They let me near customers

Today I went on a customer visit, a very rare thing for me. A few years ago Sun Ireland gave out some hardware to computer societies in various Universities around the country. As one of the first members of such a societiy (timf was a founding member) let me tell you a little about it.

In 1995 our university (www.ucd.ie) had no email for students. It had web access for students for about a month before realising that students were actually using it and this was crippling the college bandwidth. And there was very little unix material on the course. The UCD Internet Society was founded to help students out by educating them about the Internet, give them an email address and for those who were interested, to learn about UNIX. This was accomplished for 500 students with a 100MHz PC running a 1.3 Linux kernel, if I recall correctly the scsi controller in the machine was not supported on the more stable 1.2 kernel. People queued from early in the morning to be a member, normal students not just the computer geeks!

At its peek the society had over 3000 members, making it the second largest society in the college. That many paying members means you can buy some decent hardware, not to mention beer for the many social events!

The admins of this and other colleges were able to get real experience on unix machines. Not just the kind of experience you can get from a bedroom PC, but some understanding of how to consider users, and how to deal with the network owners (bureaucracy of the university IT department). Useful skills for sysadmins!

From these societies, Sun Ireland has taken on many interns and many now full time employees.

Early on some of the colleges decided they would like to expand their hardware and get hardware from Sun. The initial offering of computers were fairly modest, SPARC Station 5’s etc., but a few years ago Sun gave out E450’s to these societies. Most of these are still in use, and many of the student admins took the machine in their stride learning what they could about solaris and the machine, after all it looks good on a CV (US:resume). Some admins inexplicably decided they wanted to put linux or *BSD etc. on them, not that I have anything particularly against linux or *BSD but when Sun gives you a machine, which was qorth quite a lot in around 2000 when these were given out, you would think that running solaris would be obvious, even if just to stick on your CV!

Anyway, one of these machines fell into some disrepair, so this morning myself and two colleagues went out to rebuild the machine, give a presentation on adminning the box, and show off sun sunrays which we brought out.

Folks seemed impressed by the sunrays. They are perfect for a university environment. For example… Many universities have libraries with terminals for accessing the catalogue, these typically are powered by a noisy PC locked in a press and tucked far away from the reading areas. With a sunray there are no moving parts, so its silent. My college library had about 30 terminals (3 floors, 10 per floor) – that can be powered by a modest enough machine, since all the sunrays will be using is a web browser to access the catalogue. So you go from 30 PC’s to 1 decent spec PC and a load of sunrays – hardware and replacement cost plumets (unless you want a big server!). Given the choice wh would anyone deploy 30PC’s anymore. Now if you have 2000PC’s on campus plus servers…

Sunray 3.0 software is beta and available for download http://wwws.sun.com/software/sunray/beta/ SOlaris SPARC and x86 and Linux, though you will nead a sunray client to really use it! Some case studies http://wwws.sun.com/sunray/success.html

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