Solaris Day

We'll after a 1 hour train ride from my cousin's pad I made it to the Raffles Convention Center for Sun's Solaris Techday.

The agenda for the day was

Keynote : Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris , Changing the Game

This was a marketing spill about how they have made Solaris free and how more and more people were adpoting it. Pretty interesting but it was more a point of hitting home of how Solaris 10 is now free.

The Solaris Service Management Facility (SMF)

Solaris 10 has self healing to sum it up real quick which provides automatic recovery from software and hardware failures as well as administrative errors. Their is a good guide here if your interested.

Solaris Containers-Virtual Operating Systems Spaces

Now were talking this is basically Sun's answer to VMware's virtulalization but it doesn't use hardware resources unlike VMware this was a really topic as they showed you a zone config file and how easy it is to create and reboot zones. Although patching through zones requires the zone to be rebooted something Sun are working on in the next release of Solaris 11 codenamed Mustang if zones turns you on like it does for me check out this link here to start creating your own zones.

Sun Studio 11 , The Ulimate Tool for Solaris Application Development

I didn't really find this one to interesting probally cause I can't compile for shit but this basically ran over C, C++ and Fortran which are now free as well. If your keen on this check out this link here.

Solaris Security APIs and Tools.

I was in a bit of a WTF moment with this one probally cause I've never heard of it nor see it.


Multithreaded Solaris Application APIs and tools

I kinda of wish Glenn was with me to explain how this works but I'm sure to bug him when I get back to Perth once again my noobness showing it all it's glory


Code Camp: Solaris Dynamic Tracing (Dtrace), Increase Performance with Complete Software Observability.

We were told before we went to break to make sure we have lot's of coffee for the final session of the day cause we were gonna need it. I was looking forward to this session the most as I first came across the concepts of Dtrace at SAGE last year.

This is another cool feature in Solaris 10 which is basically a language like C but called D you can pretty much script anything with Dtrace if your skilled enough so inform you of what's happening within the kernel level . Dtrace is no joke to learn it's hardcore and we went through it in 1 hour when you could spend a few days on it.

Their are tons of useful links of Dtrace and Sun offer training course's as well all I can say is it's awesome and can save you alot of time and effort if you have the correctly written scripts.

The Dtrace discussions over at opensolaris are pretty good as most of the guys who developed it post activley Dtrace yourself silly by joining up here.

And that was the end of the Solaris day overall an awesome day highlights for me were SMF , Containers and Dtrace.

Also talked to a kernel developer (Edward Platomicz) who was working on a project called BrandZ.

This is really cool it allows you to run Linux zones under Solaris it's still in development and currently it only supports Redhat Enterprise Linux. Some good reading material can be found at the BrandZ Opensolaris website.

Touch down

Well after a 4 hour flight I've arrived in Singapore it's normal Singapore weather humid and more humid.


After chowing down on a bowl of Laksa and nann bread for dinner it's time to rest up for Solaris day at the Raffles Convention Center.

Gartner pocket power mobile devices for the enterprise

Waking up bright and early myself and JP headed to the plaza ballroom at the burswood resort and casino to listen to Gartner give a talk about mobile devices in the enterprise environment.

They started to talk about the different vendors and what platforms were getting a lot of support from third party vendors , it was interesting to hear how much they like the blackberry device and they though this device was an ideal choice for most users. They liked the blackberry because of the security features and it's user interface (keyboard) and it's support from the telco's . I was waiting for there views on Palm and was a little disappointed that they didn't devote much time to it they said the tree 650 was a hit in north America but not so popular in the south east Asia market.

Mobile phone's were also covered a lot key players being Nokia and how they are proving to be just as popular as a PDA

Instead they seemed to talk about the Microsoft mobile platform (surprise surprise ) although they did say it's user interface and support for third party vendors was no as strong as palms. Overall an interesting talk it's good to see what Gartner foresees and then try and work with this back at work. A big key point being not to standardize on one model for all your users but to have a few models based on the same platform


The highlight of the morning was definitely the breakfast , danish's , fruit's , and then a full course hot breakfast