Wednesday April 06, 2005

The apprentice series

Great series this . Alan Sugar boss of Amstrad the consumer electronics company is looking for a new starter to work for him. The idea is Sugar has two teams who are given a task to do against time each week. These have been, sell as much as you can on a pitch in Harrods, pick and then sell as many of those pictures as you can, develop an advertisement campaign for one of Sugar's new products and so on. The next one in the series is on tonight on BBC2.

The developers of the series have clearly picked people who clash horribly and blame each other for their mistakes. After the winning team is announced the project manager of the team that lost picks two of that team to explain themselves to Sugar and two of his advisors. This is where the backbiting comes in. Sugar to his credit hears none of this and makes his own mind up. It may of course be all stage managed but if so then they have done that well. Sugar then decides who of the three gets fired and the cycle repeats itself next week. Of course our opinion at home is that these people are crazy to have to go through this torture and if they want a job with Amstrad I am sure there are easier ways. At no point has the position of the job to the finalist been indicated. There also is a book.

The hidden technology Sun's OBP

Everyone quite rightly is singing the praises of Solaris10 . Lots of great new features and a secure scalable environment as well. I wonder how many people spend anytime thinking about the Open Boot Prom ? I expect most people only interact with it when they want to boot off the cdrom or dvd to install a new version of Solaris. In the lab the students soon realise the OBP can do much more. There is little point in rebooting a machine you have just connected a load of hardware to unless you are sure you got it right. Are the cards visible, scsi or fibre devices ? Extra network ports ? The OBP will tell you.

Here is the reference manual to get you started. For me the most important thing is the break sequence. Send it and the machine just stops doing what it was doing. The friendly ok> appears. You then need to understand what to do then, if the system has hung maybe force a crash dump (using 'sync' ) or just boot it again if you had it booting off the wrong device. The ability to have devices aliases in the OBP for different boot disks are a boon. Once you get used to the device pathnames they really make sense. I would always make sure all my alternative boot devices were known to OBP as device alias - see below.

The OBP is there on all sparc platforms from the small servers right up to the multi CPU/core monster E25K . If I was to learn the OBP commands I would start by looking at the settings on your machine using printenv at the OBP prompt or 'eeprom' under Solaris. This means you do not have to shut your machine down to check/change OBP settings. There are some you might want to review, like auto-boot? which is a flag for the auto reboot of a system, diag-switch? which toggles extra diagnostics on power on. If you want to reset all the settings to factory defaults use set-defaults. The OBP has a rather good command line editor which is worth getting to know especially if your typing is as bad as mine. A few of these editing commands will make life easier in the long run ( ctl+P is the first to remember to bring back the last command). The final point to make is that if you setup your own device aliases using nvalias/nvedit etc these go into the nvramrc settings where other customisations of your own may be stored.