The Coastsider has been posting some very high quality information and photos on the Devil’s Slide repairs. As you may know, April 2 of this year a 300 foot section of the roadway subsided around 5 feet coupled with a rock fall from 300 feet above the roadway. Repairs have been ongoing and are slated to wrap up late September.

Here’s a film clip provides an excellent overview of the failure, the repair plan, and shots of the work in progress. It certainly is an engineering wonder. Thanks to Barry Parr and Darin Boville for the excellent content and footage.

Meanwhile, as the road remains closed, traffic problems continue without pause. Traffic over the holiday weekend was horrible. CalTrans continues to work and monitor the traffic patterns – it’s clear they’re doing the best they can in a very difficult situation. While it’s difficult for folks to see when stuck in 2 hour backups, it is making a difference. Thanks CalTrans and keep up the good work.

Here’s a photo of the work site with crane:

Here’s a photo of drilling the “nails” into the slide (in a basket, dangling from the crane in the picture above.)

Technorati Tags: Devil’s Slide CalTrans Highway 1

A simple equation to be sure. If you’ve got to manage patches and configurations on Linux or Solaris machines, you should pay attention to this post.

Here’s what to consider:

• Baselines – Create groups of changes to be applied
• Automated application – Apply a single change, group of changes, and/or baseline to one or more systems
• Simulation – Model proposed changes to your environment before commiting to them
• Rollback – The “oops” protection, remove changes automatically
• Auditing – Know who made which changes when to aid in compliance
• Aggregation – Pull bits from many different places to a staging ground, mix and match the content in automated change tasks
• Introspection – Don’t trust what the description says, active comparison of symbols in changes vs. claims in descriptions (metadata)
• Provisioning – Deploy configurations to bare metal as workloads and demands change
• Management – Be it a data center, an application service, or a grid, actively manage the assets for workload, performance, cost, and availability.
• Realtime – Always up, always up-to-date. Continuous real-time content.
• Electronic Prognostics – Telemetry-based prediction of what will happen based on statistical models of what has happened across a broad population segment.
• Risk Quantification – Availability Risk Index (ARI) determins not only the severity negative consequence for any known risk, but also the probability of occurance in time period X.

If your vendor(s) can’t or won’t do this, come see Sun. We’ve got a solution for you…..I’ll share it this summer. Stay tuned.

Here are some hints:

+ Sun Grid
+ N1 System Manager
+ Aduva OnStage
+ Sun Update Connection
+ Sun Preventive Services
+ N1 Service Provisioning Server

Technorati Tags: Patching System Administration Systems Management Grid Software as a Service