November 13-17, 2004, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

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BoF notes

by John D. Groenveld

The ApacheCon planners could not fit our BoF in the official schedule but on Ken Coar's suggestion, we grabbed a bit of space in the hallway on Monday evening.

We had a small turn-out, six folks plus myself, Sean Ross, and Rich Teer, but not bad given that we were only able to advertise on the whiteboard.

The nine of us represented three Sun market focuses: higher-ed (Education and Research), military (Government), banking (Financial Services), broadcasting (Media and Entertainment), plus independent consultants.

There was an even mix of developers and administrators.

Known Solaris versions still in production ranged from 2.5 on up, though a couple of us figured that there might be older versions hiding in our organizations.

Everyone seemed to be aware that Solaris 10 was coming soon, but Sean, Rich, and I agreed that we should reiterate some of the key features we knew about that might be of interest to Apache/Tomcat folks: SMF, Java 1.5 (Tiger), N1 Grid Containers (Zones), ipfilter, DTrace, TCP/IP stack improvements (FireEngine).

Rich Teer gave an overview of his book and why he dedicated three years of life to write it.

Sean Ross demo'd Software Express for Solaris build 69. The machine was slow booting because of the lack of a network connection. A non-working power outlet evidently caused the machine to run in low-battery mode. Still he impressed everyone with JDS and Blastwave KDE desktops.

Mads Toftum saved the day by teaching us how to open a beer bottle using another one.

As promised we gave away a signed copy of Rich's book, some Blastwave DVDs, and a Blastwave subscription. Actually, we weren't able to give away the Blastwave DVDs because of ineptitude and worse evil from United Parcel Service but that's another story for Dennis Clarke to tell. They'll receive the DVDs direct from Dennis or Rich.

None of Sun's representatives attended our BoF, but Andy Tucker gave a keynote on Tuesday about Solaris 10 and Open Solaris.

The Sun table in the expo hall was sparse of systems, but Sean, Rich, and I made our annoyance known to Danese Cooper, so maybe Sun will better equipped for the next ApacheCon.

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