Hello

I’m proud to announce, that it is now possible to create your public_html to be displayed on the web.
It’s really easy to get it work:
Just create a directory named public_html in your home directory on enterpriselab. There you can put your web page (html, php possible). Your page should now be accessible through:

http://user.enterpriselab.ch/~<yourusername>

If you encounter any problems, feel free to contact me.

Hi folks!

There’s now the possibility to activate a Spam Plugin for your blog(s) if you encounter problems with comment spam.
Please see our wiki for more information.

At Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, we built a team of students providing services for other students on Solaris OS.

A need of urgent action

In the past, some students I was leading, provided different services like svn, wiki, forum, webserver, etc. for other students on a single server
called the iServer. As this server was not firewalled by our IT Service and not officially supported by them, we had to take urgent action as
the IT Services told us that they will take down the server in this summer because it didn’t fit their SLA and IT rules.
So we had to hurry building a new team of fresh students (most of the students in the old team are leaving this summer).

Why not using existent infrastructure?

We came up with the idea, that our Enterprise Lab (www.enterpriselab.ch) could be the best place to provide such services. With the agreement
of the labs head Bruno Joho, we could easily keep the services up. Of course he agreed, as this finally could be a big improvement on the
visibility of our lab. So we decided to migrate all the services to the Enterprise Lab.

That is hours of work! Who can the whole task until summer?

As the idea was up we started to think on who could do all the work. And we came to the great idea: Why not let do the students the work?
It’s a win-win situation for both: the students and the Enterprise Lab staff. Students can improve their knowledge on Solaris and on how
to keep a service up and running. So we decided, the whole task from planning, over migrating to actually providing the service should be
done by individual students who are interested in such topics. As we couldn’t expect the students having much knowledge of Solaris and
the infrastructure of our lab, we decided to assign mentors to each service. A mentor is a person which has knowledge on Solaris and on a specific
Service. So the students could ask them if they run into problems.

Whats next?

Finally, after 3 weeks of recruitment of new members we had built a team with 20 students. Now we started to migrate the following services which
can be used by students, staff and professors:

- a forum with user authentication over ldap (in the past we had to set up each user separately) – forum.enterpriselab.ch
- a blog space with ldap auth (blog.enterpriselab.ch)
- a place for subversion repositories
- a place for public/or private wikis (students mostly use this for learning for their finals)
- a web space (public_html of users home will be available to the world)
- a bug tracking system (where students can maintain their projects)
- a database server (where students, staff, etc. can play with databases, mainly mysql)
- and maybe much more services to come

The goal is, that we can start providing those services this summer. Some services are already up and running.
The second goal is to let the students improve their knowledge in Solaris and other Sun technology as their services
all run in our lab. So they have to deal with zfs, zones, ldap, apache, php, mailman, wordpress, dokuwiki, bugtrak, svn, mysql,
ssh, … and much much more.

This way I hope we can build a big Solaris community on our campus.

Kind regards from Switzerland

Hi all
Within the month may I could hold 3 demos. I mainly focused on the Solaris OS and on Sun Spots.

Here some facts:

9.5.08 17:00 -> SUN Spot. 20 people attended despite it was bbq weather outside on this lovely friday evening.
The students showed much interest in this new technology and wanted to know how they could be ordered.
We set up a system on which our 4 spots we have could be lend out.

16.5.08 17:00 -> Solaris Zones. Only 11 people attended (it was a hot day again). But the students asked a lot of interesting questions
(eg. one asked me to do a rm -rf / on the root FS of one zone. You can see what happens if you try it in one of your test zones, too)

30.5.08 17:00 -> Solaris ZFS. 13 people attended. (once again, bbq weather . The presentation only took about 5 minutes. But afterwards I did a live demo
which took until 18:00 As always, the students showed a lot of interest.

So the month May was of great success for me and for my university. I hope I will attract even more people the next semester. Now I’m out of Solaris CDs and
SUN pens. I still have loads of T-Shirts because I don’t give them away for free. They always have to answer a tricky question.

Much changed since I held the presos. Everyone knows (and greets) me on the hallway now and I’m always asked a lot of questions during the breaks and in
the evening (by mail, IM, etc.) on different Solaris, Java, SunSPOTs questions. It simply rockz to  be an ambassador.

Thank you Sun and thank you University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Central Switzerland.

I wish all of you a great summer time and hope to see you again next semester.

Regards from the “Football Country” Switzerland