foss is the biggest open source conference held in Bangalore from 29th November to 2nd December 2005.

As a Solaris Sustaining and Engineering team, we felt we should take the lead and use the opportunity to evangelize OpenSolaris.We started discussions on this for over a month ago when we had only 2 days to submit the abstracts.We decided to go for it and sorted out a subset of the cool features, in OpenSolaris, and quickly submitted our abstracts for the talks. Later we got the green signal for the sponsorship and we started our real activity 20 days before the event.

     20 days it was full of work.As usual Sumitha, Vinay and other managers backed us well. This is one of the coolest thing in my team. Our managers strongly believe in us. Mahesh took the lead and we formed a group of people who are interested. We brainstormed for ideas, listed down and broke up the tasks and divided the work among us. All issues like what are all needed to be demo-ed, who will lead the demos, how do we maintain 4 days making sure we have enough volunteers, training volunteers, dealing with the foss guys, agency guys, (who had setup the nice Sun stall), how to handle talks, question set, bof session plans etc.

     We cameup with a decent proposal on demos and identified owners for each demo.We can have 5 stalls in the place that is provided, so we decided we retain 3 stalls for ourself and give away one stall to Glassfish and one stall to Marketing guys. We decided to run 2 different demos per stall.The demos we planned-for are DTrace, Debugging tools, Zones, SMF, ZFS and BeleniX/installer/general stuff. Other stalls we gave it to Glassfish and netbeans teams. On final day we showed looking glass demo as well.

     We announced in internal mail alias that we want volunteers, but very few were willing to volunteer and some, who were willing, did't have decent knowledge to show our demos. We were only able to identify 3 to 4 people per demo and on top of it most of them are shared resource, which means they are also into different demos like Kishore in ZFS and BeleniX, Vineeth and Saif in SMF and Zones, Myself in Zones and BeleniX. But 3 to 4 shared people per demo was very few in number and with this number we need all of them standing all 4 days in shifts.Standing all 4 days is a difficult task. We don't know how we could manage, but everyone had a we can do it attitude.The enthu that is filled-in, a zeal to evangelize opensolaris and a good support and encouragement from managers made us stand all the 4 days. The response for opensolaris stalls was phenomenal. We got a huge response from the crowd, right from day one. All of us were so engaged, that we couldn't focus on anything else. I owned the zones part, but frankly speaking Vineeth, Shivani and Ganga handed it all. I am very thankful to them for taking this work from me and allowing me to work on BeleniX, which had to go into the CD that we gave out whoever came to the stall, Solaris 10 DVDs we gave to people who expressed interest in the project and who requested for it. People expressed lot of interest in all the technologies we demo-ed. DTrace, ZFS, Zones, SMF.

    Sun stall was the only active stall, which is always crowded with lot of people. Other stalls were literally empty.

  talks:

    We started our talks with an Introduction of OpenSolaris and DTrace by Peter Karlson on day 3 and next talk was mine, Zones. I had some demos, which I planned to show in the talk, but couldn't do as my Ferrari didn't work well with the projector display. So I used the preso which I submitted to the foss before and asked the people to come to the demo stall for more info. Mahesh presented ZFS. Finally everything went well. We also had a BOF session on DTrace by Pramod, which was well recieved.

   Day 4 started with Surya's talk on Least privileges and we had SMF talk by Ganesh and we ended up with DTrace code camp by Peter Karlson.

   Many people got to know what opensolaris is and how they can contribute back. Lot of people were eager to join our bosug. Some were willing to buy Sun hardware, for which we re-directed to proper channel. Some who came from Bombay and Gurgoan told they want to start a opensolaris user group in their places. Overall this is a huge success.