Yes, HDS9960's are great, simply because of the write performance. Basically, these have a chunk of battery backed RAM (about 32GB, I think) to which writes are stored. These are then written to disk when the array gets a chance, but write times are in the order of 1ms, as opposed to the 10ms we were seeing in FC disks (times as reported by vxstat in Veritas volume manager). For one database we have, this is a major boost as the overnight batch jobs were generating a lot of small transactions and the bottleneck was the redo logs writes (it was waiting for about 70% of the time on redo log writes).
For read-mostly, you really want to have a lot of RAM in your servers.
Re:I have some of these in my garage!
on
Sun Sparc 5 Nostalgia
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· Score: 3, Informative
Ultra 1s have one of 143, 167 or 200MHz CPUs. Older Ultra 1s (usually the 143MHz versions) have only le (10Mbit) ethernet and a 50 pin SCSI connecter. Newer versions have hme and 68 pin SCSI (not sure if the SCSI level is different). You can usually tell the version by the colour of the "1" on the front of the unit; if it's green, it's the older version with le/50pin SCSI, if it's red/orange, it's hme/68 pin. The latter usually comes with Creator graphics. There is also a 3rd version called "Ultra 1 Enterprise" which may not have a graphics board.
There isn't a CPU slot as such; the single CPU is hardwired to the motherboard.
Finally, the E150 is one of the worst bits of kit every shipped by Sun; the inside is mounted in foam blocks (!?!?!!) and if you shut it down (init 5) you can only switch it back on by either (a) opening the unit up or (b) attaching a Sun keyboard and using the 'power' button.
Yeah, I was doing an office move at my old job about 12-18 months ago and one of the workstations had 2 sun 19" (I think; might have been 21") monitors of a type I hadn't seen before and they weighed a ton! Checked the date on the label on the back and they dated back to 1989, so at the time they were about 13 years old and still working! Added to this, they had been in use in London before being moved to Aberdeen (about 600 miles) so they'd survived pretty well...
Yup, one of the best things about Suns systems is that once you have a jumpstart server set up, installation on a client is simply stop-A, boot net - install. You then walk away, come back later (anything between 30 minutes and a few hours, depending on hardware config and number of patches) and you've got a fully configured server.
The main advantage of a network install of anything is that a config change to the installation image is as simple as modifying a file (or files) on a network server; with a CD, you have to change the file, burn the CD and test. If the change doesn't work, you've got a coaster.
You want the best? They compare the costs of a 2CPU Xeon server against a Z900 with two cpus. Who the hell is going to buy a Z900 and leave it almost empty? Better comparison would have been a fully loaded Z900 and equivalent number of CPUs in Wintel servers.
Also, I haven't read it fully, but do the server costs include the MS tax?
Er, sod that. When I log on to my email and have to trawl through 40 messages of which 38 are Paris Hilton, Jessica Simpson, Big Clitzzz or whatever, I don't want to risk deleting too much and missing the 2 emails that I want. Filtering gets rid of most of the cruft, but I'm still getting a considerable amount of spam through, each of which I have to decide whether it's spam or not before I waste my time opening it.
That's something I realised very recently while I was thinking about how much faster I am using vi than notepad, reason being that the commands are so terse/concise because they were designed in the days of ~2400 baud. While we no longer need to conserve bandwidth, conserving keypresses makes vi faster for me than any other text editor. Adding fancy features (colour highlighting of source code, for example) makes it even better which is where vim wins out.
Great! So I can get a free PC which will automatically remind me every 20 minutes I should take a break from the PC? Seriously, how many people will use that 1 minute of ads to make a cup of coffee or take a toilet break?
IBM could, of course, be linux or OS/2, but I doubt either of them is being used for any large database, although once they get linux scaling well on p690s, we'll see what happens. Oracle 10g is also based around "grid" databases using clusters of smaller servers to achieve higher throughput which bypasses the need for scaling on a server level.
IBM still have the real "big iron" in their mainframes, but AFAIK, they don't tend to do the largest databases, just ones where they are (a) running legacy code or (b) require absolute reliability which you still can't get from Unix, even in a cluster.
The main point of amusement is that those two lines of code (one of which is exit) contain "Proprietary Information of Microsoft Corporation", presumably dating back to the work it did on Xenix in the 80s.
Yes and they would be right to; Sun doesn't own the full rights to all the Solaris code (cat/usr/bin/clear for one example) and doesn't have the legal right to release it under the GPL.
To be honest, I don't believe much has happened on XMMS for the last two-three years apart from a couple of incremental updates. This is, in essence, due to the fact that it was largely "done" by that point and was pretty solid and there wasn't much to do.
Also, XMMS is *nix only and would require considerable work to even load on Windows, let alone play MP3s with any quality.
Yup, it forgets that you want to keep the preview pane up. The only solution I found to this on the web was to put some script into the Notes database which opened it up on Mail startup; this is not something any novice should even think of attempting and even I found the instructions for this rather complex and forgot about it, deciding that starting up the preview pane on startup was going to be less hassle than trying to debug some obscure scripting language.
Finally, let me echo any sentiments about how crap Notes is. I'm now actually looking forward to having us move to Outlook and Exchange. Among the other bits of weirdness/annoyences:
System reports that I have new mail, but selecting "open mail" doesn't reveal any messages
Searching for unread messages finds something, somewhere which "isn't in any view" and then tells me it's been deleted.
The concept of a trash folder is missing; delete marks the message for deletion and it stays in the mailbox view until cleared out, at which point it is completely gone (barring backups).
It's not always crashing that's the problem, power failures are another (UPSs can cover that, but...). Also, component failures can often result in a crash.
In any case, when you have 500GB of filesystems, you really don't want to fsck that if a CPU fails.
One good reason for networked sound: thin clients. Linux is well put together to serve as a server for thin clients provided we can deliver sound to clients.
As for playing sound "fast", all you really want is minimal lag between sound being queued on the server and being put out on the speaker. The main problem there is network lag during congestion; I guess that could partially be offset by (a) a good, switched network and/or (b) QoS providing audio with a higher priority.
Funny, I managed to set up pam_smb to authenticate via Samba some years back under Solaris 2.6, 7 and 8 quite happily. It needed a few tweaks in a couple of places, but once it was set up, it worked perfectly well for me.
Yup, I recently got a laptop and ended up with one which had a processor running at a "mere" 1400MHz. However, the lower power consumption means that I get a decent battery life, more important than CPU power and in fact, I usually run it at 600MHz and linux runs quite happily on that, letting me write up web pages using Apache, PHP and PostgreSQL.
People are getting caught up by the hype; 75% of home users don't need 3GHz of computing power to browse the web, write some emails and balance their chequebooks, but the marketing machine tells them they do. I'm generally a "power user" but my main machine is a mere Athlon 1800 XP (1533MHz) and I see not need for me to upgrade in the immediate future and this machine will probably run until something breaks or Quake 4 (or whatever) dictates an upgrade.
Re:Too many passwords - so I write 'em down!
on
Real Security?
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· Score: 1
Urm, OK, that is a little excessive. My online banking has one username & password but also asks a "private" question like name of parent or first school.
Re:Too many passwords - so I write 'em down!
on
Real Security?
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· Score: 1
Wow, a whole six passwords. I counted out how many passwords I had to remember about 4 years ago and worked out that between home passwords and NT, Novell, Unix and switch passwords at work, I had over 20 passwords, all of which I knew by heart. For most users, having several passwords is a problem and it's probably more secure to allow them to have one secure password they can keep for longer than 1 month.
It could simply have been opportunity; he (or she, for that matter) could simply have sniffed the password by luck/chance and then cracked Debian from there.
Three words which make a very good point about the sorry state of the American political system; the politicians are paid to push the agendas of the rich, while ignoring the majority of the people they are supposed to be representing.
Being British, this shouldn't affect me directly, but with Blair doing his best to be Bush's lapdog, what starts in the US will inevitably trundle it's way here.
Er, I'm all for due process and privacy, but I don't believe this is an issue here. I'm pretty certain the laptop had something on it saying "By using this computer you are acknowledging to have actions logged" etc and likewise for AOL. In short, he received due warning (legally) that his actions would be logged. There's nothing in that which isn't "open standards" and I fail to see the link here.
In relation to setting him free, I've heard of at least one case where someone walked free from a murder case due to the DNA evidence being invalidated; the DNA sample the police used to track down the killer was held longer than it should have been. In short, the guy definately killed someone, but legally the police shouldn't have been allowed to present the DNA evidence which convicted him (IIRC, he got off on appeal). Is it fair that a murderer walks free because police kept evidence for too long? Procedures are all well and good, but in my mind, justice should override that.
With physical access, all bets are off at the best of times.
Printing logs is a good idea in some circumstances; you will have a record of all actions and a remote intruder has no method of editing those logs. The main downside is the amount of paper it could use, plus it has to be kept supplied with paper & ink.
Slashdot Mirror
For read-mostly, you really want to have a lot of RAM in your servers.
There isn't a CPU slot as such; the single CPU is hardwired to the motherboard.
Finally, the E150 is one of the worst bits of kit every shipped by Sun; the inside is mounted in foam blocks (!?!?!!) and if you shut it down (init 5) you can only switch it back on by either (a) opening the unit up or (b) attaching a Sun keyboard and using the 'power' button.
Yeah, I was doing an office move at my old job about 12-18 months ago and one of the workstations had 2 sun 19" (I think; might have been 21") monitors of a type I hadn't seen before and they weighed a ton! Checked the date on the label on the back and they dated back to 1989, so at the time they were about 13 years old and still working! Added to this, they had been in use in London before being moved to Aberdeen (about 600 miles) so they'd survived pretty well...
The main advantage of a network install of anything is that a config change to the installation image is as simple as modifying a file (or files) on a network server; with a CD, you have to change the file, burn the CD and test. If the change doesn't work, you've got a coaster.
And small companies can raise $59m for the owners, even if they only have 21 employees.
Also, I haven't read it fully, but do the server costs include the MS tax?
Er, sod that. When I log on to my email and have to trawl through 40 messages of which 38 are Paris Hilton, Jessica Simpson, Big Clitzzz or whatever, I don't want to risk deleting too much and missing the 2 emails that I want. Filtering gets rid of most of the cruft, but I'm still getting a considerable amount of spam through, each of which I have to decide whether it's spam or not before I waste my time opening it.
That's something I realised very recently while I was thinking about how much faster I am using vi than notepad, reason being that the commands are so terse/concise because they were designed in the days of ~2400 baud. While we no longer need to conserve bandwidth, conserving keypresses makes vi faster for me than any other text editor. Adding fancy features (colour highlighting of source code, for example) makes it even better which is where vim wins out.
Great! So I can get a free PC which will automatically remind me every 20 minutes I should take a break from the PC? Seriously, how many people will use that 1 minute of ads to make a cup of coffee or take a toilet break?
IBM still have the real "big iron" in their mainframes, but AFAIK, they don't tend to do the largest databases, just ones where they are (a) running legacy code or (b) require absolute reliability which you still can't get from Unix, even in a cluster.
The main point of amusement is that those two lines of code (one of which is exit) contain "Proprietary Information of Microsoft Corporation", presumably dating back to the work it did on Xenix in the 80s.
Yes and they would be right to; Sun doesn't own the full rights to all the Solaris code (cat /usr/bin/clear for one example) and doesn't have the legal right to release it under the GPL.
Also, XMMS is *nix only and would require considerable work to even load on Windows, let alone play MP3s with any quality.
Finally, let me echo any sentiments about how crap Notes is. I'm now actually looking forward to having us move to Outlook and Exchange. Among the other bits of weirdness/annoyences:
In any case, when you have 500GB of filesystems, you really don't want to fsck that if a CPU fails.
As for playing sound "fast", all you really want is minimal lag between sound being queued on the server and being put out on the speaker. The main problem there is network lag during congestion; I guess that could partially be offset by (a) a good, switched network and/or (b) QoS providing audio with a higher priority.
Funny, I managed to set up pam_smb to authenticate via Samba some years back under Solaris 2.6, 7 and 8 quite happily. It needed a few tweaks in a couple of places, but once it was set up, it worked perfectly well for me.
People are getting caught up by the hype; 75% of home users don't need 3GHz of computing power to browse the web, write some emails and balance their chequebooks, but the marketing machine tells them they do. I'm generally a "power user" but my main machine is a mere Athlon 1800 XP (1533MHz) and I see not need for me to upgrade in the immediate future and this machine will probably run until something breaks or Quake 4 (or whatever) dictates an upgrade.
Urm, OK, that is a little excessive. My online banking has one username & password but also asks a "private" question like name of parent or first school.
Wow, a whole six passwords. I counted out how many passwords I had to remember about 4 years ago and worked out that between home passwords and NT, Novell, Unix and switch passwords at work, I had over 20 passwords, all of which I knew by heart. For most users, having several passwords is a problem and it's probably more secure to allow them to have one secure password they can keep for longer than 1 month.
It could simply have been opportunity; he (or she, for that matter) could simply have sniffed the password by luck/chance and then cracked Debian from there.
Being British, this shouldn't affect me directly, but with Blair doing his best to be Bush's lapdog, what starts in the US will inevitably trundle it's way here.
In relation to setting him free, I've heard of at least one case where someone walked free from a murder case due to the DNA evidence being invalidated; the DNA sample the police used to track down the killer was held longer than it should have been. In short, the guy definately killed someone, but legally the police shouldn't have been allowed to present the DNA evidence which convicted him (IIRC, he got off on appeal). Is it fair that a murderer walks free because police kept evidence for too long? Procedures are all well and good, but in my mind, justice should override that.
Printing logs is a good idea in some circumstances; you will have a record of all actions and a remote intruder has no method of editing those logs. The main downside is the amount of paper it could use, plus it has to be kept supplied with paper & ink.
The issue is the dual standards; the RIAA wants to sue the world while being exempt from at least one type of court action on itself.