For me it was really about having a test environment. Any time I would get a "test" server, I'd quickly find that for the $$ the server would become something management wanted to "get their money's worth" from, and it would be re-purposed away from being a test machine.
The desktop was under $10k, sits at my desk, and is mine to do what I want with it. Currently I'm testing AIX 6.1 (works great, cool new features). It'll run KDE and an ancient version of firefox, if I want, usually I just have X with multiple shells open.
Whenever I need to do something particularly major in our prod environment, it's fully vetted on this desktop first. OS upgrades, patches, Oracle upgrades, firmware, new utility scripts - I have a great little test environment for them. And alt-disk-install makes it a snap to get back to 'normal'
Do I see any use for one outside of that? Not really, except maybe 3d rendering or something.
A few years back we had a surplus budget, and I was able to convince management that an AIX desktop box was a good investment - for testing & administration both. It has proven to be that and more. We got one of the 285's, and I get use out of it daily.
From testing OS & firmware upgrades to just being a great desktop platform, it's proven to be very valuable.
If you're using Qlogic HBAs, they have something you can install called SanSurfer that's good for looking at performance type things. Newer McData switches have some built in performance monitoring, but I'm not familiar with the older models. There are some awesome software packages to help track utilization, but they're pricey. (IBM's TPC for Data is stellar, and is pricer per TB managed).
Defragging at the OS level might help you, and there's no harm in it. The more sequential (at both a logical placement, and physical allocation of LUNs) the data is, the better you'll do...
If you do a lot of extending and reducing or deleting of LUNs, you can get fragmentation. (Especially with deleting LUNS, as new LUNs fill in the leftover gaps of space) That's pretty dependent upon whose storage controller you're using, how many spindles, LUN size, etc.
I'd tend to agree, not usually a problem. But then if the storage controller has been in place for a long time, with multiple admins, hosts added & deleted, etc. The (mis)management of it over the years could have lead to lots of little accumulated changes. Any decent storage controller, though, has built in software to see which LUNs are "hot", and what disks they're hitting within a raid group. If you've got one 'hot' LUN hittingn a small number of disks, it might be good to reorg it on the SC side, or move it to a new LUN spread across more spindles.
I work in IT, in healthcare. I manage our Storage, and our AIX hosts. We boot from SAN.
We boot some hosts from our SAN (McData SAN switches, IBM SVC, Multiple DS4800's). First, is it your SAN that's bottlenecking (the switches?), the storage controller, or the hosts? When they bottleneck, are you seeing a lot of paging. Large roaming profiles loading all at once could be causing you to page, since your swap is out on your storage controller, you're doing double duty, and paying a penalty for it. As others have said, work on reducing the size of the roaming profiles. If you're doing heavy paging, fix it. Buy some RAM, or move things around so it's not an issue.
Booting from a SAN can work fine, but it has some disadvantages to it besides the obvious. It means you have to watch things closer, keep histories of your IO utilization on a per-path basis. That's the only way to find where the bottlenecks are, and when they start. You need to know exactly which host, what paths it has from the HBA(s) all the way to the disk, and where you're hitting the limits along that path.
I've been running Vista (Business) for well over a month now, and use iTunes daily with my 4gb ipod nano. I haven't noticed any issues. Music purchased from ITMS plays fine, and I haven't (yet) corrupted my nano. So this news of it not working is a bit of a surprise to me.
I decided to take the plunge and give Vista a go at work. We have a volume license deal with MS, so I grabbed a brand new, unformatted hard drive, and tried to install Vista. Nada. I couldn't even boot from the CD. Tried this in 3 machines.
Out of morbid curiosity I decided to install XP, worked like a charm. I then put in the Vista CD, and it booted and installed a fresh copy of Vista without problem. (Complete overwrite, not upgrade).
So, from my experience, Vista won't even install on a totally fresh hard drive.
A co-worker had a very similar experience, but had to go with installing XP, then upgrading - which leaves you with some decidedly annoying problems with the admin controls.
Overall Vista isn't as bad to work with as some stories would lead me to believe, but there are definitely days where it's easy to see it is not fit for prime-time.
The fine summary forgot the important aspect of these laptops, the disk space. From the article: "32-Gigabyte (GB) NAND flash-based solid state disk (SSD)".
Recently at an IBM conference for pSeries hardware, they gave a small demo on the Cell processor. The demo was a Mac G4 running a sort of flight sim, with data for Mount St. Helens. The display was a 35" flat panel running at some obscene resolution. They began the demo with just the G4 processor, and no help from the Cell. It was painfuly slow, at less then one frame every 5 seconds. Jagged lines were obvious, and it looked terrible.
In the software demo, they then enabled the cell processor, or re-routed the processing to it in some way (it was hard to tell exactly, and they weren't too forthcoming). The difference was remarkable. 30 - 40 fps, and a crystal clear picture. The data they were using was from (or at least they said it was from) satellite images, GPS data, aerial photo surveys, and USGS maps. It was extremely well rendered, down to pebbles. Clouds and such were just remarkable.
At the end they offered to let us "fly", so I jumped at it and took the first turn. While not a real game by any stretch, it was a lot of fun to manuever through the terrain and look at the detail. So, taking what they said was going on at face value, the cell was a very impressive processor.
One thing of note, though... the "cell processor unit" they had hooked up to the G4 was HUGE. Bigger then a standard PC case, with 6 120mm fans on it. Not exactly heartening for something that's supposed to go into a console.
Still, my impression of it was that it's got a TON of possibility, and it really is working hardware.
Was setting up chat via jabber to some co-workers, and found that I didn't need to set up a jabber.org account, I could talk to them directly with my google talk account. Worked pretty seamlessly (To both @jabber.org accounts and @bgmn.net accounts), including a chat room. I was using GAIM as a client.
From what I can gather, I believe they don't just help players find each other, create rankings, etc... I think they actually have big powerful servers to host the games for you.
So that would be the end of lag because your host's machine can't handle it, or his DSL connection is flaky.
I am a fan of opensource software, and would agree that in many places it is better then, or of equal quality to, commercial closed source software.
The one place I do not agree is with wireless security monitoring. I have not seen any open source offering, or combination of offerings, that can hold a candle to Airmagnet. I test various open source offerings as I hear about them, and to date have seen nothing with the power and flexibility Airmagnet provides. It was worth every penny we paid for it.
IP based Console Server (via serial connection) to all Unix hosts.
IP based KVM's with flatpanel monitor/keyboard trays in each rack to all hosts.
Remote desktop for all the windows hosts
SSH on all the Unix hosts
Switches, routers, etc are all accessed via ssh. (some with a small single port "console server", if they don't natively support ssh).
Basically the goal should be not to find the *best* way, but as many ways as you can, so when one avenue breaks down, you have other points of getting in. And all of them need to be secure. If it's web based it needs to be ssl. Use ipsec. ssh. etc...
Also, the reason we have the KVM on the linux boxes serving up a green screen console to each rack is in case the console server goes down when the lan does. It saved us once when water hit the rack with both the network switches and the console server in it.
The BBC article:
Mega-tsunami: Wave of Destruction
BBC Two 9.30pm 12 October 2000
Revisited: BBC Four 7pm 24 May 2003
The other article:
11 August 2004
Unstoppable Gee-Gees
By Gwynne Dyer
Perhaps the person pointing them out was looking for a tie-in to be sensationalistic, but both articles were written long ago, and were certainly attempts to educate about preventing the disasters of the type that just occurred.
1) IBM Partners with apple to make the g5
2) IBM Sells off its intel based PC & Laptop line
3) IBM incorporates more features into the g5 to make it a bigger competitor to intel / amd
(begin conspiracy)
4) IBM pushes linux more heavily on the apple g5
5) IBM pushes the idea of apple desktops paired with IBM servers running linux or AIX
Could a stronger IBM / apple partnership be the culmination of technologies (power processors, apple desktops, IBM servers, the marketing engine of both companies) that finally steps up and pushes an all *nix platform to challenge Microsoft?
Another winner of the "spiel des jahre" online is Carcassonne. I find the game every bit as enjoyable as Die Siedler, but the online version is much, much better in its design, gameplay, and overall implementation.
You can download it from SoftUnity though you need to read some german to do so. Around $10 for the original game, another 14 or so for the expansion.
This site will help you through ordering it. If you want to play a good german game online, this one rocks!
(Note, the game is not advertised in english, but simply changing the language flag in the config file from '2' to '1' will change the entire game to english)
The first game I've played that I enjoy more then the Settlers of Catan.
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/822
(Both Settlers and Carcassonne are incredibly fun, go get them now if you've never played it)
I had to be an admin to do the install. That means I have to have rights to read all files on the machine to install it.
I switched to a non admin account, I was told only the original person who installed it could run it.
I switched to a different admin account, tried to run it, got the message that only the installer could. I attempted to install it again under this account, I got the message that it's not meant for multi-user systems, only one user can install it on a PC at a time.
So in summary, if you don't trust someone who's an admin on your system, don't use that system. The search only makes it easier for them to see your data - they already have rights to.
I have several different bootable ISO's I use, including the two mentioned above. I could either carry a stack of CDs, and reboot when I want to use them, or I can leave them as ISO's and just boot them in vmware. It has the advantage that I don't have to quit what I'm doing, and I can use different tools from different OS's at once.
The go ISO was not the first one I'd done that with, as I'd only recently discovered it. But I do find that a handy method of bringing up the tools I want quickly.
It also has the advantage that I don't have to worry about installing / configuring all of those tools, I just keep up to date on my bootable ISO's.
Slashdot Mirror
check out his book "The pluto files" http://www.amazon.com/Pluto-Files-Neil-deGrasse-Tyson/dp/0393065200
The desktop was under $10k, sits at my desk, and is mine to do what I want with it. Currently I'm testing AIX 6.1 (works great, cool new features). It'll run KDE and an ancient version of firefox, if I want, usually I just have X with multiple shells open.
Whenever I need to do something particularly major in our prod environment, it's fully vetted on this desktop first. OS upgrades, patches, Oracle upgrades, firmware, new utility scripts - I have a great little test environment for them. And alt-disk-install makes it a snap to get back to 'normal'
Do I see any use for one outside of that? Not really, except maybe 3d rendering or something.
- Tony
From testing OS & firmware upgrades to just being a great desktop platform, it's proven to be very valuable.
- Tony
I regularly got calls from the Dove Foundation. Like one or two a month. Then I started doing this...
Telemarketer: This is calling on behalf of the Dove Foundation...
Me: (Interrupting) Oh, is that where I can buy some freshly killed dove to cook, and you donate the cost to help out some charity?
Telemarketer: Ack! Uh, no! (etc)
Me: (hang up) They've never called again.
Of what I was told about .50 cal's. - You can't shoot at people, only equipment. So aim for their helmet.
Defragging at the OS level might help you, and there's no harm in it. The more sequential (at both a logical placement, and physical allocation of LUNs) the data is, the better you'll do...
I'd tend to agree, not usually a problem. But then if the storage controller has been in place for a long time, with multiple admins, hosts added & deleted, etc. The (mis)management of it over the years could have lead to lots of little accumulated changes. Any decent storage controller, though, has built in software to see which LUNs are "hot", and what disks they're hitting within a raid group. If you've got one 'hot' LUN hittingn a small number of disks, it might be good to reorg it on the SC side, or move it to a new LUN spread across more spindles.
We boot some hosts from our SAN (McData SAN switches, IBM SVC, Multiple DS4800's). First, is it your SAN that's bottlenecking (the switches?), the storage controller, or the hosts? When they bottleneck, are you seeing a lot of paging. Large roaming profiles loading all at once could be causing you to page, since your swap is out on your storage controller, you're doing double duty, and paying a penalty for it. As others have said, work on reducing the size of the roaming profiles. If you're doing heavy paging, fix it. Buy some RAM, or move things around so it's not an issue.
Booting from a SAN can work fine, but it has some disadvantages to it besides the obvious. It means you have to watch things closer, keep histories of your IO utilization on a per-path basis. That's the only way to find where the bottlenecks are, and when they start. You need to know exactly which host, what paths it has from the HBA(s) all the way to the disk, and where you're hitting the limits along that path.
I've been running Vista (Business) for well over a month now, and use iTunes daily with my 4gb ipod nano. I haven't noticed any issues. Music purchased from ITMS plays fine, and I haven't (yet) corrupted my nano. So this news of it not working is a bit of a surprise to me.
Out of morbid curiosity I decided to install XP, worked like a charm. I then put in the Vista CD, and it booted and installed a fresh copy of Vista without problem. (Complete overwrite, not upgrade).
So, from my experience, Vista won't even install on a totally fresh hard drive.
A co-worker had a very similar experience, but had to go with installing XP, then upgrading - which leaves you with some decidedly annoying problems with the admin controls.
Overall Vista isn't as bad to work with as some stories would lead me to believe, but there are definitely days where it's easy to see it is not fit for prime-time.
So 32gb of total storage. Not too bad, really.
In the software demo, they then enabled the cell processor, or re-routed the processing to it in some way (it was hard to tell exactly, and they weren't too forthcoming). The difference was remarkable. 30 - 40 fps, and a crystal clear picture. The data they were using was from (or at least they said it was from) satellite images, GPS data, aerial photo surveys, and USGS maps. It was extremely well rendered, down to pebbles. Clouds and such were just remarkable.
At the end they offered to let us "fly", so I jumped at it and took the first turn. While not a real game by any stretch, it was a lot of fun to manuever through the terrain and look at the detail. So, taking what they said was going on at face value, the cell was a very impressive processor.
One thing of note, though... the "cell processor unit" they had hooked up to the G4 was HUGE. Bigger then a standard PC case, with 6 120mm fans on it. Not exactly heartening for something that's supposed to go into a console.
Still, my impression of it was that it's got a TON of possibility, and it really is working hardware.
Was setting up chat via jabber to some co-workers, and found that I didn't need to set up a jabber.org account, I could talk to them directly with my google talk account. Worked pretty seamlessly (To both @jabber.org accounts and @bgmn.net accounts), including a chat room. I was using GAIM as a client.
Read about it
Sure you can roll your own Boinc client, but I haven't been able to get a stable version of it.
It's too bad, really. It was a fun project to contribute to.
So that would be the end of lag because your host's machine can't handle it, or his DSL connection is flaky.
The one place I do not agree is with wireless security monitoring. I have not seen any open source offering, or combination of offerings, that can hold a candle to Airmagnet. I test various open source offerings as I hear about them, and to date have seen nothing with the power and flexibility Airmagnet provides. It was worth every penny we paid for it.
IP based Console Server (via serial connection) to all Unix hosts.
IP based KVM's with flatpanel monitor/keyboard trays in each rack to all hosts.
Remote desktop for all the windows hosts
SSH on all the Unix hosts
Switches, routers, etc are all accessed via ssh. (some with a small single port "console server", if they don't natively support ssh).
Basically the goal should be not to find the *best* way, but as many ways as you can, so when one avenue breaks down, you have other points of getting in. And all of them need to be secure. If it's web based it needs to be ssl. Use ipsec. ssh. etc...
Also, the reason we have the KVM on the linux boxes serving up a green screen console to each rack is in case the console server goes down when the lan does. It saved us once when water hit the rack with both the network switches and the console server in it.
Mega-tsunami: Wave of Destruction
BBC Two 9.30pm 12 October 2000
Revisited: BBC Four 7pm 24 May 2003
The other article:
11 August 2004
Unstoppable Gee-Gees
By Gwynne Dyer
Perhaps the person pointing them out was looking for a tie-in to be sensationalistic, but both articles were written long ago, and were certainly attempts to educate about preventing the disasters of the type that just occurred.
2) IBM Sells off its intel based PC & Laptop line
3) IBM incorporates more features into the g5 to make it a bigger competitor to intel / amd
(begin conspiracy)
4) IBM pushes linux more heavily on the apple g5
5) IBM pushes the idea of apple desktops paired with IBM servers running linux or AIX
Could a stronger IBM / apple partnership be the culmination of technologies (power processors, apple desktops, IBM servers, the marketing engine of both companies) that finally steps up and pushes an all *nix platform to challenge Microsoft?
You can download it from SoftUnity though you need to read some german to do so. Around $10 for the original game, another 14 or so for the expansion.
This site will help you through ordering it. If you want to play a good german game online, this one rocks!
(Note, the game is not advertised in english, but simply changing the language flag in the config file from '2' to '1' will change the entire game to english)
The first game I've played that I enjoy more then the Settlers of Catan. http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/822 (Both Settlers and Carcassonne are incredibly fun, go get them now if you've never played it)
I installed the google desktop search.
I had to be an admin to do the install. That means I have to have rights to read all files on the machine to install it.
I switched to a non admin account, I was told only the original person who installed it could run it.
I switched to a different admin account, tried to run it, got the message that only the installer could. I attempted to install it again under this account, I got the message that it's not meant for multi-user systems, only one user can install it on a PC at a time.
So in summary, if you don't trust someone who's an admin on your system, don't use that system. The search only makes it easier for them to see your data - they already have rights to.
The go ISO was not the first one I'd done that with, as I'd only recently discovered it. But I do find that a handy method of bringing up the tools I want quickly.
It also has the advantage that I don't have to worry about installing / configuring all of those tools, I just keep up to date on my bootable ISO's.
It's also handy to keep an ISO of knoppix-STD for booting and using security related tools in a seperate VM.
(knoppix-STD is also done by the same individual who does the Hikarunix bootable go CD).