It's working again..

So I was having some issues with the blog editor and now it's working again. As a result, I've gone back to the previous posts and fixed the formatting. I'll start posting entries again. Sorry for the long delay.

Some good news..

Work.. work.. work..

Well the Sun Ray evaluation is going to go through! So after the Sun Grid project, I'll be working on that next. I completed building the packages for our Solaris 10 servers. Mind you, I'm picky, and compiled new versions of all the freeware utils we need with Sun Studio 10(highly recommend it). Other packages included our commerical products like SAS and Matlab. All together, there are about 104 packages! About 95% of those were freeware utils that I had to compile. Needless to say, that's more packages I've built in one year since the old days of Slackware! So now it's just a matter of polishing up JET jumpstart, completing the configuration files for our deployment manager, and documenting things. This is great, because the Grid will be the first set of servers to be built and deployed with Solaris 10 and JET. I'm really excited about this, because all of this hard work will help the company move away from Solaris 8 and get into the 21st century.

On the home front..

I'm still battling things out with LDAP. I'm trying to setup LDAP completely from scratch. This has turned out to be more difficult than I thought since the documentation out there is a little vague at best. But I'm going to give it another try this weekend and hopefully I'll make some progress. If that works out, I'll post the steps to replicate my setup. After that, I'll get APOC, now known as the Java Desktop System Configuration Manager, setup for the Sun Ray.

I've been trying to get my flash memory sticks to work with my Sun Ray. Much to my disappointment, it looks likes the utmountd or utstoraged components have a bug and are not mounting the devices. I can see them getting added in when I plug them then, but that's about it. After searching around, it looks like other people have run into this problem on the latest version of SRSS. Hopefully, it'll get fixed soon! I'm saving some money up to buy a VGA to TV converter and wireless keyboard/mouse so that I can hookup the Sun Ray to the TV. I think this would be a kewl thing to do and would be wonderful to use as a demo when I have guests over.

I was reading Ben Rockwoods blog and saw his article on BART and BSM. This is something that I've been meaning to read up on and test out for work. Here's a great whitepaper from Sun on the subject:

http://www.sun.com/blueprints/0405/819-2260.pdf

And a great article from Glen Brunette:

Solaris 10 and BART

And here are a few other articles to look at on related subjects:

http://www.sun.com/blueprints/0605/819-2887.pdf
http://www.sun.com/blueprints/0605/819-2888.pdf
http://www.sun.com/blueprints/0505/819-2680.pdf
http://www.sun.com/blueprints/0405/819-2262.pdf
http://www.sun.com/blueprints/0305/819-2259.pdf
http://www.sun.com/blueprints/0305/819-1742.pdf

And for those who are looking for templates:

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/config_diagrams/

A few pointers about N1GE (a.k.a SGE)

Well as you know, I'm working on a project to setup and deploy a grid for our researchers. We're using Sun's N1 Grid Engine, which is the commercial version of Sun Grid Engine. The core components are the same between the products. The difference is that the N1GE product has more scheduling options, ARCO which does accounting and reporting, and of course it's commercially supported. Outside of this, there aren't that many differences, they are built from the same source code, it's just more polished on the N1GE side. Anyways, here are some pointers:

• Visit this site and read the documentation and How-To's: http://gridengine.sunsource.net/
• Read the Sun documents: http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/coll/1017.3?q=grid
• Don't Panic!

You can easily download the SGE product from the first link and set it up on your systems. It runs on multiple platforms, including MacOS X, Windows, and Linux. I'm thinking of setting it up at home to play with myself;)

OpenSolaris

I've been trying to keep up with the flood of email in the mailing lists, and it's not easy! There's a lot of buzz around right now about the SchilliX distro http://schillix.berlios.de. Currently it only runs on x86 and AMD64. Sadly, I don't have a PC or an Opteron to test this on. I thought about the new Sun Ultra20 workstation, but the costs really come to around $360 a year, not $29.95 a month. In anycase, I don't think my wife would like the idea of another computer at home:) Currently, I have an Ultra60, a Netra X1, and an iMac. So this got me thinking that there should be a SPARC distro out there. I'm thinking about setting up an external scsi drive to build my own distro, just for SPARC. Personally, I'm interested in doing the following:

1. 64-bit only. No 32-bit stuff.
2. Remove crufty bits.. (UCB, etc.)
3. Secure from installation.
4. Enhance JDS to have the complete menus and a different default look.
5. Administrator utils. Solaris has a lot today, but they are scattered across the system. How many ppl know about printmgr for example? And no, the SM console is not good enough!

I'll have to play around with building OpenSolaris before I even begin to work on a distro. It's going to be a fun learning experience doing the builds.

Oh and here's a kewl search engine to find things in the OpenSolaris source code:

http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/

I've already started to use this to track down the meaning of error messages in Solaris;)

Some things to consider..

Well the Sun Grid project is moving along and we'll soon begin testing things out. This is the first project that I've had to manage on my own. That's not to say that I have not done projects on my own, I've done plenty of that. But this is the first project where I've been put in a position to manage other people. This is a mixed blessing, to say the very least. On one side, I get to make sure that things go in the direction that they need to. Yet on the other side, it can be difficult to keep things on course when communication breaks down or when something unforseen happens. But I've learned a lot from all of this and here's a summary:

1. Before any one signs off on any equipment, software, consulting, etc. It's important to outline the expectations. Without this, it's difficult to keep deliverables on schedule and you could end up with a poorly implemented project. If the target solution keeps changing, something is wrong!
2. Meet regularly with those who are involved to keep the communications moving in a productive manner. Nothing hurts a project more than poor communication between peers. Keeping everyone on the same page, prevents confusion and lost time.
3. Keep things simple. Don't complicate projects. Get the right people working on things that they are capable of doing from day one. No point in wasting time.
4. Try to do things the "right" way. Don't make short-cuts, you end up revisiting that down the road.

Okay.. I think those are the big ideas to keep in mind when running a project.