MSOSUG Past Meeting Details, Materials and A/V
20th May 2009:
Another cracking night with a range of topics. Malcolm taught us more
about the internals of System 5 packaging including how to make your
own patches! Boyd gave us a quick demo of StorageTek Availability Suite for doing remote mirroring. Finally, Nathan discussed some of the things to think about when performance is a problem - what to do and how to help Sun help you.
18th February 2009:
By Crikey - if you missed this month, you missed a blinder... We had Nathan and Boyd playing the fool and straight man (I'll leave you to choose which was which) in some discussions around SPARC and X86 hardware and had a good look at using Dtrace for simple troubleshooting.
Boyd even recalled his previous command - using the up arrow...
21st January 2009:
- Speakers / Topics / Presos:
- Gavin Maltby
- The Fault Management Architecture. Gavin gave us a rundown of the motivations, architecture, and benefits of FMA as well as a peek at what's coming up. We also got some insight into why sometimes it's worth keeping flaky CPUs :)
- Boyd Adamson
- Boyd gave us a quick impromptu run through on pkgbuild. It's (yet another) way to make solaris packages, both SVR4 and IPS, from source, this time based on the RPM .spec file mechanism.
19th November 2008:
- Speakers / Topics / Presos:
- Arya Abdian
- Hairy Chested Solaris and Active Directory Integration. We watched in amazement as Arya took a Solaris box and configured and compiled his way to Active Directory integration without having to pay vendors a cent!
- Nathan Kroenert
- With all the new stuff recently announced, we looked at hardware architecture of the newest servers in the Sun fleet - The M3000 and the T5440, and a flyby of the new FISHworks appliance
15th October 2008:
- Speakers / Topics / Presos:
- Boyd Adamson - Cluster
- When you need 'higher than high' availability, and automated mechanisms to know when your application is actually available, who are you going to turn to? Cluster.
- Mark Davies - Datacentre in a Laptop
- * After hearing Sun's Chief Open Source officer, Simon Phipps, talk about the virtues of Open Source and the model that would enable business to not only try before they buy, but indeed deploy a whole enterprise worth of applications before even paying a cent of support, Mark was suspicious, but also intrigued. He set about trying to both prove and debunk the theory and has ultimately shown that it's quite possible. See Mark's "Datacentre in a Laptop" and hear what it took to get from zero to 100% operational in an Opensource world.
17th September 2008:
- Speakers / Topics / Presos:
- Boyd Adamson
- SMF Service Creation, How on earth do I do that?
- Chris Wells
- Solaris / Windows integration using Vintella
20th August 2008:
- Speakers / Topics / Presos:
- Rabban Hansen
VDI Technology including SSGD, Sunray, VDI, Remote access to your desktop anywhere, from any device - Andre van Eyssen
JES Mail - Installation / running and using - Malcolm Herbet
- Common tools that make life better in the Solaris and other worlds.
16th of July 2008:
- Speakers / Topics / Presos:
- Andrew Foote - Using OpenSolaris 2008.05, and the future of Solaris!
- Nathan - Solaris on Commodity hardware
19th of June 2008:
- The first (maybe annual?) MSOSUG Party!
21st of May 2008:
*35 attendees including presenters.
- Speakers / Topics / Presos:
- Andre and Nathan - Round table on current tech and what's happening in the world of Solaris
- Andre - Solaris Containers - Updated for S9
- Nathan - Maramba
Andre and Nathan hit the group with the news of the month, then Andre broke into an S9 containers talk. We covered all of the fun stuff, including showing the actual commands required to get you there. :)
For the Maramba talk, we covered the content for the box itself, then, Lots of tech detail, including the breaking out of a compiler, assembly language and source code. Some folks may have immediately thought of running screaming from this uncommon excursion into the unknown of SPARC assembly, by the end, everyone was able to see the impact of compiling both 64 bit and using optimization. Good fun all round.
16th of April 2008:
*35 attendees including presenters.
- Speakers / Topics / Presos:
- LDOMS in anger - Nathan and Andre
- Resource control and Zones - Blaise Groud
Blaise hit us hard with a great explanation of the resource control capabilities now in Solaris, and showed how they could be applied with and to Zones.
Nathan and Andre's LDOM's talk helped us all to appreciate what it takes to use LDOMS, and both how hard it might be, and how easy it can be. :)
19th of March 2008:
*25 attendees including presenters.
- Speakers / Topics / Presos:
- Hardware Performance Counters - Richard Smith
- Jumpstart Troubleshooting - What you need to know to make it work when it don't! - Richard Spindler
Although Richard Smith had pre-warned some folks that his talk might be a little esoteric, it turns out that it was very interesting to pretty much everyone there. We were transfixed with cache miss statistics, IPC (Instructions per Cycle) and other magnificence.
Richard Spindler's talk on Jumpstart troubleshooting was also great. He covered the most likely things that go wrong, and even showed some of the oldies a new trick or two!
20th of February 2008:
*45 attendees including presenters.
- Speakers / Topics / Presos:
- Advanced JET and Automated Application Provisioning using N1SPS - David Visser
- Extended Attributes - Do you know what they are? Why should you care? - Dan Cook
- A Quick look at Virtual Box.
David's talk on N1SPS and JET was an eye-opener. Talk about cool - We look at a production deployment, and jumped a system to see the end to end process of server provisioning.
Dan's Extended Attribute chat got lots of folks thinking about how they could use extended attributes to do cool and funky things. Some considered the evil they could do with them... An interesting chat with lots of good examples.
Nathan's look at virtual box was a simple dome of creating a new virtual system, and starting up the windows installer. Also demo'd a running Windows system. I'm sure we are all looking forward to more from the Innotek guys in this space.
16th of January 2008:
- 48 attendees including presenters.
- Speakers / Topics / Presos:
- Jumpstart and Jet - Andre van Eyssen
- Ldoms on Sun4v / OpenSolaris - Nathan Kroenert
Andre's jumpstart talk was a real conversation. We covered very simple jumpstart, then swung straight into JET, JET capabilities, configuration and benefits. I'm sure those not using JET yet will be looking at it real soon...
Nathan's chat on LDOMs was lively with lots of jumping and hand waving. heaps of questions and lots of great discussion. We say LDOM's created, booted, rebooted, and even a Service/Control domain reboot that showed that the LDOMS would pause if they needed to do IO, but recovered as soon as the service LDOM was back. Also saw why it's good to check out your SSH config before the meeting... ahem... :)
19th of December 2007:
- 33 attendees including presenters.
- Speakers / Topics / Presos:
- SSGD for the masses - Andre van Eyssen
- Lustre on ZFS - Atul Vidwansa
- Xen on Solaris Nevada / OpenSolaris - Nathan Kroenert
Andre's SSGD talk was great. We saw Solaris, Linux and Windows applications deployed to any desktop. As is always the case, Windows took some time to get in the way of a perfect run, but that's what you get for running windows. Even over the questionable network connection we had on the night, SSGD was great. (Gotta love the whole statelessness thing. Gold.
Atul's chat on Lustre got us all thinking about what we could use such a setup for. I'm sure even now, we have folks thinking about new and interesting ways they could implement an storage system, and what they could do with that much available storage bandwidth and capacity... :) Thanks, Atul.
Nathan's chat on Xen went down well, though there were some grunts about it not being 'available' yet. :) heh. Bring on Xen in a supported Solaris! We saw Windows, Linux, Solaris and Solaris Paravirtualised, on a whitebox system with only 4GB memory. All ran well, though we could have used a little more grunt from the CPU. But - how much is it fair to expect from a sub $100 (AUS) CPU? :)
21st of November 2007:
- 46 attendees including presenters.
- Speakers / Topics / Presos:
- ZFS for the masses - Boyd Adamson and Andre van Eyssen
- Solaris 8 Migration Assistant (No Slides - Talk only.)
Once again, the importance of reliable, well resourced hardware was demonstrated. With two panics for the night, we enjoyed not only ZFS but the rough and ready pain of an unreliable set of iSCSI targets. Unfortunately, time prevented us from determining what was happening, but given that they were being served up by a Sunblade 100 with only 256MB of memory, some of us were not particularly surprised. :)
Boyd's excellent discussion of the ZFS layout, block update mechanism, snapshots and send/receive were well received. Questions, as usual, caused us to run quite late, with the night wrapping at 9:30 and the last of us finally exiting, 'stage left', at around 10:30pm!
Boyd also took back all the bad things he said about Nathan for running too long in the first meeting!!!
17th of October 2007:
- 28 attendees including presenters.
- Speakers:
- Solaris 10 Update 4 new features, focussing on iSCSI and IP Instances. -- Nathan Kroenert
What a wild ride this was! With many questions from the audience leading the talk in a number of interesting and unexpected directions, the whole crowd (including Nathan!) were treated to many weird permutations of ZFS and iSCSI, including presenting a multiple ZVOLs from a Zpool living on a USB stick as iSCSI targets, then using said targets to create a Zpool. This also aptly demonstrated a number of the golden reasons you don't want to be using non-replicated storage from the ZFS perspective. Doing unnatural things begets natural consequences... Panics, for instance. :)
As Nathan was the only speaker for the night, he was forgiven for talking for 2 hours. :)
12th of September 2007:
- 42 attendees including presenters.
- Speakers:
- Live Upgrade -- Boyd Adamson
- The Niagara 2 CPU overview -- Nathan Kroenert
This meeting was a great start for the group. Huge attendence, lots of interaction and heaps of questions. Boyd's Live Upgrade talk showed all who are NOT yet using it why they should. Nathan's N2 talk whet everyone's appetite for the upcoming Niagara 2 platform. (Update -- It's released now!)