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

Hello together

I’d like to announce my 3rd TechTalk here at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. After the last 2 presentations where a full success (15 and 20 attendees), I hope to reach even more people with my preso about Solaris Zones next friday.

What? TechTalk – Solaris Zones
Where? Hochschule Luzern – Technik und Architektur , Room D300 (map)
When? Friday, 16. May ’08 17:00 – 18:00
Signup? here (for sandwiches)

Until then, have a good week

Hello Together

Next Friday im going to hold a presentation about the Sun SPOTs, an experimental technology from Sun Labs.
The preso will be held, Friday 9.05.08 5pmin room D300 at Hochschule Luzern – Technik und Architektur (map).

Please sign up here to get your free sandwich

For more information about the Sun SPOTs, go to www.sunspotworld.com

And I was so happy that I recorded a little video about it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juhqSeu4erY

You can see me sitting in front of the Enterprise Lab. The picture was taken a couple of months ago.

What a birthday present SUN gave me Netbeans 6.0 has been released tonight. So switching to the brand new stable IDE should now be done. Learn more about the new features here. Happy Coding!

Yesterday I started officially with my job as SUN Campus Ambassador at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. I’m very glad to have this position and will do the best. My main responsibilities with this job are:

– Lead the Sun open source developer community on my campus
- Run Sun Technology demo sessions on my campus
- Promote Sun training events on my campus
- Promote Sun’s open source platforms and development tools to professors and researchers

I’m working part-time about 5 hours a week. I’m very excited to hold my first tech demo before the end of this year. More information about this will follow. Also I ask all the students, professors and researchers here on the campus to contact me if they  have any questions to SUN related products and technologies. At this point I want to thank SUN for this great opportunity and my employer, the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, for giving me the chance to combine my studies, my employment at Enterprise Lab and my position as SUN Campus Ambassador. As soon as I have my SUN blog working, I will also post a link here.

I hope that this never happens to me. Some people seem to have too much time

Today morning the complete staff at our campus received an email warning of a virus. The mail tells you to forward the information to all your colleagues and relatives. Please, please, please, to all who receive such messages: Check the message first if its a hoax before forwarding it to thousands of people. A good link for hoaxes is the hoax index from TU Berlin.