Its been a while...

Its been a while since I wrote anything, but its been a while since I had anything interesting to say. It seems one of the journalists at the Enterprise Systems Journal (http://www.esj.com) seems to think otherwise quoting me in my views on Solaris 10 in a recent article entitled "Sun Unveils Updated OS, New Services, Aggressive Chip Strategy" (http://www.esj.com/Enterprise/article.aspx?EditorialsID=1278). Its a big deal to me as its the first time I've had my name appear in a "real" article on the web.

Last time I wrote anything in my Blog I was busy playing with Oracle to take a few exams, I got my 9i OCA & have since decided thats enough Oracle for me for the time being. Not that I have anything against databases, but I find Unix OS's, more specifically Solaris far more interesting. As I probed further into the depths of Oracle administration I came to realise that a large proportion of the study material is related to recovery of databases & fined grain tuning of Oracle, which is knowledge I don't feel I'm missing out on currently.

I've been playing a fair bit of late with various Solaris 10 Express builds trying (as any techie does) to pick up as much about the new features as possible. Hopefully I'll start having useful information to write about my experiences in future posts, but for the time being you can check out Solaris 10 FCS for free on Sun's web site (http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/).

Its great to see that Solaris 10 is going open source later this year, I've been keeping a keen eye on developments in this area since I first heard about it last year. This for me has been the most compelling reason to learn more about Solaris over the last year (even over the new features of Solaris 10).

Now I'm no kernal hacker, but I want to be in a position to contribute one way or another to this. So I started reading Rich Teer's (he's recently started a blog too http://richteer.blogspot.com/) excellent book "Solaris Systems Programming", this has certainly been helpful in enlightening me about writing useful code for Solaris, but I want to learn more about interacting with the kernel directly & so I thought why not look at writing device drivers. As luck would have it Sun recently published the "Device Driver Tutorial" (http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-5789). This looked like the sort of introduction to the subject I needed & I'll (hopefully) be reporting further on my progress with this shortly.

Finally, on the subject of Solaris Internals it appears that an update to the book by the same name is in the pipeline according to Paul Rogers' Blog (http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/pcr/20050105#solaris_internal). Hopefully there'll be more info on this soon.