I've been getting a bill every month for almost 3 years now from Suncom. The amount is $0.00 I'd love to know the total amount they've spent on paper, printing, envelopes and postage.
When I first read the title I hoped the ability for these systems to communicate correctly was what was being addressed. I've been working with a bank for weeks now trying to get things I encrypt with GPG to be decryptable by their PGP "Universal Server" product. They can install PGP Desktop on a PC and decrypt my messages just fine. They have this larger/fancier package that decrypts upstream of their Exchange server and internally passes on the unencrypted emails to their folks. It also has a webmail (https) interface for outsiders to send/receive things to them, etc.. It simply refuses to decrypt something created by GPG and PGP's support has been thoroughly useless so far. Hrm...
GFS/GPFS: you don't need the complexity or interesting failure modes of shared-block-storage filesystems. Stay away.
I'd be curious about the "interesting failure modes" you mention. Do you have (bad) experience with this? I've deployed this technology multiple times with great success so far. It appears from your design you also try to avoid the "single point of failure". That's why with FC shared storage and GFS I generally design in more than one SAN/RAID unit and keep them sync'ed. GFS in my experience though beats NFS hands down. It's a local filesystem, most apps have no clue it's shared, it's pretty much totally transparent. NFS, even _good_ NFS, has done strange things or "let me down" much more often than GFS ever has.
Multiple servers all looking at the same files? That's what shared storage is all about.. Fibre Channel, iSCSI, etc... Look at GFS from RedHat or any of the others like IBM's recently announced GPFS. Fedora or CentOS for RedHat's GFS on a more reasonable budget.
Why is it that any time anyone develops a product and is successful with it Microsoft vows to "kill" them (or it)? Sad... Their "killer" will of course be MS-only.
PS. If it's multi-platform, watch out.. That will really get you in MS's sights.
Agree... I sat through a demo of their FTVirtual product recently and was fairly impressed. Some of the things I pointed out to them that I wasn't crazy about was that it's Windows only and that it requires Windows to be installed on both "host" servers. I can understand it being on the "virtual" server but would be interested in a solution similar to VMWare ESX Server where there is no host OS, other than the product itself. Therefore the underlying OS shouldn't get spyware/viruses if it weren't Windows. Their answer was to run virus protection on both host servers _and_ the virtual server. A different approach I realize, and what they have does work...
No support for 64-bit yet and that will hurt them, x86_64 in the server space is almost already the norm.
Other than that though, a good product that did appear to work. I saw various hardware failures get artificially introduced with not so much as a hiccup from the client workstations accessing it(them). Good stuff... For the Wintel only crowd.
Nothing to do with postal speed. Take for instance 3 out at a time, unlimited per month.. Unlimited being the key word. On the 18th of the month if you've watched and returned 2 total movies and you sign up for something you'll get it. If you've already gotten 9 or so at that point you're much more likely to see "long wait" on the movie when you add it to the queue.
I switched from NetFlix to Wal-Mart a year or more ago because of having difficulty getting new movies. When I heard NetFlix intentionally moved high volume renters lower and lower on priority scales it annoyed me and I switched. Wal-Mart appeared to never do that. The one thing that annoyed me with them occasionally was full-screen-only versions now and then. Rarely but occasionally that's all they would make available...
I wish it would get fixed since it's broken.. I turn *off* popup blocking and it still won't let them appear. I admin my photo site which opens a popup to adjust properties of photos. After 20 or 30 times of this Firefox will no longer allow them and the only cure is to close and restart it. Even when popup blocking is disabled.. Or when I click to allow them from this site either way... Has nobody else noticed this?
Yeah.. We have multiple Newisys 2100's and recently bought Sun 20z's which are the same thing. Cheaper as Sun than Newisys as well. The 4300 and 40z are identical as well. Oh, and Newisys will NOT offer firmware on their website. Sun does...
Around 1992 or 1993 we built a server for a company to do long distance billing. Early days of equal access I think where they were just beginning to be able to resell someone else's LD and the only equipment they needed was enough to print invoices, no phone switch, etc...
We put together a big huge _tall_ tower case with 2 Seagate 4096's (drive model shows the age, memory faulty, could have been earlier than '92). 5.25" full height 80MB drives (yes, MB). These things weighed a ton each (you know if you're old enough to have ever worked with them). Anyway, it had a full length MFM/RLL(?) controller card, I think 386 CPU but could have been 286 and various other large cards. Ethernet or maybe it was Arcnet at the time? Suffice it to say the box was pretty packed since cards to do simple things by todays standards were huge then. The motherboard was one of those huge beasts that required a large full-size tower case.
OK, so it breaks and he's bringing it to us to get fixed pronto. Puts it in large heavily packed cardboard box and packs it on the plane as luggage. Uh oh...
Gets to our place, wheels it in on a 2-wheel dolly and asks me where to put it. I point to a spot, he rolls it there and sits it down just the few inches a dolly like that lifts something up. Rattle, metallic clanging sounds, oh no... I knew this wouldn't be good.
Open the top. Both drives are lying in the bottom of the case on top of the cards which all had been ripped violently out of their sockets via sideways shear motion from the drive impact and subsequent banging around on top of them. This case used rails only. Screw rails onto the sides of the drives, slide them in, secure on front only. The case received such a blow the sides flexed out enough for the rails to slip right on down and drop the drives down the 1.5 or more foot drop to the waiting 8-bit ISA cards below. Ripped them out of their slots, knocked the CPU chip out, sheared off the BIOS ROM chip terribly bad, knocked out some other socketed DIP support chips on the way.
I put it all back together, including spending 30 minutes straightening pins on the CPU which was fairily mangled. Scavenged another BIOS chip from a like motherboard, put all cards back in and it worked. Mostly.. One of the drives was dead, luckily NOT the one with the most critical data (never heard of mirroring in those days yet). One of the cards, network card if memory serves, also was dead. All the rest of the stuff worked! I was stunned... The whole time I was definitely expecting the worst.
Moral of the story: Those plane luggage guys can drop things further than Fedex/UPS it would appear... This thing took one heck of a hit.
Ummm... Actually his wife drove him home... And to the other person with the Botox info, thanks! I had NOT heard of that and will check into it fully...
Let me relate my experience which is probably NOT typical at all!
Eyeglasses in middle school and high school. Hated them, got contacts in college. Constantly irrirated my right eye, tried different brands and shapes (disposable) to no avail. Had PRK laser eye surgery (was $1800/eye and LASIK was $3K+/eye at the time). Both eyes were only slightly near sighted. Left eye is great, right eye they took a bit too far and made it far sighted. My brain had a hard time coping with the difference and the years of being used to near-sightedness. Tried a contact in that right eye to correct the far-sightedness, remember that's the one I couldn't stand a contact in to begin with. Talked them into a free corrective _LASIK_ procedure on the right eye which brought it back to about as perfect as can be expected. Too late though, that time of being far sighted in it caused my eyes to cross. I now wear glasses that are clear glass, NO correction for either eye, thick as can be though because they're prisms to correct the cross-eyed condition.
How's that for coming full circle?
Fast forward a few years.. A friend a few months ago went to Atlanta on a Friday, had LASIK for $750/eye done Saturday morning, stayed Saturday, went back for a checkup Sunday, drove home, went to work on Monday. Perfect ever since...
I no longer will even attempt to use EXT3 for a filesystem ~500GB or larger. Had problems repeatedly with a couple of 1.6TB filesystems and switched to Reiser3 and haven't looked back...
I probably shouldn't feed the trolls, but... The last time a COMPLETE Linux install took me more than 3 hours was like 4 years ago. If Windows can be installed more than 3 hours faster, they've got something patentable there!
The whole idea of a CPU with more bits of addressability is memory... MORE memory... 4GB of addressable RAM on a 32-bit processor is simply not enough today. Speed is a side-issue, they're already fast, some of us just want more RAM.
We have a couple of Opterons with 8GBM RAM each running as MySQL/INNODB backend database servers. With that much RAM databases that would crawl on IA32 are very fast since so much more of it can be cached in RAM.
The only real problem is memory technology hasn't kept up. 1GB DIMMs can be had at almost reasonable prices but 2GB density ones are out of range of most everyone. 4GB are on the distant horizon.
I'd have gladly stuffed 16 or 32GB of RAM in the boxes we have if it had been affordable. More for less!
Ahhh, the Rubik's Cube. Video games nowadays may entertain for hours and stimulate the mind, the cube did in the early 80's though. I was a freshman in HS in '82 and that and the next year were spent perfecting my solutions for it instead of study:) I averaged under a minute with a best of:24 once. I was so excited, the:24 time was when the standing world record was I think:24. This was just a week or so before the competition that was televised from Budapest where someone did it in:22.
I also scrambled it and worked it the exact same way over and over enough times that I could do it blindfolded or behind my back. It was like 109 total moves to solve and they were standard moves for my method, just memorized. Blew people's minds to see it done...
Yeah... It's the Open Source folks stealing code from the Closed Source products... Uh huh. Um, did you ever stop to think how difficult this would be? In comparison to say a closed source software company freely downloading the source to an open source project and taking a peek under the hood? Hmm... Look at all these nice open source products proudly shipping with SCO OpenServer 5.0.7:
http://www.sco.com/products/openserver507/featur es /
Slashdot Mirror
I've been getting a bill every month for almost 3 years now from Suncom. The amount is $0.00 I'd love to know the total amount they've spent on paper, printing, envelopes and postage.
When I first read the title I hoped the ability for these systems to communicate correctly was what was being addressed. I've been working with a bank for weeks now trying to get things I encrypt with GPG to be decryptable by their PGP "Universal Server" product. They can install PGP Desktop on a PC and decrypt my messages just fine. They have this larger/fancier package that decrypts upstream of their Exchange server and internally passes on the unencrypted emails to their folks. It also has a webmail (https) interface for outsiders to send/receive things to them, etc.. It simply refuses to decrypt something created by GPG and PGP's support has been thoroughly useless so far. Hrm...
GFS/GPFS: you don't need the complexity or interesting failure modes of shared-block-storage filesystems. Stay away.
I'd be curious about the "interesting failure modes" you mention. Do you have (bad) experience with this? I've deployed this technology multiple times with great success so far. It appears from your design you also try to avoid the "single point of failure". That's why with FC shared storage and GFS I generally design in more than one SAN/RAID unit and keep them sync'ed. GFS in my experience though beats NFS hands down. It's a local filesystem, most apps have no clue it's shared, it's pretty much totally transparent. NFS, even _good_ NFS, has done strange things or "let me down" much more often than GFS ever has.
YMMV, but for me "it just works".
Multiple servers all looking at the same files? That's what shared storage is all about.. Fibre Channel, iSCSI, etc... Look at GFS from RedHat or any of the others like IBM's recently announced GPFS. Fedora or CentOS for RedHat's GFS on a more reasonable budget.
Why is it that any time anyone develops a product and is successful with it Microsoft vows to "kill" them (or it)? Sad... Their "killer" will of course be MS-only. PS. If it's multi-platform, watch out.. That will really get you in MS's sights.
Agree... I sat through a demo of their FTVirtual product recently and was fairly impressed. Some of the things I pointed out to them that I wasn't crazy about was that it's Windows only and that it requires Windows to be installed on both "host" servers. I can understand it being on the "virtual" server but would be interested in a solution similar to VMWare ESX Server where there is no host OS, other than the product itself. Therefore the underlying OS shouldn't get spyware/viruses if it weren't Windows. Their answer was to run virus protection on both host servers _and_ the virtual server. A different approach I realize, and what they have does work... No support for 64-bit yet and that will hurt them, x86_64 in the server space is almost already the norm. Other than that though, a good product that did appear to work. I saw various hardware failures get artificially introduced with not so much as a hiccup from the client workstations accessing it(them). Good stuff... For the Wintel only crowd.
Nothing to do with postal speed. Take for instance 3 out at a time, unlimited per month.. Unlimited being the key word. On the 18th of the month if you've watched and returned 2 total movies and you sign up for something you'll get it. If you've already gotten 9 or so at that point you're much more likely to see "long wait" on the movie when you add it to the queue.
I switched from NetFlix to Wal-Mart a year or more ago because of having difficulty getting new movies. When I heard NetFlix intentionally moved high volume renters lower and lower on priority scales it annoyed me and I switched. Wal-Mart appeared to never do that. The one thing that annoyed me with them occasionally was full-screen-only versions now and then. Rarely but occasionally that's all they would make available...
I wish it would get fixed since it's broken.. I turn *off* popup blocking and it still won't let them appear. I admin my photo site which opens a popup to adjust properties of photos. After 20 or 30 times of this Firefox will no longer allow them and the only cure is to close and restart it. Even when popup blocking is disabled.. Or when I click to allow them from this site either way... Has nobody else noticed this?
Yeah.. We have multiple Newisys 2100's and recently bought Sun 20z's which are the same thing. Cheaper as Sun than Newisys as well. The 4300 and 40z are identical as well. Oh, and Newisys will NOT offer firmware on their website. Sun does...
Around 1992 or 1993 we built a server for a company to do long distance billing. Early days of equal access I think where they were just beginning to be able to resell someone else's LD and the only equipment they needed was enough to print invoices, no phone switch, etc...
We put together a big huge _tall_ tower case with 2 Seagate 4096's (drive model shows the age, memory faulty, could have been earlier than '92). 5.25" full height 80MB drives (yes, MB). These things weighed a ton each (you know if you're old enough to have ever worked with them). Anyway, it had a full length MFM/RLL(?) controller card, I think 386 CPU but could have been 286 and various other large cards. Ethernet or maybe it was Arcnet at the time? Suffice it to say the box was pretty packed since cards to do simple things by todays standards were huge then. The motherboard was one of those huge beasts that required a large full-size tower case.
OK, so it breaks and he's bringing it to us to get fixed pronto. Puts it in large heavily packed cardboard box and packs it on the plane as luggage. Uh oh...
Gets to our place, wheels it in on a 2-wheel dolly and asks me where to put it. I point to a spot, he rolls it there and sits it down just the few inches a dolly like that lifts something up. Rattle, metallic clanging sounds, oh no... I knew this wouldn't be good.
Open the top. Both drives are lying in the bottom of the case on top of the cards which all had been ripped violently out of their sockets via sideways shear motion from the drive impact and subsequent banging around on top of them. This case used rails only. Screw rails onto the sides of the drives, slide them in, secure on front only. The case received such a blow the sides flexed out enough for the rails to slip right on down and drop the drives down the 1.5 or more foot drop to the waiting 8-bit ISA cards below. Ripped them out of their slots, knocked the CPU chip out, sheared off the BIOS ROM chip terribly bad, knocked out some other socketed DIP support chips on the way.
I put it all back together, including spending 30 minutes straightening pins on the CPU which was fairily mangled. Scavenged another BIOS chip from a like motherboard, put all cards back in and it worked. Mostly.. One of the drives was dead, luckily NOT the one with the most critical data (never heard of mirroring in those days yet). One of the cards, network card if memory serves, also was dead. All the rest of the stuff worked! I was stunned... The whole time I was definitely expecting the worst.
Moral of the story: Those plane luggage guys can drop things further than Fedex/UPS it would appear... This thing took one heck of a hit.
Ummm... Actually his wife drove him home... And to the other person with the Botox info, thanks! I had NOT heard of that and will check into it fully...
Let me relate my experience which is probably NOT typical at all!
Eyeglasses in middle school and high school. Hated them, got contacts in college. Constantly irrirated my right eye, tried different brands and shapes (disposable) to no avail. Had PRK laser eye surgery (was $1800/eye and LASIK was $3K+/eye at the time). Both eyes were only slightly near sighted. Left eye is great, right eye they took a bit too far and made it far sighted. My brain had a hard time coping with the difference and the years of being used to near-sightedness. Tried a contact in that right eye to correct the far-sightedness, remember that's the one I couldn't stand a contact in to begin with. Talked them into a free corrective _LASIK_ procedure on the right eye which brought it back to about as perfect as can be expected. Too late though, that time of being far sighted in it caused my eyes to cross. I now wear glasses that are clear glass, NO correction for either eye, thick as can be though because they're prisms to correct the cross-eyed condition.
How's that for coming full circle?
Fast forward a few years.. A friend a few months ago went to Atlanta on a Friday, had LASIK for $750/eye done Saturday morning, stayed Saturday, went back for a checkup Sunday, drove home, went to work on Monday. Perfect ever since...
I no longer will even attempt to use EXT3 for a filesystem ~500GB or larger. Had problems repeatedly with a couple of 1.6TB filesystems and switched to Reiser3 and haven't looked back...
/ /boot /data /dev/shm /usr /var /raid1 /raid2
# df -k
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda6 4032092 548856 3278412 15%
/dev/sda1 505605 19171 460330 4%
/dev/sda7 41729164 31165820 8443572 79%
none 2000568 0 2000568 0%
/dev/sda3 10080520 6437952 3130500 68%
/dev/sda2 80636072 45306536 31233364 60%
/dev/sdb1 1600772128 1462009904 138762224 92%
/dev/sdc1 1600772128 760247416 840524712 48%
PS. No, it's not pr0n
Anyone pulling a SCO yet? Comparing the M$ source code to Linux looking for vague similarities.
I probably shouldn't feed the trolls, but... The last time a COMPLETE Linux install took me more than 3 hours was like 4 years ago. If Windows can be installed more than 3 hours faster, they've got something patentable there!
Not OS caching, I wasn't clear previously.
set-variable = innodb_buffer_pool_size=7000M
The whole idea of a CPU with more bits of addressability is memory... MORE memory... 4GB of addressable RAM on a 32-bit processor is simply not enough today. Speed is a side-issue, they're already fast, some of us just want more RAM.
We have a couple of Opterons with 8GBM RAM each running as MySQL/INNODB backend database servers. With that much RAM databases that would crawl on IA32 are very fast since so much more of it can be cached in RAM.
The only real problem is memory technology hasn't kept up. 1GB DIMMs can be had at almost reasonable prices but 2GB density ones are out of range of most everyone. 4GB are on the distant horizon.
I'd have gladly stuffed 16 or 32GB of RAM in the boxes we have if it had been affordable. More for less!
Just keep getting OLED displays larger and larger...
http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/display/
15GB per side... Simply not enough IMO.
Yeah, but at 3X the QphH you can buy 3 times less hardware :)
Ahhh, the Rubik's Cube. Video games nowadays may entertain for hours and stimulate the mind, the cube did in the early 80's though. I was a freshman in HS in '82 and that and the next year were spent perfecting my solutions for it instead of study :) I averaged under a minute with a best of :24 once. I was so excited, the :24 time was when the standing world record was I think :24. This was just a week or so before the competition that was televised from Budapest where someone did it in :22.
I also scrambled it and worked it the exact same way over and over enough times that I could do it blindfolded or behind my back. It was like 109 total moves to solve and they were standard moves for my method, just memorized. Blew people's minds to see it done...
At least Yahoo maps does NOT show a non-existent street in my hometown like Microsoft's MSN does!
5 5) /map.aspx?L=USA&C=36.56183%2c-82.55701&A=7.16667&P =|36.56183%2c-82.55701|1|Birdshit+Ave%2c+Kingsport %2c+TN+37660|L1|
Birdshit Avenue in Kingsport Tennessee.. Yeah, right!
http://mappoint.msn.com/(tznt4n55n0zotg45xzopz5
PS. I had to drive there just to see.. It doesn't exist, a vacant field and some apartment buildings where they show the street to be.
Yeah... It's the Open Source folks stealing code from the Closed Source products... Uh huh. Um, did you ever stop to think how difficult this would be? In comparison to say a closed source software company freely downloading the source to an open source project and taking a peek under the hood? Hmm... Look at all these nice open source products proudly shipping with SCO OpenServer 5.0.7:
r es /
http://www.sco.com/products/openserver507/featu
Very handy key.. I press it twice and my Linksys KVM switches to the other system. Does it do something else?