There I am, working on an RFP response. Figuring our partner needs this in word format, the laptop is booted into windows xp. Word 2003 is up. Several hours worth of work. Saved often. Oh, you already know where this is going? Yeah. Its going there. Crash goes word. Starts complaining it can’t read the disk. Never mind that it appears to be able to read the disk just fine in another window.

A customer presented a nice test to us. We thought we had a good loading program going, running the units at heavy load for extended lengths of time. And these are good loading programs. But they weren’t as intensive as this customers. They run 8 bonnie++ jobs simultaneously on the system. So we ran it. And promptly crashed the unit. Believe it or not, that was good. In the process we exposed a corner case where the later rev driver and updated firmware had a crash relative to the previous driver release with the same firmware.

Alrighty. Been struggling to get an operational 2.6.26.5 kernel working for a customer. This is supposed to be the next generation of our supported kernels, replacing the now aging 2.6.23.14 kernel (you think ours is old? look at RHELs). It works fine on a Ubuntu system. All the things we needed built it, do in fact, work. The problem was the immediate kernel panic on a RHEL5.2 system. 11 seconds in, it couldn’t find /dev/root (the root directory).

Have a look at this: root@cisd-ruapehu # time dd if=/dev/zero of=80G bs=8192k count=10000 10000+0 records in 10000+0 records out real 2m41.484s user 0m0.064s sys 2m26.890s Quick calculation. This is a 44 disk raidz2 striped in the “optimal” manner according to the guide quoted. This is roughly 80GB in 161 seconds. Or, 0.497 GB/s. Under 500 GB/s. Yup. They show off their blazing 560 MB/s performance on smaller (mostly cached 16GB system ram 20GB file) files.

Mercury news blog reports that SGI has told the SEC that it will be late in filing its financials for the quarter. Specifically Read the full article, don’t jump to conclusions from this snippet. This said, I have as of yet to see any company say “hey we are gonna be late” and “wow, we just found this bucket of money in the corner!”. It is usually more along the lines of “oh, we have to pay that bill too?

Firefox 3 makes great hay over how much happier they are for their security bits. Especially their seemingly deeply thought out position on not allowing self signed certificates to be used easily on the web. Cudos to them for their stance. One … well … not so small … problem. It breaks things. No, I am not arguing whether or not self-signed is good or bad. It breaks things you can’t possibly fix.

I’ve been writing and talking about data motion as a pain point for a while. To drive this home, have a look at this site. This provides a snapshot into how much bandwidth a technology provides, and what the implications are for (best case) data motion over time. Since data motion isn’t getting any easier, a few thoughts emerge from this. First, as we gather ever more data, this data is going to reside at static locations … the cost of moving it is large over the network.

[root@jackrabbitm sbin]# bonnie++ -u root -d /big -f Using uid:0, gid:0. Writing intelligently...done Rewriting...done Reading intelligently...done start 'em...done...done...done... Create files in sequential order...done. Stat files in sequential order...done. Delete files in sequential order...done. Create files in random order...done. Stat files in random order...done. Delete files in random order...done. Version 1.03 ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random- -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks-- Machine Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP /sec %CP jackrabbitm 129112M 707695 51 153242 17 1143371 73 452.

There is just no nice way to say this. We have a real (serious) concern over the stability of the baseline Redhat/SuSE kernels on newer hardware. Not just our JackRabbit systems (and our forthcoming ΔV systems), but clusters of newer gear, newer servers, etc. We install baseline systems, using nothing but the baseline components, perform the recommended upgrades. Place these systems under moderate load, and whamo … kernel panic. Replace their kernel with our 2.

Short note. For many years, large computing companies have fielded large sales forces, and large reseller forces to provide more sales firepower to their revenue generation efforts. These require personal interaction to buy something. Sun has recently decided to go almost all reseller. Feedback from some of our mutual customers indicates that some customers don’t like this. The flip side is that large sales forces require large expenditures of capital … people cost money to hire.