Went to the local Starbucks here at Connectathon 2007. The guy looked up and said "Awake, right?" The guy I was with was floored. I told him, what is so hard - I'm 6'5", currently sporting a handlebar, and always wearing a Green Lantern hoodie.

The event is going along fine. The main problem is that NFSv3 is too solid and the NFSv4 implementations are also getting that way. The NFSv4.1 stuff is really still in the design phase. But developers are getting small victories when they either get code to compile or even run against other vendors. I think that Connectathon 2008 will be more frantic and the victories will be larger.

Ben's talk was interesting - the take home point I got was that sysadmins are not dumb and they can create unique architectures off of the building blocks you provide them. The more tools you can give them (dtrace and source code), the more they can do. That might not have been what others took home. I can't help that.

One of the things I had a problem with when I was a sysadmin was in talking to developers who would discount my ideas. I had one discount my suggestions about a new command syntax. The product has been deployed for over 5 years and everyone probably uses that syntax without thinking. My way wasn't necessarily better, just a different way of approaching the syntax. What was frustrating then though (and still to this day with other products) was the fact that the engineer who didn't have to administer the box didn't want to listen to the guy who did.

I'm back to wearing my developer hat, but I still try to listen to the sysadmins. I made a recent decision with the In Kernel Sharetab to use a symlink to solve a problem I could have coded over. I decided to scrap that idea, not because of a design review, but because I finally listened to that sysadmin in my head who told me the symlink would be a pain to work with.

So for me, I liked listening to Ben tell developers how he deploys their products and makes money doing so. He came in, said he was nervous and explained how his wife had told him that was silly. He said he told her it was like going to 3M to give a presentation on sticky notes - the audience laughed. I told him after the talk the reason why he got invited to 3M was because he was doing things with the sticky notes that 3M couldn't envision.

I.e., the innovation of sticky notes was in the past. In order for 3M to make more money, they needed to go outside their safe idea of what they thought people could do with sticky notes.

The thing which really seemed to spark the most debate (and which I started) was when Ben claimed in a room full of protocol developers that NFSv4 was too risky compared to NFSv3. Yet this was right after he said he was using ZFS and not UFS. What he wasn't articulating very well was that they went to ZFS for feature sets that they could exploit to sell to customers. The provisioning and manageability of ZFS far outweighed the stability of UFS.

In comparing NFSv4 vs NFSv3, his company did not find that overwhelming a need with respect to their business model. Or in other words, NFSv3 is sufficient for their customer's needs. Another business might find that NFSv3 is not sufficient for their customer's needs.

The other point he made was that they needed the replication (and to some extent migration) that NFSv4.1 was going to provide. This message was well received. I think it gives developers here ammo to take back to their management trees.