The Register has a great article on storage unicorns. Unicorns are not necessarily mythical creatures in this context, but very high valuation companies that appear to defy “standard” valuation norms, and hold onto their private status longer than those in the past. That is, they aren’t in a rush to IPO or get acquired. The article goes on to analyze the “storage” unicorns, those in the “storage” field. They admix storage, nosql, hyperconverged, and storage as a service.

Slowly and surely, I am scratching the itches I’ve had for a while with regards to data extraction from a running system. One of the big issues I deal with all the time is to extract what the state and components (and their states) of a linux network bond. Its an annoying combination of /sys/class/net, /proc/net/bonding/, and ethtool/ip commands. So I decided to simplify it. bond0: mac 00:11:22:33:44:55 state up mode load balancing (xor) xmit_hash layer2+3 (2) polling 100 ms up_delay 200 ms down_delay 200 ms ipv4 10.

We brought on a new business development and sales manager today. Actually based in Michigan. Looking forward to great things from him, and we are all pretty excited!

For months I’ve been noting that email to my 2 different GMail accounts (one for work on the business side using the Google Apps for business, and yes, paid for … and one for personal) are not getting all the emails sent to it. I’ve had customers reach out to me here at this site, as well as calling me up to ask me if I’ve been getting their email. Seems I’m not the only one, though the complaint here appears to be a bad filter and characterizing system.

So Baidu’s web crawler is broken. Makes the bad old days of bing bot look positively benign. Wasn’t pushing much load, but lots of log spam and it showed signs of increasing over time. So, out comes the ban hammer. Then I thought, why not report their broken bot to them. Should be as simple as an email, or a web page. Sure enough, they have links for filling out forms to indicate that their web crawler is going crazy.

Terascala appears to have been disassembled, with much of the team going to Cray. Terascala started out selling internally developed storage appliances for Lustre. They developed deployment, monitoring, and management tools. Their UI was reasonably good. Then they struck up a deal with Dell and a few others. In doing so, they largely stopped their appliance sales. Put their code upon their partners hardware. This did generate more force multipliers for them in sales, but it cost them some of their differentiation … unless their boxes were entirely undifferentiated, where it would reduce their overall costs to avoid selling undifferentiated hardware.

I was heads down all day yesterday working on a few things. Apparently this is widely known now, but I saw it late last night. Micron is being pursued by a group affiliated with Tsinghua University. There is a political angle to this group, as they are connected to the government through their management. Why is this interesting (the acquisition potential that is). Well, there are 4 basic Flash fabs out there these days.

It seems that the bot was generating some effectively random broken URLs. Or maybe not so random. I saw endpoints in the logs that haven’t been in use for at least 7 years. I can’t imagine this was simply a harmless bug, as much as … maybe? … a search for moved/renamed endpoints? As the web server is now done very differently than in the past, the missing endpoints merely generated log spam.

I am a huge fan of Charles Stross’s (@cstross) Laundry series (and most of what he writes in general), and just finished his latest over the weekend. Up on his blog, he had a guest author write a post while he was stuck in traffic or similar. The title of the entry wins the internets today. Yup, definitely a winner …

Well, their web crawler. Way way back in the day, I complained about broken bing-bots. This was 8 years ago. Bing was fairly crappy at crawling, and seems to have improved. Google is still the lightest touch. Least impactful. Deeply in the traffic noise. Not Baidu. There bot is, for lack of a better term, broken. Its not into DoS levels, but it is wasting traffic/resources, and providing lots of log spam.