cuddletech


Photo Archiving

Posted on February 5, 2009

I'm a storage guy and a father. Coming of age in the digital era means that I've never taken a picture on celluloid, I used my first bonus at MCI Systemhouse to buy my first real camera which was a floppy disk based Sony Mavica (which solved the early Linux/UNIX camera driver issue.) Now, here I sit with dozens or perhaps hundreds of gigabytes of memories. One of the great joys of being into storage is that on one hand I'm aware of the ...

Read More


Death of a Hero: Robert Snively

Posted on January 23, 2009

Bob Snively is the storage giant you've probly never heard of. Employed at Sun for a number of years and recently moved to Brocade, if you dig into the SCSI and Fibre Channel standards you'll see his name again and again. His accomplishments are greater than I can list with any accuracy. Yesterday, in my SNIA presentation I mentioned "my personal hero, Bob Snively"... afterwards, 2 different people came up to inform me that he just ...

Read More


The Showmanship of Steve Jobs, 20 Years Ago

Posted on January 20, 2009

If you commonly watch Apple keynote events, I offer you a look back, almost 20 years, to a NeXTSTEP presentation in San Francisco. Notice how his style is almost unchanged in all this time. Part 1: Part 2: I have one of these NeXT Turbo Slabs... amazing system. If you are interested in NeXT gear or software, I buy my gear from Black Hole, Inc..

Read More


Why I Hate EMC

Posted on January 16, 2009

I do, I really hate EMC. And here is a great example of why: If your reading this via an aggregator, here is the video embedded above: EMC Atmos featured on YouTube. HE SAYS NOTHING!!! ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!!! What is the product? What does it actually do? How does it do it? THIS IS MARKETING BULLSHIT. There, I said it. I am truly shocked that companies, in this day and age, can still get away with old school marketing ...

Read More


Exploring Tokyo

Posted on January 5, 2009

For once, "Tokyo" refers in fact to a physical place, not some code project. Shocking but true. Just prior to Christmas, I took a week-long trip to Tokyo Japan on Joyent business. This was interesting for me because it was both my first time to Japan and in fact first time to leave the country. Given that I am a California native, I've had little reason to leave. We commonly say here "Your within a 4 hour drive of almost any environ...

Read More


SysAdmin Advent Calendar Blog In Review

Posted on December 31, 2008

If you missed this years excellent Systems Administration Advent Calendar Blog you missed some great content. But do not despair! Its all there for your reading pleasure. Articles on scripting, new technology, primers, and workflow are there to help you into the new year. I even contributed an entry: Day 17 - Time Management. A warm round of applause goes to Jordan Sissel for organizing it and rallying various bloggers to participate.

Read More


SA Pro: Episode 3

Posted on December 31, 2008

Just before the end of the year, the third episode of SA Pro, featuring a 1 hour interview with OmniTI Founder & CEO Theo Schlossnagle. SApro-Episode002 AAC SApro-Episode002 MP3 Its a bit long, I admit, but Theo is an amazing guy and refreshing to talk with. Fire it up while you tweek on something fun for New Years.

Read More


Merry Christmas

Posted on December 25, 2008

To all my fellow administrators, a very merry Christmas to you and yours. 'Carol of the Bells' by The Bird and the Bee Luke Chapter 2: In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. 2 This was the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria. 3 And all went to be registered, each to his own town. 4 And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from ...

Read More


SA Pro: Tom Limoncelli Interview

Posted on December 1, 2008

The 2nd SA Pro podcast has arrived... Tom Limoncelli, of Time Management for System Administators and The Practice of System and Network Administration fame, and I talk about his books, experience at Bell Labs, and time management in general in this 60 minute interview. Available in MP3, AAC, and OggVorbis, Download SA Pro here, or directly: Download in MP3 Format Download in AAC Format Download in OggVorbis Format Sp...

Read More


While not an uncommon problem for storage arrays, Thumpers (Solaris/ZFS) in particular are susceptible to "mostly dead" disk issues. This is a situation in which a disk has not failed but IO performance or log messages give you that gut feeling that a drive needs to be swapped out. One would think that Solaris FMA (Fault Management Architecture) should detect these and handle them, but until the Fishworks team made a series of putbacks to ...

Read More