It's expensive for the home user only if buy the hardware sold by Coraid. There are kernel drivers that will let you export any local block device as an AoE target to your network, The Coraid devices just do this for you using dedicated hardware running Plan 9 (I kid you not...).
It's worth noting that the "expensive" is a relative term. At $day_job, we looked at a number of different storage technologies and vendors, and the Coraid hardware came out *very* nicely from a price/performance/capacity perspective. We have more than half a petabyte of storage on Coraid arrays, and have yet to find a way to do this as cheaply with any other storage vendor/technology.
The biggest bottleneck we have is the Linux NFS stack (which should come to no surprise to anyone). In my testing, I got comparable performance numbers between an SR2461 and our NetApp filer up to about 10 concurrent clients, at which point Coraid performance dropped off signifcantly. I suspect this was, as mentioned, due more to Linux choking on the NFS traffic rather than the array not being able to handle the load.
Is it perfect? No, but works and scales pretty well for us.
It's small: 756 lines of sane Perl (yes, such a thing exists).
Portable: tasks are stored in plaintext in a.gdbm file. Import and exports from text files.
Easily customizeable: Arbitrary flags/headers/etc can be added. The code is straightforward, and it's easy to add features.
Purely command-line driven (I suppose someone could build a GUI, but why?)
Disappointing for techies (except for NASA)
on
NextFest 2005
·
· Score: 2, Informative
My wife and I went, and were quite disappointed, even though both of us fall squarely into the "geek" crowd. Most of it was "Look at all the cool stuff you can't afford to buy from <CORP>!" or pushing hybrid Hummers, or tech stuff we'd heard about a long time ago. After about 90 minutes, we'd seen everything we wanted to see, and the crowds had descended (we got there early). The floor layout is poor, and there were several "choke points" that were real traffic jams. I also noticed that an hour after we got there, several exhibits had stopped working, and people were frantically trying to fix things. We got free tickets from a GM-sponsored talk a few days ago (which was also a waste of time), and I'm glad that we didn't have to actually pay admission.
There was a display for several NASA projects (Cassini, the Mars rovers, solar sails, et al), and that was very good--the NASA guys know their stuff. There was a cool vaccuum too.
I'd also like to give special mention about the rude guy at the MIT Media Lab exhibit. The conversation was along the lines of:
Me: This is interesting, how does it work?
Him: It's complicated, and I don't want to explain it.
Great attitude for a trade show...
I think I'll pass next time NextFest comes around.
I'd go somewhere besides ibuypower.com for your shopping. I ordered a laptop from them earlier this year, and it was a disaster.
Two days after placing the order, they lowered the price. I called them on it, and pointed out that I could cancel the order, resubmit one with the lower price, get rush shipping, and thus get it sooner, and for less money. They then informed me that I wasn't eligble for one of the online discounts, but did reduce the price a bit.
When it actually arrived (somewhat slowly), the DIMM was bad. After a few hard freezes, I ran memtest86, and it threw about one memory error every ten seconds during the tests. There is no reason this should ever have passed their QA department (and they make a big deal about their "burn-in processes").
Getting it replaced required sending back the entire laptop (why can't they do an advance parts RMA, like every other sane vendor?). It was on their dime, but it took a week to get a return waybill, and another week for the laptop to get back to them. The memory replacement should take all of 10 minutes (if you do it slowly), plus another hour or so to test. After more than a week, I called for an update, and the service techs had not even looked at it yet. They had both the laptop and my money.
At this point, I told them to keep it, demanded a refund, waited on hold for an hour (it was an 800-number, so they paid for it, and I don't mind too much). When the amount was still charged to my credit card a week later, I had to sic my credit card company on them to get it back.
DSH is nice for relatively small things that need to get run everywhere, and has an interactive mode that works fairly well. It works from any command line.
Pconsole on the other hand requires X, and creates a seperate terminal window for every host you are connecting to. There is a small 'command' window that echos everything you type to all of the other terminals under it's control. If you have ever seen Sun's "Cluster Management Tool" from a few years ago, this is very similar. It can also attach to existing sessions as well.
Actually, I recall hearing that Gene Roddenberry made a point of making sure that the actors in the original series could be identified (so they could get some recognition for their work). Since most actors on Earth, especially those in Hollywood, have two eyes, two ears, and one mouth, that limits what they can do with the aliens. Now, to be fair, there have been several "less human" looking species making appearances in the last few shows.
The UPS is only part of the problem; once you have an incoming power feed going into the UPS, you have to get the power to the racks. I'm involved with setting up a smallish data center pretty much from the ground up, and in our case, it makes the most sense to have a (relatively) large UPS to one side of the room, and then run power 18 racks.
These are pretty slick--the tracks are fixed in place, but the outlets are completely mobile. Think track lighting, but for power outlets. The modules come in all the various plug types ranging from standard 110v 15A plugs to 208v plugs to bigger modules with fuseboxes and circuit breakers (the list of plugs is pretty extensive).
The major benefit for this raceway is that once the track is installed, the plugs can be relocated without shutting down power, or requiring an electrician to come in and do it. You can also buy modules as needed, instead of having to guess at options for future expansion. In our case, we are going to get several 110v/20A modules and a few 208v outlets, place them directly over the racks as needed, and have power strips internal to the rack plug into those.
Far and away, the most useful program that I use is Handyshopper. It's nominally a shopping list program, but I also use it as my ToDo list as well. It's well written, incredibly stable, and very easy to use.
Another useful program is Parens. It's a very nice scientific calculator.
For mucking around with the raw.prc and.pdb files, I like OnBoard RsrcEdit. It's a bit large, but it will let you manipulate databases and resource files at a fairly low level. I also like Z'Catalog for erasing old.pdb files that weren't correctly cleaned up when you removed an application, or for beaming arbitrary files around.
There's an sntp client called (not surprisingly) "SNTP", but I can't find a link for it.
Have a look at the OpenNMS project. It looks to be very close to what you are looking for. I recently heard Steve Giles, one of their lead technical people, give a presentation at the local LUG meeting, and I was quite impressed.
...for things that require a small memory footprint.
ASCII uses 7 or 8 bits (usually 8 now). Unicode uses 16--twice as much. For things like embedded systems where memory can be in short supply, there no need to double the space used for storage.
Yes, you can do clever tricks like compress the data, and make up your own encoding scheme. And yes, memory is (relatively) cheap these days, but even so...
I have a confession to make: I likedBreakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. Granted, I was something like 7 at the time, but even so. Apparently, it's not a very popular movie anymore (or then it would seem)...but damn the dancing was cool.
Returning some of the 16.7 million...
on
CNN On IPv6
·
· Score: 2
Has anyone approached any of the Class A address holders (AOL, MIT, IBM, etc), and asked to have some of them back? I suppose that there would be some seriou opposition to this, and it may not even be technically feasible... Just a thought.
Slashdot Mirror
It's expensive for the home user only if buy the hardware sold by Coraid. There are kernel drivers that will let you export any local block device as an AoE target to your network, The Coraid devices just do this for you using dedicated hardware running Plan 9 (I kid you not...).
It's worth noting that the "expensive" is a relative term. At $day_job, we looked at a number of different storage technologies and vendors, and the Coraid hardware came out *very* nicely from a price/performance/capacity perspective. We have more than half a petabyte of storage on Coraid arrays, and have yet to find a way to do this as cheaply with any other storage vendor/technology.
The biggest bottleneck we have is the Linux NFS stack (which should come to no surprise to anyone). In my testing, I got comparable performance numbers between an SR2461 and our NetApp filer up to about 10 concurrent clients, at which point Coraid performance dropped off signifcantly. I suspect this was, as mentioned, due more to Linux choking on the NFS traffic rather than the array not being able to handle the load.
Is it perfect? No, but works and scales pretty well for us.
Perhaps you should ask Mr Popper for help? There's a book about it.
My wife and I went, and were quite disappointed, even though both of us fall squarely into the "geek" crowd. Most of it was "Look at all the cool stuff you can't afford to buy from <CORP>!" or pushing hybrid Hummers, or tech stuff we'd heard about a long time ago. After about 90 minutes, we'd seen everything we wanted to see, and the crowds had descended (we got there early). The floor layout is poor, and there were several "choke points" that were real traffic jams. I also noticed that an hour after we got there, several exhibits had stopped working, and people were frantically trying to fix things. We got free tickets from a GM-sponsored talk a few days ago (which was also a waste of time), and I'm glad that we didn't have to actually pay admission.
There was a display for several NASA projects (Cassini, the Mars rovers, solar sails, et al), and that was very good--the NASA guys know their stuff. There was a cool vaccuum too.
I'd also like to give special mention about the rude guy at the MIT Media Lab exhibit. The conversation was along the lines of:
Me: This is interesting, how does it work?Him: It's complicated, and I don't want to explain it.
Great attitude for a trade show...
I think I'll pass next time NextFest comes around.
they don't bulid the laptops themselves themselves u know. they just slap thier name on it.
So they managed to botch it even though they didn't actually have to do anything? That's even worse...
Two days after placing the order, they lowered the price. I called them on it, and pointed out that I could cancel the order, resubmit one with the lower price, get rush shipping, and thus get it sooner, and for less money. They then informed me that I wasn't eligble for one of the online discounts, but did reduce the price a bit.
When it actually arrived (somewhat slowly), the DIMM was bad. After a few hard freezes, I ran memtest86, and it threw about one memory error every ten seconds during the tests. There is no reason this should ever have passed their QA department (and they make a big deal about their "burn-in processes").
Getting it replaced required sending back the entire laptop (why can't they do an advance parts RMA, like every other sane vendor?). It was on their dime, but it took a week to get a return waybill, and another week for the laptop to get back to them. The memory replacement should take all of 10 minutes (if you do it slowly), plus another hour or so to test. After more than a week, I called for an update, and the service techs had not even looked at it yet. They had both the laptop and my money.
At this point, I told them to keep it, demanded a refund, waited on hold for an hour (it was an 800-number, so they paid for it, and I don't mind too much). When the amount was still charged to my credit card a week later, I had to sic my credit card company on them to get it back.
So, don't use ibuypower.com.
You are leaving out two very imporant parts of that $2500 site license:
1)Iit only covers student workstations. It does not include faculty or staff workstations. As to where cluster nodes fit...that's anyone's guess.
2) The only support you get is in the form of packages, not telephone/email support aside from the usual free stuff available to anyone.
- pconsole: http://www.heiho.net/pconsole/
- DSH: http://dsh.sourceforge.net/
DSH is nice for relatively small things that need to get run everywhere, and has an interactive mode that works fairly well. It works from any command line.Pconsole on the other hand requires X, and creates a seperate terminal window for every host you are connecting to. There is a small 'command' window that echos everything you type to all of the other terminals under it's control. If you have ever seen Sun's "Cluster Management Tool" from a few years ago, this is very similar. It can also attach to existing sessions as well.
Actually, I recall hearing that Gene Roddenberry made a point of making sure that the actors in the original series could be identified (so they could get some recognition for their work). Since most actors on Earth, especially those in Hollywood, have two eyes, two ears, and one mouth, that limits what they can do with the aliens. Now, to be fair, there have been several "less human" looking species making appearances in the last few shows.
The solution we are planning on using is some neat power racewys from Universal Electric Corp. Here's the link: http://www.uecorp.com/starline/starline.htm
These are pretty slick--the tracks are fixed in place, but the outlets are completely mobile. Think track lighting, but for power outlets. The modules come in all the various plug types ranging from standard 110v 15A plugs to 208v plugs to bigger modules with fuseboxes and circuit breakers (the list of plugs is pretty extensive).
The major benefit for this raceway is that once the track is installed, the plugs can be relocated without shutting down power, or requiring an electrician to come in and do it. You can also buy modules as needed, instead of having to guess at options for future expansion. In our case, we are going to get several 110v/20A modules and a few 208v outlets, place them directly over the racks as needed, and have power strips internal to the rack plug into those.
I found this from Ameritech's page titled "SBC Ameritech Cares About Its Customers' Privacy" . The link is here: http://www.ameritech.com/content/0,3086,23,00.html
Another useful program is Parens. It's a very nice scientific calculator.
For mucking around with the raw .prc and .pdb files, I like OnBoard RsrcEdit. It's a bit large, but it will let you manipulate databases and resource files at a fairly low level. I also like Z'Catalog for erasing old .pdb files that weren't correctly cleaned up when you removed an application, or for beaming arbitrary files around.
There's an sntp client called (not surprisingly) "SNTP", but I can't find a link for it.
For games, There's always SimCity, and anything else on www.palmgear.com.
There's a program called 'rgrep' that will do recursive searches. That should work much better instead of anything having to do with 'find'.
Also, something like 'find . -type f | xargs grep foo' will usaually run faster than trying to get find to do the dirty work.
Have a look at the OpenNMS project. It looks to be very close to what you are looking for. I recently heard Steve Giles, one of their lead technical people, give a presentation at the local LUG meeting, and I was quite impressed.
...for things that require a small memory footprint.
ASCII uses 7 or 8 bits (usually 8 now). Unicode uses 16--twice as much. For things like embedded systems where memory can be in short supply, there no need to double the space used for storage.
Yes, you can do clever tricks like compress the data, and make up your own encoding scheme. And yes, memory is (relatively) cheap these days, but even so...
I have a confession to make: I liked Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. Granted, I was something like 7 at the time, but even so. Apparently, it's not a very popular movie anymore (or then it would seem)...but damn the dancing was cool.
Has anyone approached any of the Class A address holders (AOL, MIT, IBM, etc), and asked to have some of them back? I suppose that there would be some seriou opposition to this, and it may not even be technically feasible... Just a thought.