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