Hello, I am a professional Unix sys admin. My current title is Senior Systems Administrator at Magellan Health Services. I have been working in Unix and Linux system administration for 23 years. I currently work with a small team on the care and feeding of a few hundred AIX LPARs and RHEL VMware nodes. Back in 2001 I was able to get Python onto the list of approved programming languages at Anheuser-Busch. My colleague and I wrote several hundred thousand lines of Python code which are still in production on Solaris, AIX and Linux machines there. I am also a master C programmer. I specialize in systems programming and software porting. SAGE is a huge help to me in my studies at Saint Louis Community College where I am currently re-taking Calculus 2 after 25 years.
If you can provide the hardware and bandwidth for a build farm of VMs, I can help with the porting, testing, packaging, and documentation of SAGE. I would recommend using a Linux machine as the VM host with KVM as the virtualization technology. I can help with designing and building such a machine. I would be happy to help with any other technology as well, though I might be less familiar with it. I've worked with KVM, Xen, BSD Jails, AIX LPARs, Solaris Domains, VMware, VirtualBox, and several experimental systems. As long as you're happy with purely simulated hardware devices KVM is an excellent choice. We might start with RHEL/Fedora/CentOS/Scientific Linux (RPM), SUSE (RPM), Ubuntu/Debian (APT), FreeBSD (PKG), Gentoo and others. Once the farm is built the job of maintaining the ports and packages on each node could be shared. We should assume the role of official package maintainer for SAGE with each of the OSes & distros. I might be able to recruit a colleague to assist in the effort, though he is currently enrolled in Real Analysis at UMSL. His time is severely limited. Peace. --Matt On Tuesday, August 28, 2012 2:56:02 PM UTC-5, William wrote: > > Hi, > > See the exchange below. I'm curious if there is anybody reading this > who would want to manage a bunch of Virtualbox VM's, if we had a > server *devoted* solely to running them, all for making Sage build in > a much wider range of distros. This would take a person with a very > particular set of skills and interests... in like maybe installing the > top 10 linux distros or something like that. > > -- William > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > From: Jeroen Demeyer <jdem...@cage.ugent.be <javascript:>> > Date: Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 1:12 PM > Subject: Re: vm's > To: William Stein <wst...@gmail.com <javascript:>> > > > On 2012-08-27 16:53, William Stein wrote: > > Hi Jeroen, > > > > If you could have access to a fast opteron machine on which Virtual > > Machines would run *really* well, what is a list of the VM's you would > > want installed? E.g., versions of Linux (etc.)? I'm going to ask the > > NSF to let me rebudget some Sage Days money to hardware, and this > > seems like a good use of resources. I can get a 1U box with 64GB RAM > > and 16 3.0Ghz cores, call it sagebox.math.washington.edu, put up to > > maybe 16 VM's on it, and devote it to build testing of sage on various > > OS's. Managing a bunch of VM's can be a pain, but I have to do it > > anyways for http://salv.us, so I'm getting efficient/good at it. > > > > Anyway if you gave me a list and expressed enthusiasm for this idea, > > it would make it that much easier to get the money. > > Some immediate and obvious question: are you sure you want to manage > those 16 VM's? I assume your salv.us VM's are all identical, which > makes the sys-admin job a lot easier. If we put different distro's on > those machines, you would have to know the equivalent of "apt-get > install" for all those different distro's. > > > -- > William Stein > Professor of Mathematics > University of Washington > http://wstein.org > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en.
