I found out late Sunday that my presentation was Monday instead of Tuesday. Not a problem! I was working off of a set of slides that Doug McCallum had put together for an internal presentation on just the sharemgr work. I tied it together with my work by looking at a case study on unshareall. You can read all about it here: The Management of Shares.

What was really interesting for me was the contrast between what I presented and what was presented before me. The discussion before mine was a heated debate about the state of pnfs and NFSv4.1. This stuff is in the early design phase. By that I mean there are prototypes which interoperate to a degree, but the spec is changing.

Anyway, my presentation was not on that technical level. And I felt a little bit indifference to what I was talking about. I presented a very simple problem, one that when the design was drafted, made perfect sense. And I talked about how we are keeping the spirit of the design intact and fixing what will be a performance issue.

I felt better after the presentation when two different people approached me and told me how they had similar issues facing them. They were interested in the approaches Doug and I took to solve our problems. One of them even took an OpenSolaris starter kit in order to look at how Doug solved his management problems. In short, this was a big win for OpenSolaris. By the way, I had plenty of people asking me for starter kits once they knew I had them.

The other thing which came out of my presentation was that it was related to the one I gave last year: Scaling NFS Services. In that one, I looked at what outside of the server can cause issues (think processor farms) and in this one, I looked at how we can fix some of the problems caused by scalability.