My Learning Curve

The Fast Moving MX000 Servers
A back to back course on MX000 servers in two different location across the Nation is some kind of indication on the rising popularity of those servers, especially in the Banking sector. With me in the photograph (by the way, I'm on the front wearing a dark blue shirt) are gentlemen from two very popular banks in India, who turned up for a course on MX000 Server Administration at Mumbai last week. Well they use High End MX000 Servers in their data center to run some critical banking applications:

Sun SPARC Enterprise MX000 Server Administration Course At Bangalore
A course on MX000 Server Administration concluded here in Bangalore yesterday and following is a moment from the class.

Taming Sakila
Just under two months ago I decided to embark on a journey through the Certification roadmap of the Worlds most Popular Open Source Database. They say, Certification isn't a substitute for real world experience. Who says it is? But it certainly has the element to motivate someone to go after a new technology, just the way it occurred to me. This morning, the journey that I've mentioned above completed rather satisfactorily, leaving me in possession all possible titles from the MySQL Certification roadmap viz CMDEV, CMDBA and CMCDBA. I'm happy is an understatement.


My entry into the world of database has nothing to do with any recent announcement from Sun, but does have a connection with an announcement from our CEO, published well over a year ago. Since then, MySQL came up in all serious conversations at Sun and that perhaps is one main factor that encouraged me to go after a technology with such a massive installation base. I regret to have taken some time before finally going for it, but the learning curve was extremely smooth and exciting.

In general, I spend a lot of time reading books (not necessarily technical) and there are some books (read technical) that I value more than others which includes Practical Unix and Internet Security, Learning Perl, Mastering Regular Expressions, Perl Cookbook to name a few. The book MySQL 5.0 Certification Study Guide easily falls into the aforesaid category for its simplicity, clarity and richness in content. Thanks to Safari Books Online, I could thoroughly utilize an online copy of MySQL 5.0 Certification Study Guide to prepare for MySQL 5.0 DBA and Developer Exams. To make it curt, this one is strongly recommended.

A similar material is available for candidates preparing for the Certified MySQL 5.1 Cluster DBA exam and its details are available here.

So if any of you feel it's time for you to tame Sakila and then show up for a test to prove you have done so, please make use of the resources as mentioned above, or find a training program at a suitable time and location, read the faqs, create a VUE ID* , register for an exam and GO FOR IT with no second thoughts. Oh yeah...don't forget to check out these sample Questions before the test. Good luck!

*Beginning on July 31st, 2009 MySQL Exams will no longer be delivered by Pearson VUE. For more details click here.

OpenSolaris 2009.06
OpenSolaris 2009.06 is being released today. Download it from here. If you are looking for an official press release about the same, that's here. Learn everything about the OpenSolaris 2009.06 release here.

Solaris 10 Administration Course
After a rather long period of time, I chanced upon a Solaris Administration teach this week at Bangalore. It was a quick revision of one of my favourite topics.



Good weekend to all!

Project Vector
Read Jonathan's blog to know more about Project Vector. After reading it, you would agree with MaryMary for sure. So have a look here and be prepared!

Sun Hardware Training @ Bangalore
This evening, I parted with the folks in the snap below, concluding a five day session around Sun Fire Midrange Servers. Felt nice to be a part of such an enthusiastic and jovial set of people and I also wish to thank them for the free (as in beer) lunch they offered me this afternoon .



It's a busy weekend here in India with the General Elections 2009 verdict to be out tomorrow. And while that happens, I'm going to journey towards a peaceful destination for spending a restful weekend. To all those who intend to follow the India 2009 Election Bulletins closely, here's wishing a very interesting weekend!

Solaris 10 Update 7
Solaris 10 5/09 a.k.a Solaris 10 Update 7 is available for download. Click here to get it. Check out Joerg Moellenkamp's web logs summarizing the new features in Solaris 10 5/09. Also read Scott Davenport's blogs to know about the bug fixes and enhancements in Solaris 10 FMA with this new release. The PDF of 'Solaris 10 5/09 What's New?' is here.

Sun Fire Midrange Servers Training in Bangalore
On a May Day, upon mutual agreement, I'm meeting up with the folks in the picture below for the closing sessions of a course on Sun Fire Midrange Servers at Sun Office here in Bangalore. They are all Field Engineers and the course they are completing today covers topics somewhat close to the ones listed here, but with some additions and omissions.



Wishing all a long restful weekend!

Ubuntu 9.04 Released
Ubuntu 9.04 (code named Jaunty Jackalope) released yesterday. Download location is here.

Solaris Containers Training at Gurgaon
Meet my new friends from CSC, Noida. I met them for a training on Solaris Containers at Gurgaon.

Sun Open Network Systems
Today Sun is launching the Intel Nehalem based family of x64 blades and rack mount servers. Tune into live webcast and get more details about the same here. Read the press release here.

Happy Vishu
Wishing all a happy Vishu.

Internet Archive
Want to see how your favourite websites appeared in the past? Thanks to Internet Archive, it's now possible to travel back in time, all the way to the Year 1996, and take a look at how a website looked at a particular point in time. Well, I went to the Internet Archive, keyed in "www.sun.com" in the 'Wayback Machine' search box, selected the date October 20 2006 and got to see this. It's fun; it's informative.

And guess what, this massive amount of data (talk about billions of pages and growing) is hosted in a Sun MD and employs Sun OpenStorage. Read more about the 'Internet In a Box' here.

Sun Unveils Open Cloud Platform
Referring to the title of this post, read the press release here. Watch the live webcast here.

Solaris Cluster 3.2 Training at Hyderabad
As I write this note, I am sitting at Hyderabad airport awaiting the boarding call for my flight to Bangalore. The flight is delayed by more than two hours. That leaves me with ample time to introduce my new friends, whom I met for Solaris Cluster 3.2 training (ES 345) here in Hyderabad They are all from Big Blue:



I'm tempted to remind all that there exist a certification exam for Solaris Cluster, the details of which can be found here. Good weekend to all.

Integrating GlassFish Web Space Server with OpenSSO
Last week I was engaged in bringing up a demo set up at Sun Solution Center in Bangalore, employing a number of components from Sun Software Stack, including IDM (Sun's provisioning tool), OpenSSO (Sun's Access Management Solution), DSEE (User Data Store), MySQL (Sun's database), GlassFish (Sun's Application Server) and Glassfish Web Space Server (Sun's portal solution) installed in Solaris Containers.

For reference, the deployment scenario is depicted in the diagram below:



The phase I of implementation involved integrating Sun's IDM with OpenSSO. The following was the objective:

[*] Configure OpenSSO Enterprise to protect Identity Manager, and to allow single sign-on login to the Identity Manager user and administrative interface.
[*] Configure Identity Manager to provision users and roles to OpenSSO Enterprise.

To achieve the above,there is a neat documentation available here.

Once I got the above integration of IDM and OpenSSO functional in our set up, users could be provisioned from Sun Identity Manager to the 'idm' realm in OpenSSO (which finally gets stored in the DSEE 6.x configured as the User repository for OpenSSO).

The actual reason for adding an entry on my blogs around this set up is to express my excitement on discovering the ease of integrating GlassFish WebSpace Server with OpenSSO. I'd reiterate those steps performed to make the GlassFish Web Space Server (installed in one zone of Solaris 10 OS) contact OpenSSO (installed in another zone) for authentication. I presume, this exercise can be performed in a matter of few minutes. So set your stop watch and get going:

Acquire Glassfish v3 prelude. Then click here and download OpenSSO. For instructions on installation, read my friend David's blog. You would remember him to be the author of free training on OpenSSO. Create a realm, if needed (say 'idm').

Download Glassfish WebSpace Server 10.. To install WebSpace Server, you would also need Ant 1.7 or higher from here. Now follow the steps (the following example uses WebSpace Server bundled with Glassfish):

[1] Unzip Ant and GlassFish WebSpace Server.
[2] Set ANT_HOME variable to point to the directory location of new version of ANT.
[3] Goto webspace_dir/glassfishv2 directory and run the following command:
ant -f setup.xml
[4] Once the above step is completed, goto webspace_dir/glassfishv2/bin directory and start domain:
./asadmin start-domain
[5] Upon successful completion of above step, open a browser and access the following URL:
http://webspaceserver_host:8080

If any of the above steps seems ambiguous, please read the installation instructions here.

Once the GlassFish WebSpace Server page is up on the browser, login using the credentials of Administrator (admin@example.com/admin), click on the Control Panel -> Settings -> Authentication -> OpenSSO. Following page is what you would see on your browser.



On the page as displayed above, following is the information filled in to make the WebSpace Server contact the 'idm' realm in OpenSSO for authentication of users. Not only that, on successful authentication with OpenSSO, WebSpace Server populates the user information from OpenSSO in its database (HSQL by default)!

Login URL:
http://opensso.ssc-blr.co.in:8080/opensso/UI/Login?realm=idm&goto=http://webs.ssc-blr.co.in:8080/c/portal/login

Logout URL:
http://opensso.ssc-blr.co.in:8080/opensso/UI/Logout?realm=idm&goto=http://webs.ssc-blr.co.in:8080/web/guest/home

Service URL:
http://opensso.ssc-blr.co.in:8080/opensso

Glassfish WebSpace Server installation,configuration and integration with OpenSSO is such a pleasant experience that I invite you to try it and experience it for yourself.

Sun and HP Announce Partnership Around Solaris
"Sun and HP announced an expanded multi-year partnership agreement that enables HP to distribute and support Sun's Solaris 10 OS. The top five x86/x64 based system vendors now all ship Solaris with their systems. HP is responding to customer demand for expanded OS support on HP ProLiant server and blade platforms. Sun now becomes a strategic HP ProLiant OS distribution partner and Solaris is elevated to the lineup of key operating environments for the ProLiant platform."

Listen to the audiocast here. View the Sun and HP Presentation Slides here .Watch Sun Execs discuss HP and Solaris. And here's the press release.

Sun Learning Services Session @ Sun Tech Days 2009
On the concluding day of this years edition of Sun Tech Days in India, Sun Learning Services (SLS) offered two Hands On Tracks - one on JavaFX and another on Solaris Containers - for its Customers, Partners and Community, and the response was simply overwhelming. Thanks to all delegates who made it for this event.

I'm glad to have got an opportunity to speak to a larger audience on a grand occasion as Sun Tech Days and that too on a very useful Solaris 10 feature, one among several Virtualization Solutions from Sun. To know more details about a training on Solaris Containers, click here. In another location within the Sun Tech Days 2009 venue, my friend Stacy delivered a full day seminar on the new and exciting JavaFX technology. Detailed description about a JavaFX course can be found here.

How well I performed my job is for the delegates of my session to judge and comment. For me, speaking to an audience comprised of employees of various organizations (IBM, Wipro, UBS, TCS, BOA, HCL,CSC, Reliance to name a few), students and lecturers from several Engineering Colleges around and faculties from our partner Educational Institutions was an immensely satisfying experience.

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Due to several last minute onsite registrations, the Student Kits, containing several materials including OpenSolaris and Netbeans DVD went out of stock and some delegates had to go back without it. While we arrange for its shipment to delegates who didn't get a Student Kit during the event, we would wish to remind all that OpenSolaris and Netbeans could be downloaded from the website as follows for immediate use: (i) OpenSolaris (ii) Netbeans .

Like all previous editions of Tech Days, the one that concluded yesterday also offered me several fond memories. The photograph below is just one of it:

Cloud Computing
If you were there this morning at HICC, Hyderabad listening to Matt Thomson's keynote on second day of Sun Tech Days 2009, you probably got to know what cloud computing is. Press talked about its prospects already in todays edition. Matt managed to throw clarity on the definition of cloud computing, demonstrated some of the powerful offerings from Sun and also talked about a couple of key projects at Sun. It was a fluent presentation, packed with lot of information.



As cloud computing takes the center stage, it'd be interesting to follow Matt here to hear from him, directly and promptly, the developments on Cloud Computing at Sun. On one of his slides this morning, Matt listed the attributes of cloud (One Service Fits All, Virtualized Physical Resources, Self Provisioning, Easticity, Pay Per Use,Programmatic Control), in another he talked about Cloud as: (i)Software as Service (SaaS), (ii) Platform as Service(PaaS) and (iii)Infrastructure as Service(IaaS) and finally he explained how developers could utilize the power of cloud for developmental activities,scaling up and down the hardware that they need, as and when they need, build their project on cloud and collaborate with their project mates sitting across different Geographical location. In a stunning demonstration, within a matter of few mouse clicks, all of us got to see a Solaris Desktop - sitting somewhere in a public datacenter- popping up on a Windows laptop. It was exciting! No wonder, the demonstration invoked a loud applause from the audience.

In addition to talking about how a startup company could rely on Cloud rather than building their own data center, Matt also introduced us to Project Kenai and Zembly.

S D Shibulal, COO of Infosys and Prof Deepak Phatak were felicitated by James Gosling in the presence of Anil Velluri, VP and Managing Director of Sun India. When invited to speak, Prof Phatak said, "I'm a teacher. My few minutes could span several hours." Prof Phatak said in his speech how excited was to see so many developers paying fees for an event like Sun Tech Days and gathering under one roof. He also mentioned that in the past, India had more number of downloads than uploads (in terms of contributions to the OpenSource community) and that he's seeing a change in that trend off late. Prof Phatak's speech was short, but inspiring and touching.



I've already talked about the 'Java Jacket Give Away' event at Sun Tech Days here. The tradition continued this time around as well with a difference that two Jackets were given away instead of one. Looks like over the last three years the weirdest talent that someone could display was singing a song!!

All right, while you try and figure out a weird talent that you possess and probably start polishing it to try and gain a Java Jacket next year at Sun Tech Days, let me hit my bed and sleep, for I have a lengthy speech to make on the last day of Sun Tech Days 2009, tomorrow.

Gosling Steals the Show on Day One of Sun Tech Days 2009
Java is everywhere. It's perhaps everyday that this technology touches us in one way or the other. But it's certainly not everyday that you get to hear the Father of Java speaks out his thoughts, live. James Gosling's presence for the Sun Tech Days 2009 at Hyderabad is undoubtedly the main highlight of this edition of the event, kick-started today at Hyderabad International Convention Center.Day one was very informative and it promises to get better in the next two days.



At Tech Days, you would see anchoring at its best. This morning it wasn't any different. With a really cool MC on stage, boredom failed to find its place. "Namaste India," we screamed loud and clear, all of us standing up, as instructed by the Master of Ceremonies, whom you see on left. That set the tone for the rest of inaugural proceedings. And when the youngest drummer of India showed up on stage, producing some magical moments with his tender hands for minutes at stretch, our energy levels went rather high. It was superb!

What followed then were some useful demonstrations on technologies like OpenSolaris, JavaFX and Java TV.

Anil Valluri,VP and Managing Director of Sun India, gave the inaugural address, briefing about Sun, its business model and other related topics, and concluded his speech by inviting James Gosling on to the stage. It wasn't surprising to hear a loud round of applause as Gosling walked his way up on to the stage.



Gosling covered a wide range of topics: the evolution of Java from a slow interpreted language in the mid 1990s, its performance improvement over a period of time, the latest release in the form of Java 6 Update 12, the new JavaFX technology, the Glassfish, the Netbeans 6.5 and much much more.

He mentioned the staggering statistics of 15 million downloads of JRE a week, talked about the Java enabled Oyster cards (he pulled out one from his pocket while talking about this) being used in the London Underground by every single train passenger, his work with the rocker Neil Young on the Java-enabled, hybrid-electric Lincoln convertible, why a virus free Java is a preferred choice for applications that require secure transactions over the network and performed a number of demos on JavaFX.

It was quite a charm when he said he was the guilty party behind developing Emacs editor 32 years back or so, which later became GNU Emacs, but urged all present day Emac users to stop using it, as things are not the way it was three decades back and that present day IDEs are intelligent enough to know a lot about the programs that programmers write. Well, here is an IDE worth trying: Netbeans.


Gosling's keynote, needless to say, was an absorbing session.

Several break out sessions on various Sun Technologies followed James Gosling's keynote. It was a good first day and it's only going to get better.

My Never Ending Misery with Laryngitis
This is Sreekanth Reddy from CSC. I owe him one. As I was approaching the finishing stages of my session on Solaris Cotainers at Hyderabad, my companion Laryngitis showed up with no mercy. My request to Sreekanth then was to perform a demo of an important concept that we had managed to discuss in the class. With no hesitation he stepped forward and not only performed a neat demo, but lectured fluently about it to rest of the audience. Do I need to tell how much helpful this act of his was to me! Thanks Sreekanth

Below you would see the entire audience who dropped in for the SA 355 S10 course concluded at Hyderabad on Saturday, the 7th February 2009:



I know I would need a few days voice rest to recover from this temporary voice loss. At times like this, I tend to rely a lot on pictures and writings to communicate. So if I've to tell you now, what I spoke at Hyderabad before my voice vanished on the last day of training, perhaps the picture below will speak out for me. Click on it to know more:


Have a good week ahead!

Four More Folks in the IDM 345 Club
Today I concluded a small batch on IDM 345 here in Bangalore. Published below is the batch photograph:



To know more details on Sun Java System Identity Manager, click here. In case, if you are looking for details on Identity Manager Certification, this is the place to go.

Sun Fire Midrange Server Training at Hyderabad
This evening I'm leaving a city where the father of Java would enlighten thousands of Java aficionados a couple of days forward to the Valentine's day this year in a grand event that's expected to bring a record number of developers under one roof. Well I'm no James Gosling to address an audience of thousands, but came to Hyderabad to teach half a dozen folks some lessons on Sun Fire Midrange Server . The course concludes today and I'm off to Bangalore, hoping to hit Hyderabad soon to find myself seated among a huge audience ,listening to James Gosling and several other distinguished speakers. My dear reader, while you make up your mind to plan and attend this years Sun Tech Days in India, I'll leave you with the batch photograph of this weeks batch at Hyderabad, concluding today.



And yeah, if you decide to take up the rare opportunity to see James Gosling and other visionaries of Sun share their thoughts, live, register for Sun Tech Days 2009 right here.

The First Java Programmer is in India Soon

Weekend Session on Solaris 10
A weekend session on Solaris 10 covering a Virtualization feature, SMF, Least Privilege model, ZFS and DTrace concluded in Bangalore last evening.



For those who haven't got hold of a copy of OpenSolaris 2008.11 Live CD, it's probably the time to do so. Click here and get one.

First Batch in CY '09
I'm glad to have kicked off this New Year with one of my favourite training programs:



I'm flying back to Bangalore from Mumbai tonight for a weekend session on Solaris

Sun Acquires Q-Layer
Sun announced the acquisition of Belgium based company Q-Layer, thereby expanding its cloud computing offerings. Read the full story here.

New Year Wishes!
Today being the last day of Year 2008, one would be pardoned to spend some portion of this day in recollections about the year that's passing by and for setting dreams and goal for the year that's coming by. It's not for the first time that we'd indulge in an exercise of this nature. Several New Years have come and gone, several resolutions made, several of them met, many ones broken. Life's giving us one more opportunity to correct our mistakes, celebrate yet another New Year, revise our goal to set it to a noble and the highest one, for which we shall always be thankful to the invisible power who has brought us all together in this third planet from Sun.

I'm certain, when we examine moments from our past (read Year 2008), we would have some that would bring smile on our face, some that would bring tears in our eyes, some that would disappoint us, some very frustrating moments and a few really promising ones. The very excitement in life lies perhaps in getting the taste of an equal measure of all dualities of existence. Naturally, it isn't wise to expect or hope for favourable events alone in the Year 2009 that we are about to welcome. We'd however wish that we get a fresh beginning for things that went awfully wrong in the past, gain a fresh momentum for our journey towards the desired destiny and a touch of freshness in our hope for a well balanced existence, devoid of terrible incidents as the ones that we witnessed in recent past. A New Year, without doubt, is one right occasion to produce such strong wishes and prayers.

Personally, I have had my share of success, failures, disappointments, excitements, joy and sorrow in the year that we are about to bid farewell to. But when I look back, the moments spent with my relatives, friends, colleagues,my training participants and all loved ones are the prominent memories that my mind generously throws up at me. To them, who have taken immense interest in me, I owe a lot and with a great sense of gratitude and affection, here is wishing them all a very happy, peaceful and prosperous Year 2009!

Sun Fire HES Training at Trichy
Published below is the batch photograph of the Sun Fire HES Training conducted at Trichy during the Christmas week: