Wednesday January 12, 2005

A good idea

One of the engineers who uses our lab asked for hardware to run a course he has produced with his peers. The course is about Service Management Facility , part of Solaris10 and he is going to utilise labs in the classroom to damage systems and get his students to fix them.

The initial idea was to setup a load of redundant desktops we have that were replaced by sunrays in the office. But what a lot of hassle. containers would be good but he wants global containers which is a pity. So by chance my brain came up with this idea. Use one of our blade shelves . He can have one blade as his jumpstart server for the rest and in fact he can use flash images to make the loading of Solaris really wizzy. The blade shelf has a gigabit switch built in so this is a great solution. Console access is also easily available for the students.

So it looks like it going to be a great course and as it will be repeated many times the TCO of setting this up and maintaining it will be really small.

Robert Harris a new book and TV program

The Sunday Times reported last week in its Culture magazine that Robert Harris is writing a trilogy set in the last days of the Roman empire . He says he used to loathe being known as a historical novelist but now he feels history is so important he is not going to be embarassed by it anymore. I guess the growing bank balance might also be having an effect but I think he is a genuine chap.

The article called Unhooked from the classics also reports that his previous novel Archangel (which I am reading now) is to be screened on BBC TV. Daniel Craig will be Kelso. It seems Mel Gibsons company got the rights to screen it when the book was written but Hollywood dropped the idea thinking no one was interested in Stalin anymore. The creators of the Likely lads and Porridge are writing the screenplay that is Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais.