So Sun has negotiated access for all Employees to the Safari eBook Library.

I have used and been happy with the Safari Books before...unfortunately I find myself slightly disapointed by the following


Not that it didn't resolve itself in a moment (presumably after the file was copied into place) but the use of windows in the backend.

Shame on you Safari Books Online, of couse if I worked for Microsoft I would probably be happy.

Maybe we are working out a trade, we get access to your books and we will help you move to our wonderful Solaris operating system.
In any case, Sun Managed Operations would be happy to help you implement the migration AND monitor the entire infrastructure BOTH running on windows and running on Solaris.

Go and Register Yourself for access: Sunlibrary
I must say, that was one of the easiest self provisioning processes I have experienced in a very long time.

Technorati Tags: Education, SUN

CEC2006: Too much content not enough time

Next Year:

• Kyocera KR1
• It seems that the state of high density WiFi may be slightly less than carrier grade, at least for temporary third party installations
• The good camera
• Not that the Cannon Point and Shoot is bad, just that I found myself wanting the more easily adjustable manual settings of the D1x
• The Managed Operations CEC blog/multi media Tiger Team (MOCECBMMTT? OK I made that up)

Interactivity(Web2.0):

• It was interesting, and hey I apparently won $200 for the most useful sms messages. I have yet to be contacted about my prize, maybe I should check my VM.
• Other winners were for such things as the most entertaining SMS
• Large (Ultra 20 and 24" monitors) prizes for best blog and such
• Not that I am bitter but I would rather have the Ultra 20 than the $200
• Much bemoaned by me, connectivity was a major issue
• Although apparently it might have been problems with my laptop almost as much as anything else, at least when the people sitting next to me were able to get access while I was not.
• Someone suggested brining the backend out to the front.
• I think that would have been great, as Dan indicated...this is a technical conference after all
• We should expose the technical aspects

Suggestions:

• LISA (USENIX) like content tracks 
• Refereed papers: A collection of 3 or so papers in a similar vein for an hour each
• Longer Presentation Slots (3 hours or so)
• WIPs: Short topics presentation overviews, here is what we are doing
• More accessable BOFs
• Tables at lunch was a good idea
• real BOF session availability would have been appreciated
• Too busy trying to get food and eat too really spend time finding all the groups
• Possibly longer, too much interesting information for the available time
• Maybe it is just me, I would have attended maybe 75% of the presentations given time
• A better scheduler
• 355 possible sessions (including duplicates)
• Presented in a list (depending on search criteria)
• Pick by topic/presentation (Content Catalog) would have been more useful
• Then given the list of desired presentations work on resolving conflicting selections
• Allow alternate selections to be maintained, I didn't attend all of the presentations I selected
• A capability to display only otherwise un-selected presentations for open time slots would also have been very useful
• A better view into content
• This would prefereably be the content catalog mentioned above
• I ignored presentations because I didn't know what they were really about
• It turns out that I would have liked to attend more and might have attended differently given better information
• Although see above: not enough time...

CEC Posts in Review:


We have an internal survey on this year's CEC, I should go do that. If there is one thing I am generally not lacking, it is opinions.

Technorati Tags: cec2006

Shawn Ferry (ME) and Brian Smith


In general our  attendance was a little bit lower than I had been hoping for. I think we got in the neighborhood of 80 total...I think I should be able to find out exactly somewhere.

Both instances went fairly well we had the required Managed Operations content. In the future we need to go straight to an elevator pitch and be done with it. I watched as people got bored hearing about how managed operations does things. Certainly they were interested in the more technical details CTA, encrypted transport and such. Unfortunately in our general Managed Operations presentation the less technically interesting details are more prevalent and this is a geek conference.

Both presentations had a few Managed Operations staff in attendance for solidarity. As well as a couple of new Managed Operations staff from APAC and EMEA.

The first presentation had a slight timing problem, the 15 min max planned managed operations specific content ran about 30min, in the end I got my content in with about a minute to spare and Brian got the last bits in about 5 after the scheduled end.  

The second presentation went more to plan. I was able to go into more depth on the technical aspects of the monitoring. For those who attended the presentation. We send an alert.

The only real failure for the whole thing was the attempt for a demo in the extra 5min before the scheduled end of the second presentation during the question and answer period. I had maintained what looked like good network connectivity until I tried to use it, at which point it all went pear shaped and I lost network access again.

In brief we covered monitoring methodology:
We have a top down and bottom up approach.

Top Down(A Holistic View):
We start measuring from a user experience, can you reach the web site.
Then a complex web site walking script/library(That I wrote) performs a:

• login
• job submission
• waits for completion
• downloads and analyzes the results
• deletes the job
• logs out

At various points in the process if we don't get specific results (Welcome to the Grid,Job X submitted, Job X Successful, Logout Complete) or the process is taking too long we send an alert.

Really in the Middle Here(Business Process Monitoring):
The from a Managed Operations Point of view what we want to know is what went wrong.

A user can get an login failure for a number of reasons:

• External authentication service could not be functional(Sun Grid does not maintain direct authentication data, you must have a sunsolve/mysun/store.sun.com account...Go Federated Identity (Silly Flash IDM) , see also: Sara Gates Sun's VP IDM)
• Your name may have been found on the Denied Restricted Persons List
• You may have moved to Brazil (This is a presentation In joke, I was hoping for some Brazilians to jump up and down and cheer) or really you are coming from outside the US.

A job can fail for a number of reasons:

• Malformed Job
• Portal Submission Failure
• Grid Engine Failure

Some of these things we can see cause from the middle and some we need a lower level view.
Bottom Up (A small sampling, we monitor a very wide range):

• System level KPIs(Memory, CPU)
• processes (sge_qmaster,sge_execd)
• services(SMF)
• logfiles(errors, failures)
• disk utilization
• network devices (firewalls, switches, routers)

Examples:

• If the qmaster is not running the job will never actually get scheduled.
• If there are no execds running (slots available) the job will never get executed(or really scheduled because the qmaster won't schedule it unless it should be able to run.
• If queues are in an Error state they cannot run jobs.
• If the file system is full it is impossible for a job to write it's output

Presentation Things I learned:

• People want to know why they can't use the grid from outside the US and don't quite understand how it is that Sun can have a gird and Sun employees can't play with it.
• We knew this was an issue, we could have just addressed it straight from the slides
• Few Sun employees (who attended our presentation have ever used the SunGrid, of course I know that a good number of Sun Employees have used the Grid it would seem that we just didn't get a lot of them.
• A demo would have been well received, but if we were working with a demo we could have talked for hours
• I still need to remember to breathe fully. I find that I will talk but forget to inhale full breaths if I am not paying attention.
• I just need to pay attention to my breathing. A pause to take a breath is ok...also it lets people absorb your output

Technorati Tags: cec2006, Education, Grid, puppy, SUN, SunGrid