Saturday, April 04, 2009

More information about Free One Day OpenSolaris Internals Training

I thought I would say a few words about what is planned for the free one day OpenSolaris Internals training class (see http://sl.osunix.org/FreeKernelTrainingDay for a list of topics, and to sign up).

Regardless of the topics covered, I want to make this as close to a "classroom" setting as possible. For me, this means that attendees should be able to follow along with anything I am doing on OpenSolaris by doing it themselves. So, for instance, if I am using mdb to examine some data structure, students should be able to do the same on their machines. For some topics, notably ZFS, this will require students to either build an mdb dmod, and the modified mdb and zdb that I use, or load a version of OpenSolaris that contains these (to be provided by osunix.org). Source for the modified mdb, zdb, and rawzfs mdb dmod is available for download at ftp://ftp.bruningsystems.com/mdb.tar.Z, ftp://ftp.bruningsystems.com/zdb.tar.Z, and ftp://ftp.bruningsystems.com/raw_dmods.tar.Z. If we do a kmdb session, students will either need to run OpenSolaris in a VM (virtualbox), or have 2 machines connectable via tip or a terminal server for console access.

Currently, the plan is to give attendees access to some slides, use IRC, and give students access to a window on my machine where they can see what I am doing, and try the same on their machine. Best would be a window where everyone can "see" my desktop, but I'm still looking into the best way to do that (any suggestions for this are welcome). It would be great to have audio, preferably conferencing, but this may cost money, and... the class is free. That should mean free for me as well. If anyone has a suggestion for free, conferenced audio, I would appreciate it.

I would like to decide on topics to be covered in the next week or so. So, if you are interested in attending, please go to http://sl.osunix.org/FreeKernelTrainingDay, take a look at the topics, and sign up. If you have ideas for other kernel-related topics, please let me know. Depending on how this goes, I may do more of these in the future.

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