That reminds me, if anybody wants to buy 2 ESA/390s they'll be coming available down in Springfield, IL sometime next year. I can't imagine why anybody would buy them, short of a university, but it will be a public auction so you might get a pretty great deal on them.
Maybe if I inherit a LOT of money before then, I'll buy them, wait for our administrative make-up to change a little, then donate them back to the department. I really don't understand why university administrations universally insist on excluding their departments full of experts on any number of subjects from any constructive input in the decision-making process. The same reason, I suppose, that politicians believe they know better than doctors what drugs should be prescribed to whom. Money. In politics it's lobbyist money, and at Universities it's donor money. Infuriating. Erik Johnson On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 4:52 PM, Erik N Johnson <[email protected]> wrote: > It is worth noting that IBM has an established program called IBM > Academic Initiatives. If you offer any courses on your Zs and you > *need* z/VM to offer those courses, IBM will *possibly* negotiate a > free license of z/VM. I'm at NIU and we have two ESA/390s donated by > IBM many years before my time. It is also worth noting that we have > had difficulty with demonstrating that our curriculum *requires* VM, > which we would love to use to allow students to run their own guest > Linux/390 images, where they may be root and try things in a nicely > sandboxed environment. > > Apparently, this is not a sufficient *need* as we have been > unsuccessful. There has been some unconfirmed speculation that if we > but had a Z, we could institute a course in z/VM+z/Linux > administration, creating a need. Unfortunately, when IBM offered us a > Z, university politics reared their ugly head, a Microsoft evangelist > convinced the big cheese that "Mainframe is dead" and not only will we > not be housing a Z, virtually assuring IBM won't send us one, they > have chosen to unplug our ESA/390s. > > We now have to use Marist's machine remotely to conduct our mainframe > courses, which are many and varied, mainframe being the backbone of > our program. It's a very sad tale but the silver lining is, perhaps > you folks up at Washington could offer the class, get the license, and > voila! > > Just a thought, > Erik Johnson > > On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 3:08 PM, David Boyes <[email protected]> wrote: >> On 5/11/09 7:33 PM, "Gibney, Dave" <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> I may have some interest in zLinux around here. The usual caveat of >>> [snip] >>> Good idea? Or am I making it more complicated than I need to? >>> Dave Gibney >>> Information Technology Services >>> Washington State University >> >> Well, it would certainly be cool to have WSUVM1 alive again...8-) >> >> Given WSU's historical relationship with IBM, I would suspect that if you >> asked IBM for a loaner copy of z/VM, one would appear for a long period of >> time. I think that while you *could* do VM->LPAR, it would probably be less >> hassle and more productive to try to negotiate a long-term loan. >> >> -- db >> >> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >> For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, >> send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or >> visit >> http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 >> > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
