Drama for CentOS

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This doesn’t look good: This is an Open Letter to Lance Davis from fellow CentOS Developers It is regrettable that we are forced to send this letter but we are left with no other options. For some time now we have been attempting to resolve these problems: You seem to have crawled into a hole … and this is not acceptable. You have long promised a statement of CentOS project funds; to this date this has not appeared. You hold sole control of the centos.org domain with no deputy; this is not proper. You have, it seems, sole ‘Founders’ rights in the IRC channels with no deputy ; this is not proper. When I (Russ) try to call the phone …

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links for 2009-07-29

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Google Search Appliance virtual edition This is pretty cool, index up to 50K documents with the test appliance. (via Scott Lowe)

links for 2009-07-28

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Google Search Appliance virtual edition This is pretty cool, index up to 50K documents with the test appliance. (via Scott Lowe) The Crow Paradox : NPR Interesting that crows can hold grudges for years…

VMworld 2009

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Heck yeah, I was approved to go to VMworld 2009 today. In case you’re still trying to convince someone you should go, here’s the approach that has worked for me for the last three years, amidst constant budget problems and skepticism about virtual environments: 1. VMworld is the best opportunity & best value for VMware software training in the United States during the year. There are hundreds of sessions, labs, and other hands-on opportunities. You’ll learn better ways to do what you’re already doing, good ways to start doing things you want to do (like implementing vSphere 4, SRM, Lab Manager, View, etc.), and be able to talk to people who are already doing it to find out how well …

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Help

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“Hey Bob, check out mailing list X from yesterday.” As many of you have figured out I work at a University. There’s a mailing list with a lot of IT folks on it from around campus, intended for discussions and peer-to-peer assistance. Signal to noise isn’t terribly high on the list so I filter it to a mailbox. I would unsubscribe except for the occasional gem that filters through, pointed out by my coworkers. “What, did you want me to see the message that just has ‘help’ in the body? That is a little odd, I agree,” I replied. How did he get that through? Damned if the list manager doesn’t filter out half of my messages with words like …

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links for 2009-07-21

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Flank Steak Stir-Fry with Asparagus and Red Pepper Recipe | Simply Recipes Going to try this tonight — props to Jeremy Zawodny for finding it. I love excuses to fire up the wok. Pest Control – Moles, Gophers, Burrowing Rodents @ Rodenator Blowing up burrowing pests one tunnel at a time. Cool!

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 SP2 & IPv6

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It looks like Microsoft Windows Server 2008 SP2 changes the way IPv6 works. Perhaps others can corroborate my experiences, or tell me I’m nuts. I’ve been running SP1 with a fully-configured IPv6 stack for some time. I installed SP2 today and two things happened: 1. It appears that the Teredo tunnel now takes precedence over an actual, working IPv6 stack. I was unable to connect via IPv6 to local resources and “ping” returned insanely long response times (300 ms vs. the 1 ms it should have been). To disable this from the command prompt I issued the command: netsh interface teredo set state disabled This smells like a bug to me, and at the very least it’s annoying if you …

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Disabling the Hardware Prefetcher on Dell R900s

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One of my favorite places to glean tuning tips, especially obscure ones, is from SPECint or VMmark notes and disclosures. I have a number of Dell R900s in my virtual infrastructure, so I perused the Dell R900 VMmark results the other day. The notes show that the testers had disabled the Hardware Prefetcher and the Adjacent Sector Prefetch in the BIOS. I didn’t know much about the Hardware Prefetcher or the Adjacent Sector Prefetch, so I started poking around. Dell doesn’t have much information about these features but IBM does, and since it’s an Intel processor feature the descriptions should be mostly accurate across vendors. The IBM xSeries 366 tuning tips have a nice blurb about the hardware prefetcher: By …

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Mistakes

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“No one wants to learn by mistakes, but we cannot learn enough from successes to go beyond the state of the art.” – Henry Petroski, “To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design” My friend Jon has a script to randomize quotes in his email signature, and this came through yesterday. I’ve always enjoyed Henry Petroski’s books, and though he’s a civil engineer most of the lessons are ones IT professionals can learn from, too. Luckily, most of our mistakes don’t involve buildings collapsing, though.[0] ——————- [0] Which reminds me of another thing a former boss of mine used to say during crisis situations: “Calm down, nobody is dying here.”

Size Labels for Virtual Environments – A Proposal

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“How big is your virtual environment?” I love that question. Find a virtual environment and ask ten people who work on it, and they’ll give you ten different answers. “It’s pretty big,” one person will say. The next person will say “oh, we’re small.” The next two people asked will argue with each other until you shake your head and walk away. It’s all relative, too. If most guys you know have 50 virtual machines, and you have 200, you’re big, relatively-speaking. You’ve got problems they don’t have, and you’d probably like to talk with others that have had those same problems. Talking to a guy who has 2000 VMs isn’t going to help you much, though. He’s operating at …

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