Coming to Aberystwyth back in 2006, I recall moving into my house in PJM (91, room C) with my family, Mum fussing about unpacking everything in my room, and my sister shoving all of my kitchen stuff in my cupboard (I never knew exactly what I had in that cupboard until I moved out the following summer).  I recall them leaving and being terrified to go downstairs, when I had plucked up the courage to go downstairs to meet my new housemates I was greeted by a friendly face offering me a cup of tea.  This friendly face was, of course, Faye’s and we spent many hours sitting in that kitchen drinking tea.
The year went on and I met new people, learnt new things, and had some wonderful times.  Perhaps most memorable is the ‘snow day’ in late February 2007, the revision sessions with seven of us crammed into my PJM room and generally ended up with Street Fighter being played on my SNES, and the long summer days playing frisbee on the University grounds.

After a long summer working, second year was upon me.  New lessons to be learnt, both in University (computer architecture, network programming, data structures and more) and in life (managing bills and other household issues).  Shortly into my second year Faye and I started going out, meaning we’ve been together just over two and a half years as I write this.
The second year saw me get an interview with Sun Microsystems and after an exam in January 2008, I was offered the job.  Revisions sessions got bigger and moved to lecture halls with projectors and elaborate slide shows.
The most memorable events of second year has to include mine and Faye’s “one month anniversary” dinner (after spending all day working, we were just about to get ready to go out when a friend knocked on the door and had us talking for three hours.  After getting ready and finding a restaurant that was still serving, we managed to order lots of tapas, but they refused to make us paella), and going to see Bill Bailey perform Tinselworm in Birmingham.

As soon as second year finished, I was plunged into yet new situations.  Moving from Aberystwyth to Camberley, I started work at Sun Microsystems.  Rather than go into any sort of detail here, I’ll direct you to my various postings of which there was one a week detailing what I was up to in Sun.
Sun gave me a lot of new skills, and made me realise what I was interested in and that what I learnt at University might actually not be much use in the big wide world…
I loved being at Sun, everything about working, and working for a company that did what I wanted to do, and in a way in which I wanted to do it.  I hope that I have a similar employer in the future.

After spending the summer working for the MOD, I entered my final year of University.  It was difficult to get back into lectures, and I found coursework terribly difficult to get on with.  I was constantly pining to be back at Sun, back at my desk in GMP03 collecting tickets, tinkering with servers, and having a chat and a laught with the great people around me.
Of course, I had to go on.  The first semester didn’t hold much for me, apart from an overly crowded timetable.  After a terrible Christmas, I was back to do terribly in my exams (all passes, but not great ones).
Semester two came and went.  It was filled with loathing for my degree and a want to break out of the formalities and just learn things that would be relevant to me.

So would I do it again?  If I knew then what I do now, well, I wouldn’t do a computer science degree would I?  I’d already know it all
Seriously, University itself hasn’t always been a happy experience, and of late it’s been the cause of much anger.  But the people I have met and the relationships I have gained have been so great, how could I turn that down?

So, after four years, it comes to a rather awkward end: I’m still here in Aberystwyth, I will be for the next 24-30 months as Faye finishes her masters in fine art.  I am looking for work, hopefully something IT based, but I’ve just got to pay the bills.
If you are thinking of coming to Aberystwyth University, I’d advise that you have made the correct choice.  If you want to email me about it, I’d be happy to answer your email, and if you have an interest in anything you see on my blog or on my website, I would be thrilled to meet up and share a quiet pint chatting about it with you!  Drop me a line to arrange a time.

If you know me and are reading this, now, in six months time, or six years time, send me an email and say hi, I’d love to hear from you too

Back in April (April 22nd to be precise) I handed in two copies of my 72 page document which outlines everything about my project.  I wanted to blog about my dissertation while I was doing it, but the thought was always pushed back by other thoughts of actually doing the project.

The project investigated how one could use virtualisation techniques of today and use them to virtualise every application on a machine.  Here’s a copy of my abstract:

In computing, occasionally an application can cause a whole system to be brought down. This wastes valuable time for users and has the potential to lose unsaved data. This project sets out to create a concept whereby applications are virtualised for overall system stability and which appears completely transparent to the
end user. The project attempts to create a system based on this concept using OpenSolaris 2009.06 and a number of its technologies, most notably: Zones.

The project discovers that the choice of technologies used are not yet mature enough to implement the concept, though they are very close to maturing.

As the abstract says, I used OpenSolaris Zones to implement the concept.  I created a script which wraps around the OpenSolaris `pkg` command which is used to install applications.  My script creates a new Zone and installs the new application into that Zone.  The application is now basically in it’s own operating system, to better describe it, it’s as if the application has been installed onto a whole new machine.  The application is accessed using SSH and tunneling X11 over it, this worked quite well after I had set up the infrastructure, but the user had to input their password when they wanted to launch an application.

The project was really fun, I really enjoyed it and learnt so much.  Now it’s finished I’m rather lost as to what to do with myself…

If anyone would like to read my Dissertation or try implementing my project (with is licensed under the BSD licence), please don’t hesitate to contact me.  At the end of it all, the documentation consisted of 72 pages in PDF form (that was 1086 lines of LaTeX, excluding comments and blank lines), and the project consisted of 1494 lines of Bash script and 1393 comments!

The icon has finally changed, see below for the old and new:

With the update comes a raft of new features including:

• Latest Intel hardware support
• Large Page support
• In-hypervisor Networking
• Storage I/O subsystem
• Remote Video Acceleration
• Page Fusion
• Memory Ballooning
• Hot-plug CPU’s
• Virtual SAS Controller
• Online Snapshot Merging
• OVF Enhancements
• Guest Automation
• USB Keyboard and Mouse
• Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.5
• Ubuntu 10.04 (“Lucid Lynx”)
• Mac OS X – On Apple hardware only

The client is called the Oracle Sun Ray 3 Plus and boasts the following features:

• Low power consumption (typically around 14W)
• 4 x USB 2 ports
• Gigabit Ethernet
• SFP (all Form Pluggable) fibre optic module for use with 1000 SX, 1000 LX, or 100 FX fibre optic connectors
• 2 x DVI connectors
• 2560 x 1600 resolution for a single display or 5120 x 1600 for two displays
• Smart card reader

One big jump from the older Sun Ray 2 hardware is the gigabit Ethernet, with it’s greater transfer speeds, this makes the four USB 2 ports possible.  Clients around the globe will be very happy with that.

The standard Sun Ray 2 supported a 1600 x 1200 resolution, even the Sun Ray 2FS client only supported 1920 x 1200 or 3840 x 1200 resolutions.  The Sun Ray 3 plus has a massively higher resolution with a single monitor supporting 2560 x 1600 or a dual monitor setup supporting 5120 x 1600 resolution thanks to the more powerful graphics card and the two DVI ports.

The fibre connectors are nothing new, they were present on the old Sun Ray 2FS and, of course, the standard smart card reader.

The only negative thing I have to say about this new hardware is that it takes up around 10W more than it’s predecessor.

I like the fact that Oracle have released this, it shows that they are committed (at least in the immediate future) to Sun Ray and the Sun Ray software.  I’d love to see one of these things, they should really help push Sun Rays into the workplace as a very viable alternative to those lumps of metal on everyones desks!

# search for all instances of an executable in $PATH
function whence {
for i in `echo $PATH | sed "s/:/ /g"`
do
/usr/bin/ls $i/$@ 2>/dev/null
done
}

It’s nice and straighforward, nothing complicated about it at all.  In fact, to let everyone on your system use it, you could just stick “#!/bin/sh” at the top and stick in a file in /usr/bin !

Today, I wanted to find a man page, the sysidcfg man page to be precise.  Instead of doing the usual trick (`find / | grep sysidcfg”), I thought I’d modify `whence` to look for it for me, and seeing as it’s no longer `whence`, I called it `whenceman`:

# search for all instances of a man page in $MANPATH
function whenceman {
for i in `echo $MANPATH | sed "s/:/ /g"`
do
/usr/bin/find $i/ 2>/dev/null | grep -i $@
done
}

As you can see, it’s very similar, and you could do the same thing by putting it in /usr/bin so everyone could use it.

I woke up early and left the house at 7:30, walked to Tesco and bought some Krispy Kreme donuts   I waited for the bus, hopping on at Blackwater station, I met Ali at Camberley as he jumped on the bus.

I had packed my badge away over the weekend by accident, so I had to go to reception and pick up a general badge.  The detour didn’t bother me too much, it meant I could go to goods-in and give them a box of chocolates, thanking them for handling personal mail over the course of the year.

After this, the day started, it was a slow morning, working to get tickets done, having a laugh with various people, etc.
Liam had started back today, it was good to see him back, I’d missed him on the couple of occasions he’d visited.
We went across to the mean hall behind the Crown and Cushion (almost opposite work) for lunch which was nice.  After that we got back to have the usual Monday afternoon meeting, good byes were said, and I told everyone about things I needed to get done.
After the meeting we gathered and Paul gave me a card which everyone had signed, people asked me what I was up to for the summer and what I was planning to do for my final year project, and also thanked me for the donuts
The afternoon passed quickly after that, I swapped a system board, but that didn’t fix my problem   Lastly, I transferred my last three tickets back to the main queue for others to finish off.

Monday evening, after a little more packing and cleaning, I went down to the town for a last few drinks with everyone.

A sad day leaving Sun, it’s been a great year, I’ve met some great people and have learnt so much from them all.  If anyone wants to know what an industrial year should be like, read this blog, look at what Sun gives you and what you have to put in, I think my year was th definition of the industrial year (though I guess everyone else will feel the same about their years too )

The rest of the week has been sorting through stuff back home.  New job next week…

Monday I came in after only having two hours of sleep and being scared by a milk float which came down the road at 3:20am! I picked up a load of tickets and started work on the most urgent ones, namely a ticket to insert some cards into a v480, reattaching some storage to the network, and battling with the 25K to net boot.

Tuesday I woke up very late, ten minutes before the bus was due to leave in fact! Not a very good week I don’t think! I carried on with work from Monday mainly. It was also Tom’s last day…He is off to Peru for the summer, so we had donuts and biscuits and the like to wish him farewell…

Wednesday was odd, no Tom, David had some time off, and Ali was on his course.  It was quiet forst thing, but when people started to trickle in I started doing some ticket work in the lab.  I had a look at a few machines which weren’t behaving and got some other work done.

Thursday was much the same as Wednesday, trying to work down my ticket queue, nothing really interesting.

Friday was much the same again, I did battle with a KVM box, but after finding a transistor or something had broken off, it seemed a moot point…I alsohad a look at a v445 which had some disks in, I wanted to play with upgrading a mirrored zpool with bugger disks, I found out how, and asked on opensolaris.org discuss too

Monday I got back into work and spent some more time on the KVM that wasn’t playing ball, it still isn’t now

Tuesday I had an 880 in the 02 lab which needed a new board, so that was replaced in the afternoon.

Wednesday I hooked a T1000 and an x4240 together.

Thursday I was looking at the 25k downstairs, trying to get a domain to work.

Friday I had a play with a machine and some ZFS stuff, I’m trying to figure out how I can upgrade my mirror to have two 1TB hard drives in as apposed to the two 500GB drives I have at the moment (I’m down to 100GB space left!)  I also looked at adding some storage to a machine in the lab.

Monday morning was spent turning everything back on after the weekend, it was a shame as I was hoping for the lab to be silent, but the AC was already on…

Tuesday and Wednesday was spent ironing out issues to do with the lab power cycle.

Thursday I looked at a borked KVM more, it doesn’t seem to be broadcasting anything on IPv4 or IPv6…I also fixed an intrusion switch that someone had broken…

Friday I went home early to catch the train back to Melksham for my sisters birthday.

Tuesday I got in a looked at the console server, my ssh session had dropped…The new BE is currently in a bad state, so I can’t delete it, or overwrite it…I’ll need to see what I can do about that…
We also moved a load of stuff out of the overflow lab, and into the bin/cupboard/main lab…It was all because we were moving the SL700 to the end of the lab. I spent the afternoon cursing the warm weather and cleaning up the mess I made on the console server…

Wednesday was slow moving, warm are irritable.

Thursday I inserted a SCSI card into an ultra 20 among other bits and bobs.

Friday was spent turning off all the machines in the lab as electrical work was taking place over the weekend. Seeing as the work was going on, the weekend was an opportune time to work on the console server without interrupting anyone.