My time at Oracle has come to a close, so I'm going to take this opportunity to ramble a bit about some of the things I've worked on, and one project in particular which I'm particularly proud of.
#begin(ramble)
I started using SunOS when I started university. The university had Sun servers, and both the CS, Maths and Electrical Engineering departments had workstations as well. It was my first hands-on exposure to a UNIX of any sort; my knowledge previously was based on articles from Byte and Dr Dobb's Journal. I spent many hours in the CS labs poking around and exploring. Sometimes I even did my assignments! Over the first summer break the faculty computer unit upgraded every system to Solaris 1 and as you might expect, printing was totally different. We wailed a lot. And got on with figuring out how to use the SysV environment.
When I started work in the university library, there was a SparcStation 5 running Solaris 2.5, and a rather early version of NCSA and then Apache httpd. On moving to another university as a fulltime system administrator I now had SparcServer1000Ds to manage, along with an early fibrechannel array, backups, and disaster recovery. I learnt a lot and when Sun was next hiring support engineers they asked me in for an interview. I was delighted to receive an offer, and .... now it's close to 20 years later and let me count the roles I've had:
front line and back line technical support
fourth level technical support, working escalations and fixing bugs
working in the Solaris MultiPathed IO (MPxIO) stack for Fibre Channel
working in the project team to bring MPxIO to the x86/x64 platform
rewriting the Solaris firmware flash (fwflash) utility to make it modular and support any device which has flashable firmware
Gatekeeper for the OS/Networking consolidation
ISV/IHV liaison for driver development
Project Architect and Lead for Project Lullaby
worked on userspace and filtering support for the Solaris Analytics project
#end(ramble)
#begin(Scratching an itch)
When I started as Gatekeeper for the OS/Networking (ON hearafter)
consolidation, the utility we used to build the gate was called
nightly. It was run every night, and took all night long to run. A
monolithic shell script, it was uninterruptible and (much more importantly)
un-restartable. As my colleague Tim noted, it used almost every letter of
the alphabet as a command line option - along with a shell script
configuration file.
It had to go.