/dev/dump

I was forwarded the following infographic from OnlineCollege.org.  While I'm not normally one to just regurgitate someone else's posting (especially advertising), I think this one is worth looking at -- especially if you're at a point where you're contemplating future career or learning plans.

I'm pleased to announce that DEY Storage Systems, Inc. , along with Joyent  and other community members, is sponsoring the illumos and ZFS Day taking place in October 1st and 2nd at the Children's Creativity Museum in San Francisco.  My partners and I will be in attendance, along with a few other of my colleagues, and we'll be speaking on related topics. Additionally, Joyent is hosting the 2nd illumos hackathon at their facilities on October 3, and we will definitely be participating there.  We had a blast doing this last year (some excellent work came out of it), and we're looking forward to doing it again. If you can make, I hope you'll register.  The event itself is free, and while there will be online recordings of the material, its more fun to get together in person -- especially with a beer or three.  (Did I mention there will be a Solaris Family Reunion party on Monday night? In many ways, I view this event as a belated 2nd birthday party for illumos,

With the recent announcement and discussion around OpenIndiana, I think its time to bring to the light of day an idea I've been toying with for a while now -- and have discussed with a few others in the community. illumos needs a reference distribution. Now just hold on there... before you get all wound up, let's discuss what I mean by a reference distribution. A reference distribution should be a base  for additional development, and testing.  It should support automated installation for mass deployment in test lab/QA/build farm scenarios. It must support "self-hosting" -- i.e. illumos-gate itself should be buildable on this distribution -- with as few additional steps as possible. It must be valid as a QA platform -- for example, it needs to support the packaging tools we use in order to validate the packaging metadata (manifests).  (Yes, this means it needs to support - and be packaged with - IPS -- in spite of my loathing of IPS itself.) It should be