links for 2008-10-23

Luke Kanies Wants to Modernize System Administration – O'Reilly News This is a really good interview with Luke Kanies. I agree with a lot of what he's saying. We aren't using Puppet right now, we're using all the tools he mentions as being inadequate. The next iteration of our Linux operating environments will use something like Puppet to keep everything in sync, to keep everything maintained, etc.

links for 2008-10-22

Stick Figures in Peril pool > Flickr "kidnapped hostages may not be exchanged for briefcases full of cash here" Great pool of photos of stick figures, with captioning… Adventuring Party Politics If the presidential candidates played Forgotten Realms together. OMFG, funny. "KUCINICH: IM A BARD" LOL.

links for 2008-10-21

Biker jailed for YouTube stunt video – CNN.com Dear fellow Internet users, if you post videos where you are doing illegal things people will find you and put you in jail, or cite you for breaking a law. End of story.

links for 2008-10-16

ICANHASFORCE? This made me laugh. The Saw VI Ackbar's head poster put me over the top. Days of Autumn – The Big Picture – Boston.com I love the Big Picture blog. This entry has a couple of photos from Munich and the Koenigsee, where I was six weeks ago. The shot of the cattle on the barge is interesting… (also, that barge is one of the only non-electric boats on the lake).

Should vs. Does, again.

Mark Callaghan over at High Availability MySQL made some comments about the wording in the MySQL documentation. All you readers of my blog will know why I find his comments interesting: MySQL documentation states that replicating from a 5.0 master to a 5.1 slave should work. This is very different from stating that it does work. That section of the manual should enter the 5.1 no-use case competition. Frankly, I hate the word “should.” To see it in vendor documentation like this is terrible, because it’s a weasel word. It puts the onus of testing and support on the end user, and gives the vendor a cop-out when it doesn’t work. “Well, we only said it should work, not that …

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links for 2008-10-14

FM 100 Hue Test The blog "Tech at Play" had this on it, it's interesting to see what hues are troublesome for my eyes, especially since I work with color. I scored a 7.

If There's One Feature I Want…

If there’s one feature I want to see added to VMware Virtual Infrastructure it’s the ability to update hardware firmware. “Hi, I’m VirtualCenter. I noticed you have a Dell PowerEdge 2950 with BIOS 2.3.1. I have a copy of BIOS 2.4.3, let me put that on there for you. Your fibre channel HBA has firmware from the stone age? No big deal, maintenance mode, update, reboot, awesome. BTW, I also set the queue depth on the HBA to the optimal values.” Perhaps you can speculate what I’ve spent the last few hours doing… several hours of my life I’m never getting back. I can only imagine that VMware has thought of this already, but I wish they’d hurry up. 🙂

Why Does rnd() Keep Changing?

My friend Tom found this, I thought it was worth re-sharing: I can think of several ways of making things like /dev/random stop changing, mainly based on what my customers have done to machines.

Intel 7400 Memory Population

Intel’s The Server Room blog has an interesting tidbit of information for those of us thinking about servers with the Intel 7400 series of CPUs in it: As mentioned before, an MP Xeon 7400 series server will provide four channels of FBD memory. There are a couple of considerations here. First, latency to memory increases for every DIMM added to the system. This is important to note because you can keep the memory latency to a minimum by adding fewer high capacity DIMMs. Second, be sure to evenly distribute the DIMMs across all the channels. In other words, don’t fill up all the slots on one channel and then lightly populate the rest. Some systems get faster when you have …

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No UW Band? What?!?

It’s going to be a weird Wisconsin/Ohio State football game without the University of Wisconsin – Madison band, seeing as how they all got suspended: Leckrone suspended the band Friday night from performing in today’s home football game against Ohio State because he said the allegations were serious enough that they required immediate action… There will be no replacement act at tonight’s Badgers football game to fill the absence of the UW Marching Band. Of course, it’s the one football game a year I actually make it to. I’m not going to make any in-depth comments, except to say that the band has been rowdy and fun for decades, and if people don’t like it, well, all the members are …

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