it. There is no easy access to the plot by tractor and trailer so it is going to be a spade and wheelbarrow job. My neighbour has two plots by mine and he lets me have some of his surplus. This year we have had to protect our plots by thigh height chicken wire as the local rabbit population have been causing a shed load of damage.

So what do I grow ? Unless you are overloaded with spare time, and do not suffer from hay fever ( I suffer badly ) its best to keep to simple things. Don't even attempt things like cauiliflower, brocolli and carrots etc. They suffer from neglect and require careful looking after.

I grow garlic, buy proper garlic bulbs do not use stuff you buy from the supermarket. bury in the ground each clove (so the tip is just bleow the ground) about Feb, harvest in august when the tops wither.

I also grow shallots, these you just bury slightly into the soil and make sure they do not get pulled out of the ground before they start growing by birds after nesting material. Again set in Feb , harvest a bit earlier than the garlic when the tops are browning off and the original bulb has split into many.

Potatoes ere worth growing, if you have the space. Don't bother with 'earlies' which may suffer frost damage. At the bottom of my plot their is an underground stream so that is where I grew my potatoes this year. I grew what is in my opinion the best red there is 'desire'. I got a good crop -I just did one row. Lift them when the tops go brown and dry then store in a paper sack in a frost free site.

I also grow onion sets that is onions that are put in the ground as a bulb the size of a small marble. Set later than shallots - late march depending on the weather. Harvest in late august, dry and then hang on lengths of string in a frost free place - I use our garage !

Finally I grow leeks. We love leek and potato soup. Set the seed in a tray in Feb, plant out in may by making a deep hole pop the leek into it and then pour water in the hole. Do not fill in with soil. Harvest anytime from late autumn. Leeks are VERY hardy so you can leave them in until you need them.

I usually go and visit the plot once a week in the growing season to keep the weeds down. In the winter I dig the whole plot over. I keep off the ground when it is very wet.

My old friend NIS+

Before I joined Sun I worked at a company who use Sun hardware for mathematical modelling. I was the SA. Like all Sun customers I was faced with learning and using Solaris 2.x on our servers/deskops. Being keen on new technology even then I looked at NIS+. Essentially we had a single NIS domain pretty simple but I was sure NIS+ was the way to go. So I took a SparcStation ELC home and loaded Solaris 2.2 on it and created my first NIS+ domain. Of course then you did not have the nifty nisclient/nisserver/nispopulate scripts to aid configuration. I went through each nis* command, what it did and so on. We then created the 'live' NIS+ domain back at work and kept it up to date with NIS until we could throw NIS away. ( we ran the NIS+ domain in NIS compatibility mode for the Pc-nfs clients though.) Security was not an issue in this workplace but the ability for non root admins to add/change entries in NIS+ anywhere on that network was awsome. I wish we had done more to better use some of its other features but I learnt about them later on...

Little did I realise that learning about NIS+ would help me get a job at Sun. I joined as a solution centre engineer and used a NIS+ domain still in existance created by my long time mentor and friend in Sun. He brought it to life on guy fawkes night.....

It was not until we both moved on to another support organisation in Sun that for me NIS+'s multi domain possibilities came to be seen. As the internal support organisation did not have global logins and we needed to have that to allow our engineers to share data/ideas/lab equipment we setup a three domain environment. One domain in Singapore, West coast of the US and in the UK. Many of our tools were built on top of the NIS+ technology.

I remember creating the Singapore domain while on rotation there. (with help from my mentor..) Sitting in the office and being able to login with my existing unix login/passwd on a remote domain was awsome. It was the enabling technology that brought the three groups of engineers together into one virtual team. Clever things were done with automount maps that allowed you to for example cd /share/us and see the equivalent filesystems in the US '/share' directories as we had in the UK. We learnt about the problems of replication and how to solve issues when remote sites went down and how the impacted their peers. We setup a local_dir for information that did not need replicating around the world like mail_aliases and ethernet addresses.

Now of course NIS+ is in its twilight years. The world is looking at LDAP. But for me this technology was awe inspiring and typical of the level of technical competance and mega ideas into action stuff Sun is great at doing. We see this continuing with the features in Solaris 10, containers, ZFS see Solaris10

Tuesday September 28, 2004

Jack Higgins books

Of course everyone knows his most famous book The Eagle has landed. The story (or is it factual) of the German plot to kidnap Churchill while he was having a steak and kidney pie in Norfolk in a country retreat. The inevitable follow on book appeared but was no where close as good. The Eagle has flown is the title.

Like Ian Fleming Higgins does know his stuff he has inside knowledge and when he introduced Dillon (a member of the IRA) who ends up working for a secret organisation who are only responsible to the PM it looked like a good idea. Trouble is he has lost the plot dare I say and milked the idea too often. The latest books that involve a fued with the Rashid family who Dillon wipes out by the end of the second book ( we hope ) have lost his previous storytelling ability.

There always seems to be a Judas gate, someone is always saying something softly, familier sentences keep appearing.

Going back in time some of the older books are good;

Thunder point, a story of how a U boat was found by a lone diver that held paperwork that someone did not want found is a good yarn.

Luciano's Luck, the story of how a convict was let out of prison in order to persuade the Mafia to assist in a uprising when the invasion of Scilly occured.

Night of the Fox, the story of Henry Martineau who has to go and recover Hugh Kelso who gets washed up on the German occupied shore of Jersey and bring him back to blighty.

Solo A piano player, part time asassin who is a Cretan being pursued by an SAS soldier.

Cold Harbour, where Craig Osbourne gets sent back one more time to German occupied France for a mission to far.

Exocet, how an Argentinian pilot had to try and get the weapon to help them win the Falklands war

So all in all not a bad bunch of books. I usually read one on holiday it is a good relaxing easy read

Enteprise Backup nee Networker bootstrap info

I have a way of storing this very important data but I let the machine do the work ...

I have a rotating sequence of these files one for each day of the week. I run the cron job on machines we have in other countries for added security. So if my server goes down or its media database is trashed I can quickly find out the latest bootstrap and on what tape to use to get the product up and running again.

I also query the media database about root /var etc backups for the server and its clients again to speed up recoveryif the database is down. If you have the client packages for a laptop you could run the report everytime you put your laptop on the network and know the information is safe.

James Bond Books

I started reading Ian Fleming's books on James Bond as a teenager. I am continuing to reread them even now. If you buy a new one there is a good forward on Bond and Fleming written by Anthony Burgess which sums up the whole Bond character and how Fleming's is interwoven into it.

As Fleming worked in the secret service during the war he knew what he was writing about. The Russian organisation Smersh really did ( does) exist. He came up with covert operations for SIS which probably sowed seeds in his journalistic mind about the character Bond. In many ways I think Bond was the person Fleming wanted to be. I don't think he would have made it into the 'field' as he was a sickly man partly due to a sports injury he got at Eton on the playing field.

Fleming's character's are enormous. The criminals, Bond himself and of course 'M'. The details in the action in the books are mind boggling. That is why I reread them. I always find a little bit more each time that my eyes missed last time.

The books are small in number but like that TV series ( Fawlty towers being the best example) which they made just the right number means each book is perfect. I don't think he could have written many more without the plots becoming similar and loosing that edge each book has. To add to the collection are two that have short stories. Also the 'strange' The Spy who loved me the story of a woman who Bond meets and rescues from a gang.

The best for me are Thunderball, Dr No and Moonraker. In all of the books on Bond is the romantic interest and as Anthony Burgess points out each has a little imprefection, for Honey Child in Dr No her broken nose, the limp that Domino has in Thunderball.

The films of course were destined to move away from the storlyline as time marched on. Moonraker if filmed as per the story would show the UK developing with the aid of Drax the first nuclear weapon. As it was it had to be modernised with the space shuttle. Thunderball must be the best inline with the book.

as regards the modern books by John Gardener, Kingsley Amis and Raymond Benson, Amis single one Colonel Sun is the best , Benson's are not bad, Gardener's passable. In all cases these modern books have Bond in the modern ages and he must be sixty but still fighting Mick Jagger fit.

As in all things the best is the first.

Monday September 27, 2004

My front garden

I live in Berkshire and have a small front garden and a sixty foot rear garden.

The soil is sandy with gravel on a small slope ( we are at the top of the slope..) and dries out very quickly.

When we moved in the front garden was covered with a dodgy ill looking patch of grass. I had already built a small pond in the rear garden and decided to do the same in the front. The pond takes over a lot of the available space and the final problem was what to do with the remainder of the space. I decided on covering the soil with a membrane which is porus and allows water through it while stopping weeds growing in the soil. This was then covered with pea gravel and I have planted several heathers, grasses and mahonia in the plot. The front endge of the plot has a dry stone wall and this has various alpine plants that are drought tolerant growing in it. A couple of hollyhocks have self seeded and I have left them to add a bit of extra colour.

The pond has a variety of water plants including lillies which look great. The abundance of water in the area in the form of the Thames and filled in ( with water) gravel pits means herons steal as many fish as you are prepared to buy...

The whole patch has matured now and in fact I have had to remove some plants as they had grown into each other. I also have daffodills around the edge of the pond and along the dry stone wall.

The good news is it is attractive, has colour especially in the spring and is easy to maintain.

shared lab ideas/tools/technology

I'd like to announce a set of tools we use in PTS and certain AS/CCC labs around the world to this blogging audience. I am not going to tell you they are really easy to setup and use in your lab but I hope in time we ca nget a communication thread going to end up with a set of Sun standard tools all labs use. This will promote sharing. I also really want to hear about what YOU use it; might be better than the we came up with and I'd want to use it !

The tools are documented on web pages and are:

Javalabtool -> A java gui booking tool with sybase back end

Consoletool -> A tool to access consoles

js_config -> A jumpstart tool to install and customise an operating system on a lab box rebuilding a customers configuaration

All have TOI's on http://pts-lab.sfbay/ under FaSt Access -> TOI

We also have other technology and ideas like webcams, remote power to allow better remote access. The PTS engineers wrote a lot of these and other tools. These such as diskomizer are on the web page http://pt.emea/

Even though you might want these tools please note I can't promise immediate access. js_config at the moment requires nis+ on the install server that you might not have.

But do let me have your ideas I'd like to hear from you !

Sunday September 26, 2004

Walk books worth looking at....

In my immediate area we have found the following books useful:

Rambling for pleasure East Berkshire (3 editions), around Reading (2) and Along the Thames (1). Dedicated to the memory of Peter Nevill who was chairman of the East Berks Ramblers group. These books usually seen in newsagents and bookshops in the area contain ~ twenty walks between two and six miles long and usually circular in nature.

Teashop Walks by Jean Patefield. A series of walk books featuring that great British institution the tea shop. For many areas including Chilterns, Thames Valley, Cotwolds etc.

Pub Walks in the Chilterns by Alan Charles, again circular featuring some wonderful pubs in this area.

Pub Strolls in Berkshire, by Nick Channer he has also written Waterside walks in Berkshire, Village walks in Oxfordshire etc

More general books:

Jarold Pathfinder are available for most areas of the UK. Published in association with the Ordance survey map folks. Walks graded into difficulty again circular with good descriptions. Again seen in bookshops and Tourism shops over the UK.

Saturday September 25, 2004

Moving sixty users and a terabyte of data...

Last weekend saw the culmination of several weeks worth of preparation in the move of sixty engineers and a terabyte of data. Nothing spectacular in that you might say but I would disagree. I support PTS and Solaris sustaining engineers in the UK who are now based in the third building 'sparc' at Sun's Guillemont Park campus in the UK. I think the engineers would agree that they are the most demanding of users they expect the best support/best environment and also want us to use as much of Sun's cutting edge technology as we can. So we use Sunrays, we have one Sunray server running zones and of course thats on top of the latest build of Solaris10 we can get our hands on. We have unique sharing tools used by all of PTS and other parts of Sunservices like the AS labs worldwide. We use live upgrade ,netconnect and much more. We log bugs when these things do not work. We look forward to learning Greenline, using Zfs to make better use of our always stretched storage hardware.

So what happened ? Well we decided on the servers to use, planned reducing the number by use of zones. Also by use of domains on a Serengeti platform. We loaded Solaris on them, preconfigured as much as we could and sent them to the new site a week before the move. We planned our data migration strategy. We had three ways of getting the data to the new site. In case one failed we HAD to have alternatives. We even planned if all them would fail. So we took down the old servers on Friday and started the changeover.. By Saturday email and most services were up. We finished off on the Sunday. We had teething problems for sure but by midweek most of the engineers seemed pretty impressed with how well it went.

The thrill I got out of this was two fold. First filling an empty room full of computer hardware and seeing it bootup and turn into an environment that allows these enginerers solve Sun's most difficult customer issues. The day I loose that interest is the day to go home and never come back. Years ago one person told me when I was getting excited about getting the latest fastest machine in my first IT company "Its just a tin box like your fridge in the kitchen", I could not then and cannot now understand him saying that.Computing should be fun.

Secondly I just enjoyed seeing the folks who work for me doing the hard work. I am a veteran now and aloohugh I can be useful now and then I just like seeing and ensuring all members of team felt and did work that really made this happen. We have students. Each of them built and setup a server each. The students will look after that server in the remaining time they are with us. Upgrading/patching fix ingproblems with it. I think they have to pinch themselves sometimes to believe they are REALLY doing it.

Of course my full time staff also rose to the challenge. PTS and solaris engineers also offered valuable help and advice.

A good weekend's work !

Friday September 24, 2004

Walking in and around Reading, Berks I live in a village called Twyford, a busy commmuter village with a railway station. However busy the village is there are some great walks around us. We have lived here ten years now and are still doscivering parts of the countryside we never knew about before we did a walk from a book. The Thames is nearby so a stroll along its banks can be just as much fun. Drive to Hurley and walk to Marlow via Temple lock. The lockeeper's wife even sells drinks/snacks to keep your strength up. Most pubs don't mind you parking in their car parks if you pop in for a drink/lunch on your way back. Henley can be busy so park at Remenham and walk along the banks of the river to Henley or turn 'right' and go to Aston where there is a pub "The flowerpot". At Henley you can walk further along the river to the next lock which is called Marsh lock. ( Sep 24 2004, 08:00:00 AM PDT ) Permalink

Formula1's future... As the last three races of the season beckon it is worth considering where F1 goes from here. The rules changes to make engines last longer, remove downforce and ending up with a driver doing as many miles on a set of tyres as the average car make one consider is the governing body really up to its job? The UK touring car championship went through a similar crisis a few years ago and did not fix the problem of one team with more money than the others dominating the sport. Safety is an issue but life and all sport is dangerous. As long as the risks are minimised then that is acceptable. Regarding A certain German driver's domination of the sport and his Ferari team, well the others had better make a better job of their 2005 racers and put all their drivers on performance payements ! ( Sep 24 2004, 08:00:00 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]