Monday February 14, 2005

History boys...

Saw The History Boys a new play by Alan Bennett at the National Theatre Saturday. An excellent production which we all enjoyed. The story is about a school which is trying to get all of one class into Oxbridge has an anarchic teacher played by Richard Griffiths who actually teaches the kids more than anyone realises. Frances de la Tour is his understanding peer and Geoffrey Streatfeild who plays Irwin who is brought in as a 'straight' supply teacher to ensure 100% success at Oxbridge.

It does not take Irwin long to realise Hector ( played by Griffiths) is actually doing a rather good job but matters are quickly taken out of his hands by a indiscreet moment by Hector. The class are all played by young actors who are all excellent. The punchy one liners were often missed by me and the short acts are punctuated by music from the 1980's and film projected on the rear of the stage of the actors at a 'real' school, while the stage is rearranged for the next act.

( Feb 14 2005, 04:00:39 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [0]

My home box running Solaris10... ready to be Live upgraded again soon...

I have an Ultra5 at home that I use for work. It was running Solaris9 and is now running Solaris10. I planned a cunning upgrade I had wanted to use Live upgrade but had not setup my disk to do this. So I booked an Ultra5 in the lab and loaded Solaris10 using a custom install so my disk had two slices for Solaris. All went well but I ignored package warnings about dependendies - big mistake. I then loaded the VPN client software we use onto the box - including instructions and then copied my small home directory from home onto it. I then took the machine home on Friday

I powered the box up, and realised soon that dtlogin was not going to appear. After checking with work dtlogin is not started by SMF we saw the rc2.d/S99dtlogin was missing. I was tempted to give up and take the box into work. But I soldiered on and got VPN going and mounted the Solaris10 FCS image from work onto the Ultra5 and worked out what SUNWdt packages were not loaded. A very small time later I had a running desktop environment. Thank goodness for a one megabit ADSL line..

The lab system then needed to give up its disk to my home system and then a reboot to check all was well. A few more packages had to be loaded from the Companion CD for CD burning etc and I was back up and running. I now need to teach myself all the good things in Solaris10 and try and catch up with the students. Next time Live upgrade will be my friend. I am ready for that now

PS One of my guys rebooted enospc our main nfs server off a Live Upgrade Boot environment over the weekend. So it is now running Solaris10 too. It came up like a charm. Our primary motivation is of course to be running the latest Solaris we can and if we run into any problems we will be logging bugs as we should. Thanks for doing that DC.