Well … judge for yourself. [ ](/images/blocked.png) Yahoo/ATT and the other guys … you have a problem you need to address. Worth noting: The following are the IP/nets we are blocking access to port 25. AT&T;/Yahoo: 207.115.11.0/24 204.127.217.0/24 DNSVR: 71.6.153.204 216.40.239.162 216.40.250.39 I do not believe in RBLs. Likely we are losing mail. But then again, the good folks at these sites did not seem to do more than auto-acknowledge my concerns over the use of their infrastructure to DoS us.

SGI acquired the assets yesterday. Sad, LNXI was one of the good ones. Like us, a real HPC shop. They got killed (my guess) by going after huge government systems with long drawn out acceptance tests. Which killed their cash flow, and put them into an unsafe business area. Look, HPC is just like any other business, you have to be able to distinguish good business from bad business. Some business you cannot afford to pursue, the cost of winning is simply too high.

I hope someone from isp.att.net reads this. I have sent email to abuse@att.net, to spam@att.net, and so on. I have filled out the necessary forms on their website. Yet, sadly, no response from them. So I have taken the minimal of draconian measures. I put a simple rule in our mailer to automatically reject connections from isp.att.net. If this is problematic for you, please send me email at gmail.com. I am joe.

A company apparently has demonstrated the validity of a P.T. Barnum quote . SCO is going private. PJ at Groklaw has a note on this. So after this is over and SCO goes private, Novell ought to get its appropriate share of the about $50M or so of license revenue that SCO owes it … right? Which leaves about $50M for the IBM lawyers to go after. Maybe the title should have been “night of the living dead”.

`root@jr1:~# ./simple-w3.bash sync echo -n ‘start at ' start at + date Thu Feb 14 13:33:03 EST 2008 dd if=/dev/zero of=/big/local.file.5962 bs=8388608 count=10000 oflag=direct 10000+0 records in 10000+0 records out 83886080000 bytes (84 GB) copied, 68.8322 seconds, 1.2 GB/s sync echo -n ‘stop at ' stop at + date Thu Feb 14 13:34:12 EST 2008 root@jr1:~# ./simple-w root@jr1:~# mv /big/local.file.5962 /big/local.file root@jr1:~# ./simple-read.bash sync echo -n ‘start at ' start at + date Thu Feb 14 13:34:32 EST 2008 dd if=/big/local.

Building a large JackRabbit. 2 raid controllers, quite a few other goodies (CF boot!). Doing some testing for burn in, including our “simple-write” benchmark from a few posts ago. I haven’t done any tuning yet. Honest. The throttle is not cracked wide open, the JackRabbit is not running at full potential. It doesn’t even have its full complement of RAM, or cache. The folks shipping those to us shipped us the wrong RAM, so these are 2x 2GB sticks that we had for our testing unit.

Ok, we are being mailbombed as I write this. I know, I know, tin foil hats. [ ](/images/mail-bombing-in-progress.png) I don’t mean to taunt the folks doing this, but 6 messages per minute? C’mon. This system withstood 250k in a 12 hour period about 6 months ago. Thats 347/minute. I won’t tell you what the user load was on the system then, but it wasn’t high. Didn’t even break “1” as I remember ….

Rumors being reported by John at InsideHPC.com suggest LNXI may not be long for this world. It would be sad to see them go. I had heard things like this in the past, in large part due to the problematic acceptance schedules of the government. When you sell a big huge thing to the government, the government withholds payment until you can prove it is working to their satisfaction. This is called the acceptance test.

Working on it now. Quite a few orders last week, so we are trying to get them built as quickly as possible. Still, I want to do some more benchmarking and updates. We will have a JackRabbit-S benchmark document done soon. Our results from testing that unit suggest that the new unit we are building may be … very interesting … in real performance. Hopefully we will see, soon. Missing some of the memory (supplier shipped us the wrong parts), and have some minor physical build work to do … hopefully building the rest of the unit out later on today.

I have had discussions in email groups recently where I encountered some interesting phenomenon. Call it corporate cheerleading, or “fanboy” behavior. The signatures of this phenomenon are * Tendency to repeat marketing material as inherited from a higher diety * Tendency to attack other points of view not in line with their corporate-centric one * Tendency to attack posters of such views as being biased, and suggesting that competitive products that might be offered by the poster, but not mentioned or alluded to by the poster somehow constitute bashing.