Omni Modo

Solaris (cont'd)

In 1998 I left Motorola and began travelling. Destination Australia. In Perth I found another exciting project and began to work for the Western Australian Department of Training. This introduced me to the government way of doing things and it is a lot different to the private sector. Our job was to maintain the college systems scattered throughout Australia and to make whatever upgrades were required to make them Y2K compliant. We also took the opportunity to upgrade hardware and several of the colleges were installed with new Sun E450s.

Because of the need to build so many servers in such a short period of time I recommended the use of the Jumpstart mechanism. As the department did not use NIS etc. some changes to the jumpstart scripts were necessary. This gave me greater insight to the way jumpstart worked and before too long I was in a position to build up to 12 servers simultaneously, including installing the OS, applying OS and Y2K patches, installing required packages, department specific security files and their standard directory structures. The number of machines was limited to the availablility of ports on the hub I had to hand.

My holiday continued and soon again I was asked to return to WA to continue my work. How could I refuse? More good work followed but soon it was time to return home. After some time doing the family thing at home I decided to come to London to continue developing my skills. In the last year I have learnt about BroadVision, securing Solaris and Linux systems, developed even more scripts and had a really good taste of what it is like to be involved in the ever popular e-commerce industry.

Whatever your preferred industry you will find Sun's Solaris at the heart of it all. Enjoy!!!