I had met the criteria for Becoming a sponsor last month and I never got around to getting it officially approved. I was hip deep writing an article for SDN: The Management of NFS Performance With Solaris ZFS with Doug McCallum. This is part of a concerted effort by the Storage Community to get content out there.

I'm also really busy with the Mirror Mount project (which is part of the OpenSolaris Project: NFSv4 namespace extensions). A good melding of us getting content out there and an explanation of Mirror Mounts is provided by Rob Thurlow as Mirror-mount and referrals demo.

Anyway, I saw Ram asking for a sponsor for 6428435 zfs rename failure can leave file systems unmounted. It sounded a lot like another I had worked on, and no one was replying. I knew I could be an intern sponsor, so I piped up that I could help. Well then Mark Musante sent me email stating that he wanted to work on it, but needed a sponsor he could intern with. And that led to me applying to be a sponsor.

Helping out sounds so simple in practice, but it takes time to track down all of the details. I can't tell you how stressed I am between the end of a project and some additional bugs I own. Sometimes contributing to OpenSolaris is not doing code, but enabling others to do so. You have to find the time, even when pressed for it, to make others feel like there are no impediments to contributing.

I bought a six seater Insta-Bench from amazon.com - they had the best price and with 3 day shipping, it still came out less than other online retailers. I got the thing, pulled it out to make sure it worked, and threw away the box.

We went to a tournament this weekend and one of the caps which secures the seat material to the frame popped off in two. I told everyone I'd superglue it back together. They told me to return it.

Instead of contacting Amazon directly, I sent an email to Insta-Bench asking for some caps. And I got a reply stating that some were in the mail. I'm really happy with their service. And their product is great as well.