Stupid UNIX Tricks: User-to-User Communication
Today and interesting post came across Slashdot: (Useful) Stupid Unix Tricks? The post points out other users that were unaware of the write command. This doesn't surprise me, a lot of sysadmins likely don't know about some of these tools... after all, the "write" command isn't exactly self-evidently a tool to communicate with another user. There are several tools that allow users to communicate with one another through the shell, we'll ...
Formula1 World Champion: Lewis Hamilton
Todays Grand Prix of Brazil marked the end of the 2008 Formula 1 World Championship, and on the 2nd to the last corner, fate crowned Lewis Hamilton World Champion. It was an exciting race. Unlike last year, Lewis was much more controlled and calm... he wasn't fighting battles he didn't need to fight, which cost him the crown last year. However, very much like last year, late in the race he just fell apart and acted like he forgot how ...
zdb: Examining ZFS At Point-Blank Range
ZFS is an amazing in its simplicity and beauty, however it is also deceivingly complex. The chance that you'll ever be forced to peer behind the veil is unlikely outside of the storage enthusiast ranks, but as it proliferates more questions will come up regarding its internals. We have been given a tool to assist us investigate the inner workings, zdb, but it is, somewhat intentionally I think, undocumented. Only two others that I know have ...
Explore Your ZFS Adaptive Replacement Cache (ARC)
Some time ago I wrote a tool which I call arc_summary. It is a kstat based PERL application that runs some calculations and presents you with a pretty report of ZFS ARC. The idea is to help you interpret the data more appropriately. Lets look at some output: benr@quadra ~$ ./arc_summary.pl System Memory: Physical RAM: 4083 MB Free Memory : 130 MB LotsFree: 63 MB ZFS Tunables (/etc/system): ...
Best. Wife. Ever.
I'm older... it won't stop. But my wife makes me feel better with kickassness. Behold my "new" mint condition Faber-Castell 2/83N. To compliment, I just recently bought a copy of Euclid's The Elements. I love mathematics.... I suck at it, but who cares, I enjoy it.
Blastwave Saga Continues
You'll recall my "unofficial" Blastwave update in August. The separation of Phil and Dennis seems to be solidifying a bit. The CSW Project (Phil and co.) are now up and running at OpenCSW.org. Minus the blastwave name and CSS, its more or less the same site and content you had/have at blastwave.org. OpenCSW.org includes a History page, which tells the CSW side of the breakup, minus the unverified assertions by Dennis Clarke that Phil ...
The Cascading Crash and You
I've been surprised how few people are blogging about the current market situations. Its coming up in casual conversation "around the water cooler" and dominates the news channels, but tech outlets aren't jumping on the bandwagon. Today on CNBC's "Fast Money", following todays almost 700 point drop, bringing the Dow under 9,000, I heard the first mention of the word "crash", or more properly what they called a "cascading crash". IBM ...
Storage Trends from SNIA SDC
The Storage Networking Industry Association's (SNIA) Storage Developer Conference (SDC) is not, as the fancy name suggests, not a place for storage hobbyist or the light hearted. Attendees are leaders in our industry, highly informed and knowledgeable. If they are interested in it, we all will be soon. If you follow the storage press at all, the two big things on their mind won't surprise you: De-duplication Solid State Disk (SSD) ...
Exciting Goings On
There are a lot of exciting things going on... here are some I think you might enjoy. Iron Man releases on DVD & BluRay today. At Target BluRay was sold out by lunch even out here in Tracy (ie: the sticks). If you've got a PS3 nab it, if you don't have a PS3, buy one its a tremendous value if you compare it against the cost of a vanilla BluRay player. Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle presents its new sermon series: ...
Jim Zemlin Lives in a Cave; or Linux Zealots Should Get Out More
OSNews recently posted the following: Linux Foundation's Zemlin Declares Solaris All But Dead, which in turn links to the InfoWorld article: Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? Mr. Zemlin hammers on the fact that Solaris has only two redeeming qualities, ZFS and DTrace, which he degrades as "minor features". Both these technologies are revolutionary advances in computing and storage... "minor" my ass. "That's literally like noticing ...