Alan Hargreaves' Weblog

SOSUG Meeting last night

We held the first Sydney Open Solaris User Group meeting last night in the iForce Centre in North Sydney.

About 20-25 people showed up (and the Sun folks appeared to be outnumbered).

Unfortunately I missed the first ten minutes or so as I got assigned door duty (the doors on the building lock at 6pm so someone had to stay out and let folks in. So I missed the Introduction and welcome by Che Kristo and James Eagleton.

Peter Lees

Peter gave an introduction to what Open Solaris will and will not be.

There was some good discussion about the license and it appears we were able to clear up a few things. For example how the license is file based and that it was designed to be re-usable.

Brendan Gregg

Brendan gave a demonstration of tracking down a problem without and then with DTrace. Brendan's style as an instructor really came to the fore as he involved everyone with the "how do we do this with the tools we already know".

He also spoke briefly about the work going on in creating a DTrace Toolkit and encouraged folks to contribute.

Alan Hargreaves

I spoke about Using SDT Probes, followed by a quick demo of looking glass under Solaris x86 with the shortly to be released Nvidia driver. I had a bit of trepidation about his as I'd only had an hour or so to get it working properly and I'd only just done so before leaving for the meeting.

Beer and Pizza

By the time that I finished, it was about 8pm and food had arived, so unfortunately we did not get to the video of Liane's presentation on SMF, but there is certainly interest in seeing it. Perhaps next month.

There was a lot of good informal discussion during this time.

Oh yes, we did have a door prize. Kavit (elric) Munshi won a copy of Sun Cluster 3 Programming by Joseph Bianco, Kevin Rabito and Peter Lees.

The next meeting should be in about a month and the idea of holding it at the James Squire Brew House was floated. Brendan also suggested that we might want to reserve some time at the next meeting for 5 minute informal sessions of "this is what I'm playing with", or "wouldn't this be a good idea" type material.

All in all, I think we all had a pretty good evening.

Che had a very nice looking video camera there so hopefully we should have video some time in the next week. Kavit assures me that when he watched it last night that it looked pretty good.

Technorati Tags: OpenSolaris, Solaris

Update June 2

Inserted South Park Brendan and modified his hyperlinks.

Posted at 03:39PM Jun 01, 2005 by Alan Hargreaves in Open Source Solaris  |  Comments[2]