For $399, you get a wickedly good, highly portable Linux-based laptop. Check out the review over at Laptop Magazine and Hot Hardware. With an solid state drive, LED backlit LCD, 4 USB ports, VGA-out, expansion slot for SD/Memory Stick, and room for a PCI-Express mini card, this looks perfect for the sysadmin on the go.
Asus Eee review
November 8, 2007
Remote sysadmin on your iPhone
October 14, 2007
Remote administration on your iPhone without installing any apps? Check out http://www.getinco.com/ . It’s not out just yet, but he is taking beta test requests. TUAW has an interview with the developer that’s worth a read as well.
Does storage have to be a headache?
October 14, 2007
One of the biggest challenges we face at work is managing storage. While we don’t run the day-to-day operations of, say, the EMC gear, we are responsible for engineering and maintaining some very high traffic and mission critical storage at the host level. Due to the nature of our Matrix management structure, this means that we have to be experts on SAN, filesystem, OS, and even said EMC gear. Since we also provide storage for databases and “generic” network filesystems, the team has to be aware of the limitations and requirements of both of those. Throw in an extreme sensitivity to cost, and you have a real engineering challenge.
On the the network file side, we’re currently using NFS, warts and all. With high traffic and high use – like, say, SVN or CVS with active development and testing on an NFS mount – things get hairy. File locking seems to be an issue with high numbers of users and/or traffic on Linux as opposed to Sun. Keeping very large filesystems across multiple sites in sync is also a lot of work, even with the best Veritas has to offer.
The filesystems and their hosting servers require 5 9s of availability. Another wrench – high availability usually means a cluster solution. Most cluster solutions are not easy to manage. As you add more levels of complexity to a system, you have the paradox of more moving parts making your HA solution more delicate.
So, what to do? Right now, I am thinking of using some new technologies – and some not so new – and move away from the “We’ve always done it this way”. We need to create a new framework, and then use the technologies to lay upon that framework. I also want it to be architecturally simple.
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How to tell if you’re running 64-bit Linux
October 11, 2007
For some reason I have been asked this several times over the last two weeks. It is a simple enough thing to determine:
Photo books
March 13, 2007
I am putting together a collection of photos of Angus to put into print form. iPhoto offers photo books at a pretty reasonable price, and the process is very simple. I also found Blurb.com, which offers an expanded version of the same. The latter also allows you to sell collections of your photos, which is a nice touch if you’re so inclined.
Linux eye candy
August 31, 2006
I got around to installing Compiz, Xgl, and aiglx on one of my Ubuntu boxes today. Despite the integrated Intel graphics, it all runs pretty well, with only occasional slowdowns. It’s pretty impressive, especially in comparison to my recent install of Windows Vista RC-1 with all its eye candy on a much higher specc’d machine.
Of course, a blog post about eye candy is worthless without at least one screenshot:
You can see a fully opaque Firefox over a full, truly alpha-blended transparent terminal, over Rhythmbox. The latter two are darker to highlight the window with focus. I wish I could take a video, but there are plenty of videos showcasing the wicked 3D effects.
Overall, the install was pretty smooth and quick. I do recommend a visit to compiz.net if you run into any problems.
mod_cband for Apache2 not working
March 24, 2006
I’ve installed mod_cband on an apache2 host. Within the virtual host, I have the following:
CBandRemoteSpeed 300kbps 2 2
This should limit remote hosts to 300kbps, and 2 connections.
Now, I had to grab source and compile, since the apt-get Universal version did not work. Put everything where Ubuntu likes it, do a a2enmod to be sure, bounce apache2. No errors.
However, when doing a netstat this morning:
foo@tempest:~$ netstat -an | grep 217.249.151.236 | wc -l
115
Any ideas?
UPDATE: It appears that mod_cband doesn’t work right on Dapper/Apache2. When I removed it – and all vestiges it left behind – the site worked. I also blocked two connections that were spewing hundreds of SYN_RCVs.
Drakes, Badgers, and RAID
March 2, 2006
We got our Penguin Computing server last night, and the first thing after unboxing and testing was to replace Fedora Core 4 with Ubuntu. I downloaded the x86-64 distro of Badger Breezy, slap the ISO in, and egads! the drives are not recognized. A quick trip to 3Ware’s site reveals that kernels 2.6.14 and above have support for the 9550SX. Breezy ships with 2.6.12. 3Ware has driver images I can use for install, but just for SuSE, RHEL, and Fedora Core 4. Anything else, I will have to compile against source.
Now, what to do? I can’t compile, since I don’t have a computer to compile upon – well, not without work. I could build my own CD, but again, major pain. So, decided on installing Dapper Flight 4. It’s not the final release, so I have some concerns. I’ve got apache2, PHP 5, MySQL 5, and the modules/libs for the web sites. My intent was PHP 5 and MySQL 4, but now that 5 is installed, I may stick with it.
SATA II and Linux
January 30, 2006
Note for self: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html
I want to add several hard drives to my Ubuntu box so I’ll have enough room to backup my G5 (in addition to the Fw800 drive) and also rysnc down the web sites. Looks like the real hardware RAID cards for SATA are not too bad, at around $100 to $150. On the other hand, the solid SATA II cards run $300+. Ouch.
I don’t want to use dmraid, AKA fakeraid. The performance under Fedora with a Highpoint was not too bad, but certainly not up to hardware RAID stats. Anyone have any experience with any of the cards?
Ubuntu and LAMP
January 24, 2006
I took an older box at home (1.2Ghz AMD Athlon) that had been sitting idle for a while, and slapped Ubuntu on it this weekend. Quick and easy install, and was able to backup some of my sites. It had been sitting idle for quite a while – not because I was deciding what do do with it, or lack of hardware. I had to find a way to run power to it without the Destroyer of All Electronics chewing on the cord.
I am running it headless right now, and it’s acting solely as an internal web server. I want to test the current sites I run with PHP5 and MySQL 4.x before I roll them out to the new server we’re buying. Getting everything set up was a breeze.
wraith:/var/www$ sudo apt-get install php5
wraith:/var/www$ sudo apt-get install php5-gd
And so on. Much easier than the download, compile, and install that I had to do on some of my older hosts, esp. when it came to Apache/MySQL/PHP. What I thought was especially cool was that when I did the apt-get for php, it was smart enough to download the necessary dependencies to run Apache2 in prefork mode and relaunch, switching from threaded worker to prefork mode. Slick.