The support docs (found here) say that in this 158MB update we get:

• Java SE 6 (x64 only)
• J2SE 5.0 (PPC & x64)
• J2SE 1.4.2(PPC & x64)
• 64-bit Java for Intel Macs only

Upgrade today as I’m sure many developers will be wanting to update their code as part of a long awaited refactoring!

Tuesday started with me trying to figure out how to send an email using Java. But before I sunk my teeth into it, I realised I had promised to change the hardware of the stable zones box for some engineers.
The stable zones box is just a box which is set up to create and test Solaris zones on, the current machine (A Sun Blade 2000) was restarting every 24 hours, seemingly this has something to do with Solaris 10 update 5 and above….
So I got an Ultra 80, set up the zones stuff and made it ready to take the place of the current zones box. At 4pm I scheduled some downtime and swapped the boxes, they are heavy things, and powered up the Ultra 80. I had console access, I had changed the details in NIS+, and I just had to change the hostname, which was easy thanks to this page
At 5pm an engineer decided he really want to play with domains on the stable 15K downstairs, the SC’s use our production password so I can’t give him access. On top of this, the console to the main SC was dead, it wasn’t allowing SSH or telnet connections and wouldn’t failover. I didn’t have time to look at it, so emailed the guy and left it for Wednesday

Wednesday! Feels like a normal Wednesday too, yesterday felt very much like two days…
The morning was spent fixing that 15K, the console wasn’t broken, someone had consoled from the SC to an inactive domain, so I had to ~. out of that. After some investigating, it looked like NIS+ wasn’t running on the machine, this being Solaris 9 I’ve got no idea…I’ll have to grab David or James at some point…

Gyaaaargh! It’s only Thursday
The morning went slow…I didn’t get any development done because an engineer wanted me to move a storage array and kept complaining that it didn’t work. In the end it was his fault for not enabling something or other…
I also got a new email from the guy who I’m doing this programming for.

FRIDAY! Not a moment too soon either!
OK, so I’ve listened to what Rob said in the comments from last weeks entry and started to re-plan things, plus sent an email to the guy I was doing the work for. He came back saying that he would prefer to stay as we were, with one stored procedure which gathers booking numbers based on some simple input and then punts the booking number to a Java application. So I’ve been working at undoing my changes this morning (note to all: don’t do something then tell someone your thinking about doing it for fear they’ll say no).
I’ve gone away from university teachings in as much that I’m not bothering with reading in files by setting up a file and setting up a stream buffer, etc, instead I’m using the UNIX cat command, which works quite nicely
It’s currently lunchtime and I’m looking at publishing the blog now I think, I came back early as my yoghurt had separated and was all icky My plan for this afternoon is to finish off my email class which will send the emails and perfect the stored procedures.
I’ll update this later to say how I got on…

:wq

*note to self, WordPress does not except Vim key bindings – FAIL!*

The Problem

Engineers can book hardware to escalation numbers (customer cases), however, we know that a number of engineers take advantage of this, and book systems for other, more personal, uses under the same escalation numbers.
These bookings don’t end unless:
1) The engineer or a lab team member removes the booking, or
2) The customer case is closed.

The Solution

Create something that will check the database for bookings which have been active for more than X number of days and bug the engineer via email to see if they still need the system.

What I’m doing

So, after achieving this once in Perl (*spit*) and it being little good (because we want to trigger it from the database), I gave it another bash:
This time I’m using a stored procedure (from now on referred to as an SP) which will collect a list of bookings. This will then run a Java application, passing in the booking number as an argument. The Java application will then connect to the database again and call another SP which will recover the booking details (I couldn’t pass them in as arguments as the method of calling external scripts from the database is limited to 255 characters).

This is basically where I am now, at the end of the week. Next week I’ll need to find a way to get the Java application to email the user of the system, and maybe look at a better way of passing in a list of booking numbers, as having loads of these processes running could seriously slow things down…

I will, at some point, blog about connecting to a Sybase database using Java, this should be fairly generic, I just found other documentation for doing this very poor