We’ve had a number of interesting interactions with customers over the last few weeks. They all seem to center on, and around, how to get high performance out of gear which isn’t designed for high performance. Generally speaking, you can’t. High performance requires a mixture of design and implementation, with well designed and implemented parts. High performance isn’t A random collection of web and file servers joined together with clustering tools Some random tier 1 box usually used as a lower end file server shoved with disks/ssd/Flash A poorly architected, but easy to purchase system (e.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while. We have a good diskless system, but I’ve always liked the nano-ramdisk version of the OS. Create a base distro with JEOS (just enough OS) to boot, and mount all the other bits you need. Not that there is anything wrong with what we are doing now, its just that I really like that capability. Especially if we could keep the ramdisk compressed.

As we rebuild our server infrastructure (aside from taking time to do things more intelligently), we run into some bumps. This one sorta threw me for a bit. [root@virtual ~]# mount -a mount.nfs: Stale NFS file handle mount.nfs: Stale NFS file handle Checked all the usual suspects. No dice. The /etc/exports was correct, and visible locally. There was a DNS oddity I resolved (humor … heh). But mounts kept giving me the stale NFS handle.

So … where does this tale begin? We had a nice backup system in place at the lab. Twice a week, all the important servers would happily sync their contents to this unit over Gigabit ethernet. It worked well, we were happy. Place that snippet in the background, it will come up again. I’ve told our customers for a long time that RAID is not a backup. RAID is RAID, it gives you time to recover from a failure.

[root@<a href="http://scalableinformatics.com">skunkworks-prototype-n2</a> ~]# ifinfo device: address/netmask MTU Tx (MB) Rx (MB) eth0: addr not set/mask not set 1500 0.000 0.000 eth1: addr not set/mask not set 1500 0.000 0.000 eth10: addr not set/mask not set 1500 0.000 0.000 eth11: addr not set/mask not set 1500 0.000 0.000 eth12: addr not set/mask not set 1500 0.000 0.000 eth13: addr not set/mask not set 1500 0.000 0.000 eth14: addr not set/mask not set 1500 0.

Our little skunkworks project boots!!! Mwahahahaha! Must check off on our list design build boot ??? profit (or something)! Note to self: work on eeeeevul laughter …. And get step 4 ironed out too.

икона за подарък… and in the process, take down a drive, 5 of its friends, and our RAID card. We have backups from before the move (15+ days old … sigh). We’ve decided to go full monty on the new unit. Its a JackRabbit JR4 with 12x 2TB drives, 2 hot spares, and 10 disk RAID6 (8x data drives). 2x OS drives (on SSDs, rear mount). Leaves us 12 open bays.

So in order to (really) bring my monitoring app into the modern age, I want to change its flow from a synchronous on-demand event driven analysis and reporting tool, to an asynchronous monitoring and analysis tool, with an on-demand “report” function which is basically a presentation core atop the data set. There are many reasons for this. Not the least of which is that this should be far more efficient at handling what I want to do … not to mention more responsive.

This is seriously … seriously funny. Note the addresses. ROTFLMAO!!!!

Good article from Matt Asay in The Register today. This is about as truthful as it gets. There are many tiny startups, pulling in various fractions of $1M to more than $10M to develop … product features. Is this really the right approach for VCs? And this opens up some interesting new questions on startups and their product offerings themselves. Take Netflix. Running on Amazon S3. And what does Amazon do?