Sorry for replying to myself, I don't think I made my post clear; the backup power is not on (the mains was blown to bits), because the fire department told them to shut it off.
Actually, modern batteries should be sealed valve or Absorbed Glass Mat (AGM) that don't vent (too much) hydrogen. During a thermal runaway, they vent a tiny bit before killing themselves, but hydrogen doesn't become explosive until the concentration in an enclosed environment is ~4%. 4% of a data center is a fairly large area. I've heard of this happening in one data center where the primary and fail over (IIRC) HVAC units failed and no one had been on site for well over a month. IOW, every battery in the place started venting and it took over a month without any air circulation for it to get to 4%.
No, the power was off because the fire department told them to shut it off (during an investigation, I assume). The explosion was in a high power conduit - I'm sure it severed all the lines inside the conduit itself. This is one of those things that couldn't easily be avoided at a single site. But, if your server is of any importance, you do have a colo, right?
Lesson learned: don't store dynamite in the power room. But they told me to take it out of the room with the fuel for the generators, the management offices, and HR department...
While I understand and sympathize with what you're saying, I counter with this; If they thought that the cost of encrypting the backups was a lot, they should have realized that the price of not encrypting the backups would be much, much more. And, to boot, they'll have to (if they'd like to stay in business) do it now regardless, without having time to leisurely consider the price point and pros and cons of many systems. They've just paid double (if not more so) to avoid the cost of half.
Nah, they'd probably just send in blanks on old reels and blame the age of the medium if they had to pull down their backups. That'd probably be a somewhat safe calculated risk if one had no scruples.
Dude. Not even funny. I've never seriously considered this idea and when I read it and it sank in... well, I felt a little sick to my stomach. How would/could anyone/any bank recover from that? You know once it's out there, it can't go away...
[...] Archive America? Does anyone know what kind of security measures these jokers take? [...] They've got a guy named Vinny who rides shotgun during transfers. And, you know, accidents happen and all that. Sometimes people fall down a flight of steps... twice... on to a tire iron.
Just for a comparison, where I work we bought a SuperMicro with the same specs. about two years ago for about $3500. This was just as the new Xeons and ICHs were coming out, so that number is a bit higher than it would have been if we waited a couple of months.
Great post, man! As to your question; I'm in college and doing an internship at a small (~20 employees) local company as their 'tech guy', although my major is software development. It's great because while I only make $11/hour, I've gained knowledge and experience in almost every imaginable field.
Our warehouse manager has a degree (or was just a few credits shy of it) in graphical design, and has just decided to go back and work on software development after we've talked about the lack of people who have the ability to both code and do graphical design. He's also started to get in to Linux as we've talked about it... he run Mac at home, so it's easy to use bootcamp/fusion. We constantly give each other ideas. Every now and then, we go off on a tangent and just 'do something'.
That's the value of the small business in my experience. You really do have an ability to influence and encourage your coworkers in a positive way. Also, getting a 'critical mass' to change the way things are done is much easier. I've started to get to the point where if I truly believe I have a good idea (say... encrypting the backups), and feedback from my coworkers is positive, but management disagrees or doesn't listen long enough to understand (I'm still mastering the elevator pitch) what I'm driving at, I'll just do it. The small business arena is the only place where you can away with this. Just do it, document it and own up if it blows up in your face. If you're, in the least, technically competent, you probably have more job security than you think and if you get fired, you'll land on your feet. Mediocre techs/admins/coders are a dime a dozen, but experienced and talented employees (not to mention jack of all trades, specialist at most) are hard to find and aren't unemployed very long.
I've got karma to burn, I'll say it for you. This is the problem with MBAs who only watch the bottom line and "know the price of everything and the value of nothing". (stolen from someone on/. from a couple days ago. It's a great quote) The culture you're talking about is the culture of marketing and management making technical decisions they wouldn't dare have the guts to even try to explain to the average slashdotter. I guarantee somewhere there's an admin trying his best not to scream "I told you so". If there isn't, there should be one out of a job for sheer ineptitude. You don't store or transmit data in plain text, ever, period. Especially when it's actual customer information. For craps sake, I'm a developer and I know that much about administration. No, this was probably a decision made by someone who manages what they don't understand and can't be bothered to learn. Flame on.
I'm 23 and I concur; I never thought I'd ever say the following words other than to make fun of the boomers, but, have you heard Def Leppard's new CD? It seriously rocks. Boston is great, but I've been listening to them since high school, so it's not much of a change for me. However, I have been digging into the 80's stuff between the occasional gem that I come across (mostly bands I've never listened to before and decided to give a spin). I was just thinking the other day about a conversation I had years ago with a friend in high school. He said, "dude, you're a rocker; the music you love, it's dead, man. They just don't make that stuff any more." I said rock would come back, half hoping to make myself believe it. It's just that it's coming from the old guys again. Then again, a couple of years ago I was rocking out to a song on the radio in the car, only to have the radio station identify itself as 'lite rock' (when did Van Halen become lite rock?!), so take my view point with a large grain of salt.;)
Don't think they won't be kindly requesting that cash back, with interest, in your next months service bill. The bill will also, most likely, be accompanied by a change of service terms notice, and a rate increase letter.
I'd like to be pleasantly surprised (my father just retired from Bell/Verizon and without him working there, I wouldn't be in college - I must admit that), but I have a feeling I won't be. It seems that management will cut off their noses to show good numbers for the quarter, while actually losing money in the process of padding the numbers. They're not going to take a loss without passing it on to the customer, and they're probably going to take that opportunity to sweeten the deal for themselves just a little bit more. But, like I said, I really hope I'm wrong.
[...]
Even if you have to optimize for the CPU's read-ahead buffer and cache (which, again, is something you should only be doing in system programming, not in physics) just iterate by Z first and X last, and there you go.
[...] Can you tell I'm a software development major and not a physics major:). FWIW, I've done a bit of SPARC assembly, which is probably part of my troubles;).The things that worry/bother me aren't things that anyone thinks about.
What I was trying to get at (I think) is that for number crunching, row major layout makes more sense due to the layout in memory keeping a more sane locality with respect to 'left to right, top to bottom' reading of a multidimensional array. And like you said, this is a systems programming concern and not one of physics. But, it would probably suck for performance, on a large array, if you scan a row and blow your read aheads on every iteration and have to go back to RAM. Even more so if you have an SMP and have to worry about ping-ponging and coherency at the same time.
Also, IIRC, Java's arrays are immutable, which only makes them that much uglier. Although I don't know enough about JITs to even know if that's a Good Thing (SMP/multithreading win at the cost of GC?) or Bad Thing.
I should note that I've never programmed a single line of FORTRAN, the closest I've gotten to writing a 'real compiler' is parsing a toy language in ADA95, and if I had to write more than a single line of non-trivial assembly to save my life, I probably couldn't do it. View my comments from the point of view of a naive software development student, and they'll probably make a bit more sense:). Also, when I was young, I toyed with BASIC on my C64 and VIC20, and QBASIC in DOS6.0 - I've been mentally handicapped for life as a programmer.
Forgot to mention... there's a reason you shouldn't give us programmers soldering irons. Did you know those things are really, really freakin' hot?! I never did get that firmware working again after that...
Fortran is 'teh sux0rz' at more than two dimensional arrays, though. It doesn't use row major order, so the offsets are all screwed up. Don't use it to simulate four dimensional space/time unless you have something to prove to yourself and/or don't mind premature gray hairs.
typical/. posters to build a Core 2 Duo from stuff lying around their garage. Done, now lets see that column sum. *Examines CPU* Hey! Wait a minute, this is a Celeron. Get back to work!
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Sorry for replying to myself, I don't think I made my post clear; the backup power is not on (the mains was blown to bits), because the fire department told them to shut it off.
Actually, modern batteries should be sealed valve or Absorbed Glass Mat (AGM) that don't vent (too much) hydrogen. During a thermal runaway, they vent a tiny bit before killing themselves, but hydrogen doesn't become explosive until the concentration in an enclosed environment is ~4%. 4% of a data center is a fairly large area. I've heard of this happening in one data center where the primary and fail over (IIRC) HVAC units failed and no one had been on site for well over a month. IOW, every battery in the place started venting and it took over a month without any air circulation for it to get to 4%.
The short happened in a conduit (behind a wall, I'm assuming), FWIW.
No, the power was off because the fire department told them to shut it off (during an investigation, I assume). The explosion was in a high power conduit - I'm sure it severed all the lines inside the conduit itself. This is one of those things that couldn't easily be avoided at a single site. But, if your server is of any importance, you do have a colo, right?
While I understand and sympathize with what you're saying, I counter with this; If they thought that the cost of encrypting the backups was a lot, they should have realized that the price of not encrypting the backups would be much, much more. And, to boot, they'll have to (if they'd like to stay in business) do it now regardless, without having time to leisurely consider the price point and pros and cons of many systems. They've just paid double (if not more so) to avoid the cost of half.
Nah, they'd probably just send in blanks on old reels and blame the age of the medium if they had to pull down their backups. That'd probably be a somewhat safe calculated risk if one had no scruples.
Dude. Not even funny. I've never seriously considered this idea and when I read it and it sank in... well, I felt a little sick to my stomach. How would/could anyone/any bank recover from that? You know once it's out there, it can't go away...
Archive America? Does anyone know what kind of security measures these jokers take?
[...] They've got a guy named Vinny who rides shotgun during transfers. And, you know, accidents happen and all that. Sometimes people fall down a flight of steps... twice... on to a tire iron.
Just for a comparison, where I work we bought a SuperMicro with the same specs. about two years ago for about $3500. This was just as the new Xeons and ICHs were coming out, so that number is a bit higher than it would have been if we waited a couple of months.
Most rackmounts that I've seen have an 'identify' LED that you can have blink (I assume you can automate this with SNMP and management software).
If not, just flip over some keyboards until you find it :)
Great post, man! As to your question; I'm in college and doing an internship at a small (~20 employees) local company as their 'tech guy', although my major is software development. It's great because while I only make $11/hour, I've gained knowledge and experience in almost every imaginable field.
Our warehouse manager has a degree (or was just a few credits shy of it) in graphical design, and has just decided to go back and work on software development after we've talked about the lack of people who have the ability to both code and do graphical design. He's also started to get in to Linux as we've talked about it... he run Mac at home, so it's easy to use bootcamp/fusion. We constantly give each other ideas. Every now and then, we go off on a tangent and just 'do something'.
That's the value of the small business in my experience. You really do have an ability to influence and encourage your coworkers in a positive way. Also, getting a 'critical mass' to change the way things are done is much easier. I've started to get to the point where if I truly believe I have a good idea (say... encrypting the backups), and feedback from my coworkers is positive, but management disagrees or doesn't listen long enough to understand (I'm still mastering the elevator pitch) what I'm driving at, I'll just do it. The small business arena is the only place where you can away with this. Just do it, document it and own up if it blows up in your face. If you're, in the least, technically competent, you probably have more job security than you think and if you get fired, you'll land on your feet. Mediocre techs/admins/coders are a dime a dozen, but experienced and talented employees (not to mention jack of all trades, specialist at most) are hard to find and aren't unemployed very long.
Why bother citing when someone will come along and tell you whom it is you're quoting, anyways ;)
I've got karma to burn, I'll say it for you. This is the problem with MBAs who only watch the bottom line and "know the price of everything and the value of nothing". (stolen from someone on /. from a couple days ago. It's a great quote) The culture you're talking about is the culture of marketing and management making technical decisions they wouldn't dare have the guts to even try to explain to the average slashdotter. I guarantee somewhere there's an admin trying his best not to scream "I told you so". If there isn't, there should be one out of a job for sheer ineptitude. You don't store or transmit data in plain text, ever, period. Especially when it's actual customer information. For craps sake, I'm a developer and I know that much about administration. No, this was probably a decision made by someone who manages what they don't understand and can't be bothered to learn. Flame on.
No, they lost the intern this time. If we're lucky it'll be the consultant next time! ;)
I'm 23 and I concur; I never thought I'd ever say the following words other than to make fun of the boomers, but, have you heard Def Leppard's new CD? It seriously rocks. Boston is great, but I've been listening to them since high school, so it's not much of a change for me. However, I have been digging into the 80's stuff between the occasional gem that I come across (mostly bands I've never listened to before and decided to give a spin). I was just thinking the other day about a conversation I had years ago with a friend in high school. He said, "dude, you're a rocker; the music you love, it's dead, man. They just don't make that stuff any more." I said rock would come back, half hoping to make myself believe it. It's just that it's coming from the old guys again. Then again, a couple of years ago I was rocking out to a song on the radio in the car, only to have the radio station identify itself as 'lite rock' (when did Van Halen become lite rock?!), so take my view point with a large grain of salt. ;)
Don't think they won't be kindly requesting that cash back, with interest, in your next months service bill. The bill will also, most likely, be accompanied by a change of service terms notice, and a rate increase letter.
I'd like to be pleasantly surprised (my father just retired from Bell/Verizon and without him working there, I wouldn't be in college - I must admit that), but I have a feeling I won't be. It seems that management will cut off their noses to show good numbers for the quarter, while actually losing money in the process of padding the numbers. They're not going to take a loss without passing it on to the customer, and they're probably going to take that opportunity to sweeten the deal for themselves just a little bit more. But, like I said, I really hope I'm wrong.
Yeah, I meant that you couldn't allocate an array and then resize it. I've never considered a triangular array before. Very cool!
Column major order 'breaks' locality of reference ruining your read ahead caches, causing cache misses.
What I was trying to get at (I think) is that for number crunching, row major layout makes more sense due to the layout in memory keeping a more sane locality with respect to 'left to right, top to bottom' reading of a multidimensional array. And like you said, this is a systems programming concern and not one of physics. But, it would probably suck for performance, on a large array, if you scan a row and blow your read aheads on every iteration and have to go back to RAM. Even more so if you have an SMP and have to worry about ping-ponging and coherency at the same time.
Also, IIRC, Java's arrays are immutable, which only makes them that much uglier. Although I don't know enough about JITs to even know if that's a Good Thing (SMP/multithreading win at the cost of GC?) or Bad Thing.
I should note that I've never programmed a single line of FORTRAN, the closest I've gotten to writing a 'real compiler' is parsing a toy language in ADA95, and if I had to write more than a single line of non-trivial assembly to save my life, I probably couldn't do it. View my comments from the point of view of a naive software development student, and they'll probably make a bit more sense
Not to mention LOGO is actually derived from LISP. ;)
Forgot to mention... there's a reason you shouldn't give us programmers soldering irons. Did you know those things are really, really freakin' hot?! I never did get that firmware working again after that...
Fortran is 'teh sux0rz' at more than two dimensional arrays, though. It doesn't use row major order, so the offsets are all screwed up. Don't use it to simulate four dimensional space/time unless you have something to prove to yourself and/or don't mind premature gray hairs.