Cross-posted to Linux-390 and IBMVM. Some time back, my manager asked me to find out what sort of tools our customers had developed on their own to make managing their Linux on System z systems easier. At SHARE, we discovered that a number of shops have re-invented one particular wheel: getting network configuration information from a CMS minidisk during the boot process so that adjustments can be made dynamically to account for being in a DR test, a real DR situation, etc.
So, that's something we'll be taking a look at to see if we can relieve some of that burden in the future through a supported method that we would provide. We're also aware of the "SAN management by spreadsheet" problem that everyone using SCSI over FCP has to deal with. That one's going to be really hard to deal with, since there doesn't seem to be any standards defined in that area for the industry. But, it's still something we can ponder. Those two items don't answer the bigger question, which I was supposed to answer: What _else_ has everyone been working around with homegrown "stuff?" I imagine for some of you, this self-developed tooling has been around for so long now that you almost forget that at some point it wasn't there and you had to invent it. We'd like to surface those items, if possible, to try and get a better handle on what sort of pain our customers are experiencing managing their Linux systems. So, feel free to reply here on-list, or contact me directly off-list. Perhaps we can get enough people participating that we get a decent list to work with. Thanks, Mark Post ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 more information on Linux on System z, visit http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
