We’ve been using MongoDB for a while for a number of things, internally, and thinking about using it for Tiburon as the restful interface. It has some nice aspects about it, but it also has some known issues for larger DBs. Considering what we want to do for some of our work, these larger DB issues are potentially problematic for us. Basically, MongoDB is one of the class of mmap’ed DBs.

This has been a long time coming for me. I’ve been using Apache in one form or another since the 90’s. I’ve never found it easy to configure, and often ran into maddening bugs in the config files and how they interacted with the server itself. I’d taken a long time to evaluate the various alternatives. Lighttpd caught my fancy for a while, but I ran into similar problems with config.

Robin at StorageMojo has an interesting article up (right after the one about Violin maybe being dead). I won’t comment on that second one, other than to say I disagree with his analysis and conclusions. As the day job is nominally a competitor (we’ve seen them in a deal, once) I am biased. But the fundamental analysis simply doesn’t look good for them (or Fusion, or …). They need a larger player to buy them.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away … I worked for this company named SGI. SGI machines and software were awesome … I had used them (R3k and R8k) for doing calculations for my thesis. Very very fast. But very hard to install/manage. In fact, brutally hard. This was not lost on customers with many of these devices. One of those customers read SGI the riot act on this.

Good post over at Math Blog. There is no short of STEM folks in the US, and hasn’t been for a long … long time. Any shortage of STEM folks would be well represented by a number of economic factors: 1) rapidly rising compensation rates (economic scarcity impacts upon costs of labor), 2) very short job search times for STEM folks, 3) additional market based initiatives to find and retain STEM folks.

Many years ago, I had this thought in my head that I wanted to be a physics professor. No, really. I went through all the motions. Undergrad BS, then MS and then PhD. While I was doing this, the Soviet Union collapsed. How was that fact related to my former desire to be a physics prof? Simple. Its economics. Its always economics. Anyone tells you differently, they are either lying or selling you something.

About 2 years ago, we had an issue with an internal server blowing up, taking data and config with it. I resolved to place some of our core infrastructure (external DNS, etc.) beyond our virtual boundaries, so we could maintain email/web presence in the event of a power or server issue. This has proven to be a prescient and wise move. We started out on Amazon with their small instances. And started out with dnsmasq, as I didn’t want to re-learn bind and all that config.

Burning in … Hammering on all disks, while computing pi, e, sqrt(2), … It is a thing of beauty … [ ](/images/unison.png) First one was an Isilon replacement. We seem to have many more of these in queue.

Henry could probably write far more in depth about this subject than he did. Regardless this is a must-read article. Now it is important to understand where you can use each technology, and Henry does a great job of explaining some of these. However, its important to note that as some of the file system and device bits are pushed into higher levels in the stack, some of the functionality becomes redundant at the lower levels.

E: Couldn't find these debs: pico dtrace Forgot what platform I was working on …