Student Views and Reviews: Sun on Campus

Catch up on Sun in the news this week in the short segment below as Chhandomay Mandal and Maijaliisa Burkert review Amazon's new cloud storage offering based on MySQL open-source software, the 100 million download milestone OpenOffice.org hit this week, the announced availability of Sun investor proxy materials, and the new 3.0.10 maintenance release of VirtualBox.

Marc Moreau, a student at the University of Lethbridge and member of the OSUM community, has been playing with ZFS in OpenSolaris, which he recently installed as a guest OS through VirtualBox.  Marc has been curious to play in ZFS because he is interested in "seeing what it can really do."  

Marc has written an impressive blog about his experience in playing with ZFS, and also compiled some great reference articles he used as a learning tool. His objectives in trying out the system were to:

1. Install OpenSolaris on a Mirrored ZFS root partition
2. Write random data to disk and see what ZFS does
3. Learn some of the ZFS commands and how they work.

Marc began by learning how disks are labeled in Solaris and gives a quick summary in his writeup.  He then successfully got his system up and running by following instructions in articles he links to in his original blog.  After playing around with the different toys Marc noticed he had amassed some silent errors.  He wasn't surprised and states "we caused the errors, expected them to occur, and now we are happily rolling along as if nothing ever happened."

Check out Marc's blog to get the complete rundown on his installation, setup and testing along with links to helpful articles for anyone who is also interested in playing around in ZFS.  And thanks to Marc for writing such an informative review to share with the student community!  Please continue to send your reviews or how-to articles through my page in OSUM or by e-mailing me at reviews[dot]program[at]sun[dot]com.

Douglas Ramiro is a Sun Campus Ambassador at Catholic University in Brasilia, Brazil.  He is an Open Source and Java enthusiast with three certifications:

•  SCJA - Sun Certified Java Associated
•  SCJP - Sun Certified Java Programmer
•  LPIC 1 - Linux Professional Institute Certification 

Douglas has been writing a very informative series of blogs on how to install OpenSolaris in VirtualBox.  He begins with how to install VirtualBox, and follows that post with a three-part tutorial on how to install OpenSolaris.  In the tutorial he covers how to configure VirtualBox to boot a local image from OpenSolaris, and concludes with a step-by-step screen shot breakdown through the entire process to get OpenSolaris up and running on a virtual machine.  

I encourage everyone to check out his blog, his tutorial is quite well done.  

I also encourage everyone to write your own blogs and reviews about the different programs you are trying out -- whether it be in your student programs or on your own just for fun -- it is a great way to learn and teach at the same time!