Scott Dickson's Blog

I just spent the last four days in a ZFS Intenals TOI, given by George Wilson from RPE.  This just reinforces my belief that the folks who build OpenSolaris (and most any complex software product, actually) have a special gift.  How one can conceive of all of the various parts and pieces to bring together something as cool as OpenSolaris or ZFS or DTrace, etc., is beyond me.

By way of full disclosure, I ought to admit that the main thing I learned in graduate school and while working as a developer in a CO-OP job at IBM was that I hate development.  I am not cut out for it and have no patience for it.

Anyway, though, spending a week in the ZFS source actually helps you figure out how to best use the tool at a user level.  You how things fit together and this helps to figure out how to build solutions.  I got a ton of good ideas about some things that you might do with ZFS even without moving all of your data to ZFS.  Don't know whether they will pan out or not, but some ideas to play around with.  More about that later.

Same kind of thing applies for internals of the kernel.  Whether or not you are a kernel programmer, you can be a better developer and a better system administrator if you have a notion of how the pieces of the kernel fit together.  Sun Education is now offering a class called Solaris 10 Operating System, previously only offered internally at Sun.  Since Solaris has been open-sourced, the internal Internals is now and external Internals!  If you have a chance, take this class!  I take it every couple of Solaris releases and never regret it.

But, mostly I want to say a special thanks to George Wilson and the RPE team for putting together a fantastic training event and for allowing me, from the SE / non-developer side of the house to sit in and bask in the glow of those who actually make things for a living.

I caught the genealogy bug nearly 20 years ago. Not a typical thing for a single guy in his (then) twenties. Now married, my wife tolerates but does not share my obsession. Shame, since she has some really potentially interesting family lines to research.

The thing about searching for your family tree is that you never know quite what you might find! I saw a great blog entry today on The Genealogue that I had to share.  It quotes an article in the Saturday Times about one such search:

Maurice Kellner, a county officer for Genuki, the genealogical body for the UK and Ireland, reports how he helped a woman in Tasmania seeking facts about her family connection to the village of Wappenham, near Towcester. He found that one of her ancestors had been sentenced to be transported to Australia for committing unnatural acts with a cow. “I’m not sure if she was grateful or not because she never contacted me back,” he says. [Link]

I may have some characters in my background, but that's not something I've yet found!

I'm from the South. People in the south often have a different sort of appreciation for the American Civil War than those in the rest of the country. Like so many others here, I had ancestors who fought for the Confederacy. By my count, 1 lineal ancestor on Dad's side, 6 or 7 on Mom's side, and literally dozens of collateral ancestors.

I've been thinking about joining the Sons of Confederate Veterans. It's a lineage society ostensibly devoted to honoring our Confederate ancestors. Trouble is that sometimes it strays over into some pretty unacceptable areas. From what I have read, there has been a bit of a take-over in some parts by racial extremists. I really want nothing to do with that and find it really appalling.

But, I am torn still. I think going through the application process would help me get my research cleaned up. But, do I really want to join?

It's that old question of whether a few bad apples in a group can spoil the whole bunch. Lots of people think the same thing about church, but I would never consider not being active there. Is that a double standard? I just don't know.....

Got into SFO Sunday evening and went straightaway to the reception at the Hilton. It's always great to see the folks that you have worked with over the years and don't get to see very often. Networking is as important as anything else at these events. If social networking is important in a Web 2.0 world, it only got that way because social networking in our day to day life is how we get stuff accomplished.

Laura Ramsey and I hosted an OpenSolaris BOF at lunchtime. We had a pretty good crowd and had short, "lightning talks" from a number of folks

• Ienup Sung talked about Internationalization and Localization in OpenSolaris
• Ken Drachnik talked about Glassfish
• Jeff Savit talked about some cool stuff going on with ports of OpenSolaris to "alternative platforms." More on this as it is ready for prime time.
• Iwan Rahabok talked about Singanix and the OpenSolaris user group in Singapore
• Bruno Gillet talked about how he uses OpenSolaris as a tool to demonstrate new features that will appear in Solaris and how important OpenSolaris can be to Sun's engineers as a day-to-day too.

After lunch, the breakout sessions began, the real reason we come to CEC.

• I heard Jim Mauro talk (and make himself tired in a mad dash through more slides than minutes) on Solaris POD - Performance, Observability, and Debugging - tools.
• I saw a talk about new features in Sun Cluster 3.2 that make upgrades of not only the cluster, but also the OS and application easier and with less interruption in service.
• I saw two good talks on ZFS. One by Detlef Drewanz and Constantin Gonzalez on how they use ZFS and some of the reliability metrics around various configurations of disks. And one by Roch Bourbonais about some of the ZFS implementation details. That one just whet my appetite for a week long deep dive into ZFS internals I hope to attend in December.

Now, it's time to start again. Andy B. is on tap today for the general session. I plan to hear Richard Elling talk about RAS for sure, but I don't know what else. Busy, Busy, Busy!!

Technorati: cec2006

I had these grand intentions of writing some sort of brilliant synopsis of all the amazing things I had seen during the first day of CEC, but this CEC stuff will wear you right out! Long, long days full of firehoses to the brain make you just want to sleep. Couple that with the fact that the folks back home on east-coast time still want you do do your day job and be on con calls convenient to them. 5am and 6am calls start the day, followed by sessions until 7pm. The the after-session stuff goes on until late. Then you collapse in your room. But, wait... Didn't you commit to putting together a slide deck and sending it out before tomorrow morning. Gotta get that done. Finally to bed after 12, only to start again at 5am.....

It's a great opportunity to be here at CEC. Tons to see and hear and learn about that I can take home and use directly, but this CEC thing will wear you out!

Technorati: cec2006

I'm on my way, like so many others at Sun, to CEC 2006 on Sunday. Sounds like there will be nearly 3000 Sun engineers and architects from around the world convening at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. This year is the first time that I have attended without presenting a paper. Maybe I'll get to see more presentations this way!

One of the highlights of CEC is the many BOFs - Birds of a Feather sessions. Laura Ramsey and I are hosting a BOF for OpenSolaris on Monday over lunch. Plan is to have several Lightning Talks - 5-8 minute, very brief presentations on a variety of topics. We've got Lightning Talks lined up on Security, Trusted Extensions, I18N & L10N, Glassfish, and a bunch of other stuff. Shame we have only about an hour for the meeting. If you are CEC and are looking for a BOF to attend on Monday, try the OpenSolaris one!

Also like others, I am combining CEC with an Ambassador meeting, but for me it's OS Ambassadors rather than DC Ambassadors. 50 or so of us from around the world who focus on Solaris will get together with Solaris engineering and marketing. It's always a great meeting and a good time to see folks that you don't see very frequently.

So, look for a few more blog entries here on things that I see that might be interesting to pass along.

Technorati Tags: cec2006

The Atlanta OpenSolaris User Group met last Tuesday and it has taken me a week to get my head above water to mention it. Ryan Matteson from Earthlink, battling a nasty cold, did a great job. His presentation was on Brendan Gregg's DTrace Toolkit and how system administrators can make good use of DTrace. His slides are on his blog here on prefetch.net. We ended up with about 25 people for this meeting.

Thanks to our sponsor for this meeting, Forsythe Systems, for providing refreshments.

The next meeting of the Atlanta OpenSolaris User Group will be Tuesday, Oct. 10, in the Sun office in Alpharetta, GA. More details are here.

My granddad is 86. He decided a few weeks ago that he wants to be able to send email to his grandkids and great-grandkids. So, at 86, he bought a PC! Now, he's got it all set up, with DSL service into the assisted-living facility where he lives. And he's raring to go! I think this is really cool.

Granddad worked for and around the railroads for years and always has loved the switching yard. Years ago, he tried to get going with a Timex Sinclair to manage his model railroad switching yard, but that didn't work out too well It was the eternal problem of lack of application availability to do what you want to do.

I think this time things will go much more smoothly, especially with Granddad's new pacemaker (which he got yesterday). I hope to be sending him email by the end of the week!

Way to go, Granddad!

The next meeting of the Atlanta OpenSolaris User Group will be Tuesday, Sept 12, at 7 PM in the offices of Sun Microsystems. Sun is located at 3655 North Point Parkway in Alpharetta, GA. For directions and details, see the ATLOSUG web site at http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/os_user_groups/atl-osug/

The topic for this meeting will be the DTrace Toolkit. Ryan Matteson, of Earthlink, will present. The DTrace Toolkit is a collection of tools built on top of DTrace for system and application monitoring and observation.

Please RSVP to Scott.Dickson@sun.com if you plan to attend. We need to have at least a rough count for refreshments.

ZFS on a box like the SunFire X4500 is way cool. But what if all you have is old, controller-based storage devices? George Wilson and I were wondering about that and thought it might be useful to do some experimentation down that line. So, we collected all of the currently unused storage in my lab and built a big ZFS farm. We've got a V480 with 7 T3B and 8 T3 bricks connected via Sanbox-1 switches, along with a couple of TB of IBM Shark storage recabled to be JBOD. I have a 3510 and maybe some Adaptec RAID storage that I can hook up eventually.

So, the server is up and running with a 3 racks of storage, keeping the lab nice and toasty. Now what?!

What might be the best way to manage the T3s in a ZFS world? As a first pass, I split each brick into 2 RAID5 LUNs with a shared spare drive. But, maybe I would be better off just creating a single stripe with no RAID in the T3 and let ZFS handle the mirroring. But, I've had a number of disk errors (these are all really, really, really old) that the T3 fixed on its own w/o bothering the ZFS pool. Maybe RAID5 in the brick is the right approach. I could argue either way.

Feel free to share your suggestions on what might be a good configuration here and why. I'm happy to test out several different approaches.

It's mid-July and for me, that's still time for the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts in State College, Pennsylvania. CPFA is a great break in the middle of the summer. Like so many things in Central PA, part of its great appeal is the fact that so much stays the same year after year after year. Friday night means gathering on the lawn of Penn State's Old Main and listen to Cartoon followed by a sing-along with Ernie and the Phyrst Family. Cartoon broke up over twenty years ago. And the Phyrst Family has been leading their sing-alongs to drunken crowds of students and alums for forty years at least!

I guess there's a lot of comfort in finding something that feels like home and sticking with it. Penn State and central Pennsylvania is like that. Happy Valley is a beautiful place and is very comfortable. So many people have come there for what they thought would be a short time and stay forever. Ken Hall, a good friend of mine arrived there in 1935, intending to stay for a few months to make some money to go to undertaker school. He ended up making sandwiches at the Hotel State College for almost sixty years.

This year, there's a special treat. If you are around Central PA today (July 14), head out to Tussey Mountain to check out the reunion show for Koehler Bay. Sylvia and Marilyn are well worth the trip. I used to go see them play anytime they played. Many Fridays, after playing happy hours, Sylvia and a bunch of us would go somewhere to make nachos and play Pictionary (I can't believe I admitted that in public!). Marilyn is the sultry-voiced, comedic front for the band, while Sylvia is the more retiring, extremely talented guitar player and songwriter. "Point of Contention" still rocks!

Yeah, I guess I am feeling sort of nostalgic for State College. Before long, it will be time for the Grange Fair and Hewlett's hot sausage sandwiches, apple dumplings, and people living in the same tent that they have used for 100 years. But, at the end of the day, while it's great to visit, it's so much better to be here, in Roswell, with Kathleen, at Sun. No regrets.

The Atlanta OpenSolaris User Group had a great monthly meeting last night Alok Aggarwal presented on NFSv4 to a group of about 15 and fielded quite a lot of questions ranging from how NFSv4 works to how to use the DTrace provider for NFSv4. Good meeting. Check http://opensolaris.org/os/community/os_user_groups/atl-osug/ for slides and meeting details.

No cake and pictures this month, but a big Thank-You to Intelligent Technology Systems for sponsoring us this month and bringing the pizza.

Our next meeting will be August 8 in the Alpharetta, Georgia Sun office. Check the ATLOSUG web site for details and directions.

The Atlanta OpenSolaris User Group launched a bit of an early birthday celebration for our good friend, OpenSolaris, last night with a rousing meeting. George Wilson, from Sun's Revenue Products Engineering group, gave us an update on what's new in ZFS lately. I have to say that I am more and more impressed with the things that you can and will be able to do with ZFS. George and I were talking about how one might use promotion of cloned ZFS filesystems as a part of a Q/A and patching process, especially for zones sitting in a ZFS filesystem. I am not yet sure of exactly how all of this might work, but I think it has promise.

George also talked about using ZFS for the root filesystem and booting from a ZFS filesystem. Also very cool. Seems to me like this has a lot of benefits. You never will have to go through the pain of backing up and restoring a root drive to resize /var or /opt! Plus, you get the added safety and security of ZFS. Old-timers who want to see a root disk that looks like a simple disk may have to rethink things a little, but I think the added benefits will outweigh the effort of change.

After George's talk, I took the stage and talked about integrating Zones and ZFS. I'm pretty excited about this. On the one hand, being able to use ZFS to provide application data space to a zone allows the zone administrator to take on the responsibility of managing their own filesystems to fit their needs, without bothering the global platform adminstrator. On the other hand, using ZFS for the zoneroot, I can easily and quickly create new zones, cloning them from a master, using ZFS properties to keep them from stomping on one another. All very cool. I have to congratulate the whole ZFS team (and the Zones team).

I am looking forward to our next meeting - July 11 - when we will hear from Alok Aggarwal on NFSv4. We got a good list of suggested topics that should keep us going through the fall.

The Atlanta OpenSolaris User Group is having its next meeting on Tuesday, June 13, at 7:00 PM in the Alpharetta, GA Sun Office. Details and directions can be found at http://opensolaris.org/os/community/os_user_groups/atl-osug/

Our speakers for this meeting will be George Wilson from Sun's engineering group talking about ZFS as a Root Filesystem, and Scott Dickson talking about integrating ZFS and Zones.

Come out and help us celebrate the 1st birthday of OpenSolaris!

Sometimes weird ideas occur to me while I'm on airplanes. The other day, while flying to a customer engagement, I was thinking about the fact that customers often ask about how to manage usernames and passwords between the global zone and non-global zones in Solaris 10. Certainly, you can use a centrally managed solution such as LDAP or NIS, but many of these customers don't have anything like that. Moreover, they only have a few users on any particular system and want all of the users in the global zone to be known in the non-global zones as well.

So, this got me to thinking. What if we use loopback mounts for things like /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow? Hey, yeah! That's the ticket! That might work! If I make a readonly mount of these files, I bet I can access them in the non-global zone. If I make then read-only, they end up being managed from the global zone, and less likely to be a security problem.

And what about /etc/hosts? Well, probably there's DNS, but not necessarily. I have customers who have 50,000+ line host files. They would love to share these, too. So, why not mount /etc/inet while we're at it?

Here's what I did. I have a zone called z4 whose zoneroot is located at /zones/z4. I had already created this zone previously, so I will just use zonecfg to make some modifications to the existing zone:

global# mv /zones/z4/root/etc/passwd /zones/z4/root/etc/passwd.safe
global# mv /zones/z4/root/etc/shadow /zones/z4/root/etc/shadow.safe
zonecfg -z z4
zonecfg:z4> add fs
zonecfg:z4:fs> set dir=/etc/passwd
zonecfg:z4:fs> set special=/etc/passwd
zonecfg:z4:fs> set type=lofs
zonecfg:z4:fs> add options [ro,nodevices]
zonecfg:z4:fs> end
zonecfg:z4> add fs
zonecfg:z4:fs> set dir=/etc/shadow
zonecfg:z4:fs> set special=/etc/shadow
zonecfg:z4:fs> set type=lofs
zonecfg:z4:fs> add options [ro,nodevices]
zonecfg:z4:fs> end
zonecfg:z4> add fs
zonecfg:z4:fs> set dir=/etc/inet
zonecfg:z4:fs> set special=/etc/inet
zonecfg:z4:fs> set type=lofs
zonecfg:z4:fs> add options [ro,nodevices]
zonecfg:z4:fs> end
zonecfg:z4> verify
zonecfg:z4> commit
zonecfg:z4> ^D

When I boot up the zone and take a look at what's mounted, I now see this:

# uname -a
SunOS z4 5.10 Generic_Patch i86pc i386 i86pc
# zonename
z4
# df -h
Filesystem             size   used  avail capacity  Mounted on
/                      5.9G   3.5G   2.3G    61%    /
/dev                   5.9G   3.5G   2.3G    61%    /dev
/etc/inet              5.9G   3.5G   2.3G    61%    /etc/inet
/etc/passwd            5.9G   3.5G   2.3G    61%    /etc/passwd
/etc/shadow            5.9G   3.5G   2.3G    61%    /etc/shadow
/lib                   5.9G   3.5G   2.3G    61%    /lib
/opt                   3.9G   1.6G   2.3G    42%    /opt
/platform              5.9G   3.5G   2.3G    61%    /platform
/sbin                  5.9G   3.5G   2.3G    61%    /sbin
/usr                   5.9G   3.5G   2.3G    61%    /usr
proc                     0K     0K     0K     0%    /proc
ctfs                     0K     0K     0K     0%    /system/contract
swap                   1.5G   240K   1.5G     1%    /etc/svc/volatile
mnttab                   0K     0K     0K     0%    /etc/mnttab
/usr/lib/libc/libc_hwcap2.so.1
                       5.9G   3.5G   2.3G    61%    /lib/libc.so.1
fd                       0K     0K     0K     0%    /dev/fd
swap                   1.5G     0K   1.5G     0%    /tmp
swap                   1.5G    16K   1.5G     1%    /var/run

Now, I can log directly into the zone using the same username and password as the global zone. This seems like it could be pretty cool. /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, and /etc/inet are all mount points from the global zone.I am not sure that it's really useful. What does anyone else think? Is this a technique that should be strongly discouraged? Or something that we need to document and encourage?

One thing that this makes me think of is a potential RFE for zonecfg. It would be nice to be able to somehow have an include operator, so that you can pull in common segments to be added to each zone configuration. But maybe the right way to do this is to just do this in a script.

Thoughts? Comments?

Gotta take this as an opportunity to brag on my little brother!

Dr. Marcus Wren Dickson, Ph.D., associate professor of Industrial and Organizational Psychology at Wayne State University, received the Distinguished Teaching Contributions Award from the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology.

This award is given to recognize excellence in teaching, excellence in student accomplishments, and excellence in teaching-related activities. And all of this has to be done while maintaining research excellence as well. After all, in a university setting, research is still one of the very top priorities. So, that says a lot. It says that the recipient of this award is able to balance teaching and research, and to excell in both. It says that he not only is able to do the research, but to pass it on to the next generation of students in an effective and compelling way. It says that he is able to inspire students to go on to produce quality work of their own. And it says that he is a part of the community, building up the total through his efforts.

Seems like this whole idea of a Creative Commons that we talk about in the Open Source world really applies in a lot of other areas. Research is built on the shoulders of those who went before and is typically a collaborative effort. Teaching involves bringing together ideas and concepts and presenting them in a way so as to be compelling to others, so that they can in turn build on those ideas.

Anyway, Marcus keeps his own blog, about all of his travels while on sabbatical. He says he does it out of self-defense so as not to have to write the same letter or email over and over. He's been traveling all over the world this year. He goes to Amsterdam, I go to Jackson, Mississippi. He goes to Taipei, I go to Conway, Arkansas, half-way between Toad Suck and Pickles Gap. As you can see from his picture, he's quite the baseball fan, too. Marcus plays in a vintage baseball league at Greenfield Village near Detroit. They play baseball as it was played in 1867 - authentic rules, gear, cheers (Huzzah! Huzzah!), even an authentic band.

But, I digress. I could go on about the abstract for Marcus presentation for the teaching award, or that he is co-principal investigator in the GLOBE Project, a 62-nation study of leadership and culture, or give you lists of his publications and areas of interest. But, what I really want to say today is how proud I am of my little brother, little goofball that he is. He's turned out pretty much ok. He's a proud father of a great son, a respected professional, and a good guy. It's hard to believe that he not only has a PhD, but is a tenured professor, and has been one long enough to be on sabbatical this year! I guess that makes me old, too.

I can't believe that I've let things go so far away from me that my last post was in November. Here it is May already! Lots of news from ATLOSUG (Atlanta OpenSolaris User Group). Since November, we have had a couple of meetings in January and March, moved around trying to find a better venue.

The last meeting was a great overview of ZFS, given by George Wilson, one of the engineers involved in the port of ZFS from Nevada back to Solaris 10. This was the first meeting held at the Sun office in Alpharetta, Georgia. Had a great turnout. Lots of discussion and questions. We could have gone on for another hour or more. Expect to hear more from George on ZFS in the coming months.

The next meeting of ATLOSUG will be May 9 at 7PM at the Sun office. Check the ATLOSUG site for directions and details. Matrix Resources is sponsoring this meeting for us, and we thank them for their support (and for the refreshments!). Our topic for this meeting is BrandZ - Running Linux applications in a Solaris zone. Expect to see some slides, and then a bunch of demos of how to build, install branded zones, running applications in zones, and then some cool interactions of zones and ZFS, zones and DTrace.

Another piece of news regarding the ATLOSUG, starting with the May meeting, we are altering the schedule to meet monthly rather bimonthly. Seems like there is enough going on and enough people interested to keep us going at that pace. So, the next meeting will be June 12, at the Sun office.

Regarding the location, admittedly, in the Atlanta area, meeting locations are a challenge. As a stand-alone user group, we need a meeting location that doesn't cost very much, is accessible in the evening, and is as convenient to some large portion of the city as possible. Meeting downtown or midtown is inconvenient to many folks on the north side. Meeting on the north side (at the Sun office, for example) makes attendance near impossible for ITP folks. Clearly, around the Perimeter is the best bet, but everything we have found so far is expensive. So, if you have an idea for a location on the top end of the perimeter that's cheap, accessible, and available, please let me know.

And to anyone in Atlanta, we look forward to seeing you on May 9!

The Atlanta OpenSolaris User Group kicked off last night with just over 50 attendees! There were about 30 who had signed up beforehand, and I would have been happy with 20 for this first meeting. I was floored that we had SRO. All the food was gone; all the soda was gone; all the shirts were gone!

The crowd braved the fierce Atlanta traffic to convene at the Crowne Plaza Ravinia hotel. Our future meetings will be held on campus at Georgia Tech, where we hope that students will get involved with OpenSolaris. As it turns out, the Atlanta Telecom Professionals were having their annual awards Gala at the same hotel, so it really was a case of braving the crowds and traffic.

But, just over 50 people turned out from all over town. Customers, iForce partners, recruiters, integrators, universities, commercial, Sun engineers - all sorts of folks.

As this was an organizational event, we talked about meeting mechanics, frequency, etc. As I said, our future meetings, held the 2nd Tuesday of odd-numbered months, will be in the Georgia Tech Student Center in mid-town Atlanta at 7:00PM, with networking and refreshments starting around 6:30. We're taking a lesson from the venerable Atlanta Unix Users Group and not trying to get complicated or fancy in our structure. Each meeting will include time for discussion, Q&A, and a presentation. We invite partners to sponsor meetings and help defray the cost of the refreshments, etc.

Our kickoff presentation was an overview of OpenSolaris. Much thanks to Jerry Jelinek, whose slides provided a lot of background. You can find a recap of the meeting with photos and the slides here.

I think we're off to a great start! We have sponsors fighting over who gets to sponsor upcoming meetings, and we have speakers volunteering for most of the next year already! We may have to meet more frequently to get the speakers in.

Thanks so much to the folks who have been a great help, and will continue to be a great help - Crystal Nichols from Intelligent Technology Systems for covering logistics, and to George Wilson and Don Deal from Sun's Sustaining Engineering group for technical backup.

We'll see everyone at the next meeting on January 10!

We are kicking off an OpenSolaris User Group in the Atlanta area. Several customers have asked me about whether such a thing existed. Since it didn't, we're starting one! The first meeting will be on Tuesday, November 8, 7:00-9:00 PM, at the Crowne Plaza Ravinia hotel in Atlanta.

Subsequent meetings will be on the campus of Georgia Tech, in the Student Center (the room was already booked for the first meeting). We will meet on the second Tuesday of January, March, May, July, September, and November (every other month).

Both the web site and email discussion list are live already.

For the kickoff meeting, I will talk about OpenSolaris, what it is, and how to get involved. But we hope to have community members present at many of our subsequent meetings. Ryan Matteson from Earthlink has already volunteered to speak about an article he wrote on the DTrace Toolkit.

We hope that anyone in the Atlanta area interested in OpenSolaris, as well as the commercially distributed Solaris, will come by help us get a great start!

This week is the annual meeting of the Hudson Family Association. The HFA is a genealogical society that researches Hudson and Hutson families in the US, primarily focusing on the South. We get together every year for a couple of days. The annual meeting consists of workshops on genealogical techniques and resources, research opportunities, a banquet, and just getting to see folks. Our meeting this year is in sunny Tupelo, Mississippi, birthplace of The King, Elvis Presley. I have heard that perhaps Elvis might even grace us with his presence this year!

One of the big topics this year is the Hudson DNA project. The HFA has been encouraging direct male Hudson members, particularly in key family lines, to have their DNA tested and recorded. In this way, we have been able to both verify relationships exist and to verify that supposed relationships do not exist, that presumed brothers are in fact not related. Pretty exciting results.

Now, if only I could connect my Hudson family into *any* of the lines that the HFA researches......

For the past several years, I have been associated with the Disciple Bible Study program at my church, Roswell United Methodist, first as a student, and for the last two years as a leader. This year, I will be leading Disciple IV on Monday nights. The Disciple series of studies are typically concurrent with the school year and include daily reading, prayer and reflection, and a group meeting for 2 1/2 hours weekly. The focus of the whole series can best be summed up in the title of the first study "Becoming Disciples Through Bible Study." There are four foundation classes in the Disciple series. Disciple I is prerequisite for all the others, but once you take Disciple I, you have the necessary foundation to take the others in any order. The four foundation classes are

• Disciple I: Becoming Disciples Through Bible Study - Survey of the entire Bible
• Disciple II: Into the Word, Into the World - Genesis, Exodus, Luke, and Acts in some depth. This course challenges students to hear and respond to the call of God to go in service into the world.
• Disciple III: Remember Who You Are - The Old Testament prophets and the letters of Paul teach us how to live as Christians in today’s world.
• Disciple IV: Under the Tree of Life - The Writings of the Old Testament and, from the New Testament, the gospel of John and the Revelation.

Many United Methodist churches offer Disciple, as well as many other churches. In Roswell, the United Presbyterian Church also offers the classes. If you are looking for a deeper understanding of your faith and what the Bible says to you, I highly recommend this class. The commitment of time and effort is substantial, but so is the reward.

It's been a long time since my last blog. I feel like I have been on the road now for months, travelling about the South, talking about Solaris. Every where I go, folks are excited about Solaris 10, Open Solaris, Solaris running on x86 / x64. After being an OS Ambassador at Sun for 10 years, it's finally fashionable to focus on the OS. And that's a lot of fun.

Many of us OS Ambassadors have been presenting roughly six hours of Solaris 10 technical overview at a series of Solaris 10 Boot Camps held across the country. If one is in your area, try to take it in. Even if you are already a Solaris junkie, this is a great way to meet other folks in your area also interested in S10. For the most part, these events are hosted by colleges and universities and held on-campus, but are open to the community at large. I've been doing these in Florida, so far, and plan to travel to Mississippi for one next week. Who would have thought that there would be excitement for Solaris 10 in Mississippi?! But, we have between 50 and 100 people signed up in Jackson, MS for our event. There are a couple of these events planned for the West Coast (San Diego and Santa Clara, I think), as well as Atlanta, in the next month or so.

On top of the Boot Camps, I have visited dozens of customers, both very, very large, and very, very small, and everything in-between. Even if the customer is not currently running Solaris, Solaris 10, especially running on x86 hardware, is something that *they call us to hear about*! I've visited customers in Georgia, Tennessee, Florida, Alabama, Virginia in the last couple of months and the reception has always been the same - "This is way cool!"

It looks like my task for the next year will be focused around helping customers get Solaris 10 integrated into their environments. That's a pleasant task, to my way of thinking.

It's times like this that continue to make me happy to be at Sun and happy to be associated with Solaris and the people who make Solaris possible.

Monday morning was the final half-day of the Sun Customer Engineering Conference. We rounded out this morning with two breakout sessions and some time chatting with Scott McNealy. The breakouts I made this morning were particularly good. I started with Liane Praza giving a talk about SMF for Administrators. SMF is one of the particularly powerful new sets of features in Solaris 10 and Liane gave a great presentation on how all the pieces fit together. I can see a lot of promise for ISVs integrating their application software with SMF for higher levels of availability. One question that came to mind is "what sort of applications would be well served by having their own custom delegated restarter?" One possible area I thought of would be telco network applications. These sorts of apps often require special processing and go to great lengths to provide very high levels of reliability. Maybe having a delegated restarter based on the particular types of transactions, these core network apps could provide even higher levels of reliability. My second breakout was another view of server consolidation, this one being a session on lessons learned through an internal project to move internal applications to consoldiated environments using zones. One thing that comes out over and over is that no matter the server consolidation approach being used, planning and operational maturity are the key components to a successful deployment. One interesting comment from this session is that the group doing the deployment felt like they could make better progress and show positive ROI more quickly by approaching things in small, achievable chunks - 20-30 apps at a time, rather than a huge enterprise-wide analysis and deployment. We finished out the morning with a presentation by Scott McNealy, with a pretty good question and answer session. Like Jonathan's, Scott's talk is always a highlight of this event. I believe that the senior executives at Sun really value the contribution, and understand the significance of the contribution, of the technology organizations in the field. All in all, this was a great event. I'm definately heading home with a big list of things to try to work on in my _copious spare time._ There are so many gems hidden down in Solaris that deserve attention so that I can share them with my customers. It's sort of like the guy who works at the hardware store. He has to know from his own experience the basics of what he sells, but he also has to know from study and listening to other customers what all of the other mysterious and arcane items he might have in stock do and how to use them. Now, time to move to meeting two - OS Ambassadors for most of the rest of the week. That's always an exciting meeting. But for both of these, you end up tired! As invigorated as I always am after the meetings, I am also glad to get home!

When I have to be away for the weekend, travelling for work, I make a point to still go to church. Sometimes it feels kind of perfunctory, but other times, it is really a blessing. For several years, it seemed that I was always at an OS Ambassador meeting or some other sort of meeting on Ash Wednesday. So, I attended Ash Wednesday services at First United Methodist Church in Palo Alto. This church is shared by a Tongan and a Fijian congregation and the Ash Wednesday service with the soul-shaking music from the islands is something I won't forget. But that's another story. Today, I went to Glide Memorial United Methodist Church in downtown San Francisco. This was like no other service I have ever attended. The congregation was a cross-section of San Francisco - young, old, straight, gay, white, black, hispanic, asian. And like the song says, _surely the presence of the Lord is in this place; I can feel His mighty power and his grace._ I don't know a lot about Glide, but it seems like this church is a real force for good in downtown San Francisco. I usually attend the traditional Sunday morning worship at my home church. I find that the old hymns and the traditional liturgy really touch me. We also have a contemporary service that I attend from time to time. But the service at Glide is a rocking gospel service! Bluesman John Turk led the music and was joined by the Glide Ensemble. The excitement and enthusiasm were everywhere in the church. Living in the South, it feels like a smaller proportion of the folks in the Bay area are "church people," but the folks at Glide were a welcome surprise. The service opened with Fanny Crosby's classic Pass Me Not, Oh Gentle Savior, and the singing continued for 45 minutes. The Reverend Douglas Fitch preached on Cosmic Dreamers, using the text from Genesis 37 where Joseph's dream stirs up jealousy in his brothers. Dr. Fitch was rounding out Black History Month talking about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a cosmic dreamer in the line of Joseph. He talked about how cosmic dreamers challenge us to take the abstract dreams and bring them into the concrete, how they present to us up close and personal just exactly what God has in mind for us. I kept thinking that he was going to connect all of this to the life of Jesus, but he never did. But, he did say one thing that really stuck with me. Dr. Fitch said that it is easier to honor the dead than it is to follow the living. We tend to make a cult of admiration for the cosmic dreamer cut down for the dreams that they have. And that's the easy thing. Much more difficult is to recognize the power of the dreamer while they are still living and serve and follow them while still alive. That got me to thinking about our relationship to Jesus, too. So many people focus on the death of Jesus and honor the dead for the sacrifice Jesus made. But in this season of Lent, as we prepare to celebrate and remember the events of Jesus Passion, that the dream does not end on Good Friday with the cross. It begins again on Easter with the Resurrection! So, we are challenged: will we honor the dead Jesus, or follow and serve the living Jesus? Even though that wasn't the actual core of Dr. Fitch's messsage, it was the question I came away with.

Day Two of the CEC is Sunday, 2/27. Like other days, we begin with general sessions, but I missed the early ones. I "cut class" and went to church at Glide Memorial United Methodist Church. Great service and I am glad that I went. More about that later. Finally got to the CEC in time to hear Andy Bechtolsheim and John Fowler's general session about where Sun is going with Opteron servers. David Yen, EVP of Sun's Scalable Systems Group, explained how CMT works and where Sun is going with our upcoming CMT systems. Right after lunch, I had the second round of my BART presentation. Pretty good turnout, I think. Probably about 35 people. BART is one of those little gems in Solaris that people overlook. After my talk, I caught several good talks this afternoon. First one was on the new way that Sun will distribute updates for Solaris 10. This looks to be a real improvement over the current tools and practices. The second talk was on metering and accounting resource usage for utility computing, aka in this case chargeback. The key here is extended accounting and its ability to report usage by task, project, or zone. Exacct is something that I have been intending to look more closely at for a while. Now, I think it's time to do that. Third talk was about the Fault Manager in Solaris 10 given by Mike Shapiro. The more I look at FMA and hear the plans for this, the more impressive this technology is. One more half day tomorrow morning, finishing up with a visit with Scott McNealy. Last year at CEC, Scott (like Jonathan this year) was very open with us. I'm looking forward to that. But, CEC is only the first part of the week for me. Tuesday to Thursday, the OS Ambassadors, a group of roughly 50 Solaris specialists worldwide , will meet or a short mini-conference. We are taking advantage of the fact that most of us are in town for CEC to catch up for a few days. So, looks like a busy week, too.

Each day at the CEC start with general session, presentations from the leaders and executives at Sun. This gives all of us the opportunity to hear what is the execs are saying to customers and what they are up to. This morning, we started out with our hosts, Dr. Jim Baty, CTO of the Client Solutions organization, and Hal Stern, CTO of Client Network Services. Next up, Bob MacRitchie, Executive VP of Global Sales, and Marissa Peterson, EVP for Client Network Services, gave us an update on the state of the union from their vantage point. The highlight of the morning was a very open and candid question and answer session with Jonathan Schwartz. Someone wrote in a blog not to long ago, and I aplogize for forgetting the author, that one of the really great things about being at Sun is the freedom to speak your mind and ask the tough questions up and down the line. The group of folks here at the CEC are the engineers who are with customers every day, who see the ultimate effects of decisions made at the top levels of the company. And this group is anything but shy. Jonathan gave us a very brief talk about where he sees Sun, what the company's priorities are, and where we are going. Then, in a move not many company presidents would do, he opened the floor to an hour of honest question and answer in a room filled with 3000 opinionated engineers. Jonathan met every question head on. He didn't dodge or discount anyone's opinion. In fact, he often amplified the feelings expresses, saying that he had hear that same issue from other people, from other customers. And he validated people's feelings, letting us know that he has had many of the same frustrations as we in the field face. He talked honestly about what has gone into many difficult decisions over the last few years. He talked honestly about where we and our produces have been and where we are going. I've been at Sun for a long time, and it's things like this that keep me here and keep me excited and optimistic about being at Sun. I'm as opinionated as the next guy, and I have my own ideas about what's good and bad at Sun, but when our top executives talk to us honestly, it really makes me glad to be here. Break Out Sessions The big problem at the CEC is the fact that there are so many sessions that look like they will be really good and so little time. You have to pick and choose carefully. You have to move quickly and be aggressive to get into the most exciting talks. I tried to get into the talk on Sun's new Update Manager, the new mechanism for delivering patches and system updates. But every seat, every spot along the wall was filled and another dozen people were crowded around the door trying to hear the talk. I guess I have to get the slides for that on. I got to hear Claire Giordano talk about Open Solaris and all that we are doing there. This is a talk I have heard before, but I find it valuable to hear the conversation around Open Solaris. After all in the open source world, it often is as much about the conversation as it is about the source. As soon as Claire's talk was over, the doors burst open and hundreds of folks rushed in to try to get seats. Turns out the next presentation in that room was Andy Bechtolsheim, Sun badge number 1. Everyone wants to hear what he is up to. Next up was Grand Holland and Ed Turner, a couple of local Atlanta guys, talking about a project they have been working on called Service Configuration and Deployment Engine. This is a pretty cool effort to glue together packages and processes in the deployment and management of services and servers. I mostly wanted to see this since I've loaned a rack of gear in the Atlanta lab to Grant's team and I've wondered what they are doing. It's always fun to hear these guys. Grant is so wicked smart, and someone always asks a question that sets him to thinking of a whole new set of opportunities, that it's always a good show. The last talk I saw on Saturday was about the Solaris on x86 boot process. Like many sessions, this was packed. Everyone knows all about how SPARC systems boot, but many of us are just becoming familiar with the ins and outs of BIOS and x86 boot process. For the last session of the day, it was time for me to give my talk on BART. I had a pretty good crowd, but certainly not SRO. BART is the basic audit & reporting tool in Solaris 10. It's a simple tool that allows you to detect any changed files on a system. Pretty full day for sure.

Arrived in San Francisco early in the day on Friday for CEC2005. This first day (well, zeroth day) of the CEC is really just to get folks here, get reacquainted with folks you've not seen in a while. We had a short session on "The State of the Union" where each of the organizations involved in the CEC had a chance to meet with its leadership and get an update on what's going on. For my group, Client Solutions, this was particularly interesting, being a new organization this year. At the last Network Computing launch event and Analyst Conference, Chris Ostertag, Sr. VP for Client Solutions, introduced this organization to the analyst community. CSO is the result of bringing together the field-based presales engineering team with the professional services delivery team. This is a pretty major and far-raching undertaking. So, for the CSO State of the Union, each of the heads of the various disciplines gave a brief update on and make sure it matches the voice coming from the trenches. Spent the rest of the evening at the Welcome reception, reconnecting with folks. The best part of a big, worldwide event like this is getting to network with people that you don't often see, otherwise. Seems like everyone I talked to is finding huge interest from their customers in Solaris 10. Lots of us who work in that space are moving from spending our time introducing Solaris 10 to doing more in-depth engagements to talk about how exactly a customer might move forward with a consolidation effort using zones, or might use DTrace to optimize an application, or might take advantage of the Service Management Facility for better application management on their systems. Rounded out the day with a bit of planning for the rest of the weekend. Sessions kick of for real at 8:00 AM on Saturday morning. There are hundreds of breakout sessions given by my peers. One of the good things about the new Client Solutions organization is that new job roles help focus which sessions will be most useful. I'm now focused on Solaris and smaller servers. While I still think big servers are cool, I can skip those and narrow my focus a little. Even so, there are still far more sessions than I can attend. Luckily, I think we are recording sessions so I can catch them later on. At the very least, I can get the slides. My tentative list of topics that I want to see today has been narrowed down to: * Volume Server Performance Analysis * OpenSolaris * Sun's New Update Manager * Compliance - Technical view of Lifecycle Management * Reducing Service time with the Diagnistic Boot CD * A Basic Introduction to Reliable Computing * New & Upcoming Server Hardware * DTrace - This is Clive King and Jon Haslam. Definately don't want to miss it! * The Solaris x86 boot process * Transitioning NIS to LDAP and Issues * Performance monitory for Solaris on SPARC, Solaris on X86, and Linux * Solaris 10 Service Management Facility * Trusted Solaris - Simple, Powerful Security * BART - Basic Audit Reporting Tool * Report on Sun's internal POC with Zones and Solaris 10 From that big list, I think I get to pick 5 if I want to stay the whole session. More on what I see later.

My grandparents, Robert & Susan Dickson, will celebrate their 65th wedding anniversary this week. So far as I can tell, they are just as in love now as they were in this picture, taken in 1940. I am so happy to be able to share in their special day. Family and friends will gather for an open house and reception after church on Sunday to wish them well. I look forward to the day when my wife and I can look back on our long years of marriage. Everybody has ups and downs. Grandmother & Granddad have no doubt had good times and bad, good health and poor, great happiness and great sadness. Besides the joys of marriage, birth of children, and all the other happy moments, over the years, they have buried their parents, eleven brothers and sisters between them, and a son. But they have always remained steadfast in their love for each other and their love for their family. They have remained active in their church for all of these years, too. I am proud beyond words to be their grandson.

Sun's annual CEC conference is coming up next weekend. A couple thousand Sun engineers from around the world will get together in San Francisco for this event. This is the main event for Sun engineers from the field to share what we are doing, what we have learned, what works well, neat tricks of the trade, etc. Engineers who work in service, in sales, and in delivery all present at the CEC. A number of us will be blogging from the CEC about the papers we see, what we learn, etc. I'll try to give an account of all I see. I hope that Clive King and Jon Haslam are presenting on DTrace again. They were hands down the best talk I saw last year. These guys get nearly as excited about DTrace as Bryan does! I'll be presenting on *BART, the Basic Audit Reporting Tool*. BART allows you to detect changes in groups of files and filesystems over time. One obvious (and intended) use is to alert the administrator to any unintended changes to key files, whether malicious or not. So, watch this space for new reports coming from the conference.

I spent this past weekend visiting my brother, Marcus, and nephew, Michael. He's a very bright and energetic seven-year-old. Gets excited about all kinds of techy things like Bionicles, Transformers, etc. Looking at my pictures from the trip, I found this great one of Michael and the Ferrari. See the Solaris boot messages? In the battle for hearts and minds, you have to start early! Looks like it's up to Uncle Scott to make sure Michael finds out about the *right kind* of computing. If we can find a way to run SSX Tricky on Solaris, then we are good to go. Hmmm... Who was it that ported Quake?