by Last night Sun held it’s first Austin Solaris User Group meeting at Painter
Hall on the UT campus. The event was reasonably well attended with ~15-20
people from various companies and academia around Austin.
The meeting was broken up into two parts: a presentation about new features
in Solaris 10 release 11/06 and a discussion about how, when, and what the
user group will be.
The presentation was a whirlwind tour of things like zones and their
improvements (such as cloning zones, effectively creating a flashstart-like
system for zone building), ZFS (such as RAIDZ2 which is a RAID-6-like RAID
setup and working hot spare support), improvements to the fault management
core (support for x86), and various other things like Blastwave (the open
source packaging initiative) and SAMP (Solaris, Apache, Mysql,
PHP/Perl/Python) stacks.
The discussion covered what we wanted the group to be (a mix of presentations,
howtos/instructional, socializing and networking), when and where the meetings
would occur (3rd Thursday of every other month; next one in April at Sun’s
main campus), future topics (performance tuning, LOM, SAMP/Mysql on Solaris,
ZFS, etc), and a discussion about sponsorship by non-Sun vendors (partners,
VARs, and recruiters — this was mostly to get someone other than Sun to pay
for food).
Some interesting things that came up during the evening:
The presenter, Bob Netherton, has a blog that covers Zones at
http://blogs.sun.com/bobn/
If you’ve tried to work with Sun’s Service Management Facility (SMF, the
replacement for init.d scripts) and become frustrated over it, you should
probably check out the following:
http://mediacast.sun.com/share/bobn/SMF_in_a_Day.pdf
If you’re interested in the fault management framework, you should checkout
the Predictive Self Healing bootcamp:
http://mediacast.sun.com/share/bobn/Bootcamp-PredictiveSelfHealing.pdf
If you’re interested in DTrace, Sun’s new system profiling tool, you can
pick it up in about a day with:
http://mediacast.sun.com/share/bobn/DTrace_in_a_Day.pdf
The DTrace Toolkit is a useful add on that helps package up some of the
more interesting and useful pieces that would help troubleshoot problems
on a system.
http://users.tpg.com.au/adsln4yb/dtrace.html
Finally, for the next meeting, Sun is attempting to have their lead
performance guy come out and give a discussion on performance tuning in
Solaris 10.