So I was on Sun’s website reading up on ZFS (see post below) and it seems they are now demonstrating a data center in a box. That is actually pretty intriguing. They’ll be in Seattle on April 1st and 2nd.
This is what their marketing department has to say:
“Code-named Project Blackbox, this Sun innovation is the first virtualized datacenter, optimized for extreme energy, space, and performance efficiency. Project Blackbox enables instant-on expansion and rapid deployment while maximizing savings and providing operational flexibility to address two of today’s most critical IT issues — soaring energy prices and space constraints.”
Off topic and random… but i’ll end up going to one of their sessions.
Deployment server and management server. I still remember that it took 24 - 48 hours for a machine setup… with this it’d be much much shorter then that.
This is pretty darn cool. This is what a shuttle launch looks like when viewed from the International Space Station, about 220 miles up from our planet we call Earth.
My next question… where are the damn high res pics so I can set this as my background. I’ve had a high res pic (variation) of a shuttle launch as one of my backgrounds… this would be a fantastic replacement.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been looking for a decent monitoring system that would monitor the 40 odd servers at work. Now anyone with even a small foot hold in the open source world has heard of nagios. Nagios is very open ended system that is very flexible but at the same time can be a behemoth to configure. Not to mention that it primarily depends on the SNMP protocol (yes it supports others as well) and there are a ton of plugins to chose from but hardly any clear documentation as everyone has *their* way of running Nagios.
So enter Zabbix. Another open source product that is also backed by the same company with a support contract. Easily to get support via the forums located on that website (Nagios does *not* have official support forums, but links to unofficial support forums) and the main product manager, Alexei, is very easy to contact. Not to mention that the product is stable and after you get the interface down (which is a blessing / hateful considering how entirely segregated the “configuration” section is from the “monitoring” section) its very easy to configure and setup. On the client side I can either do A. SNMP or B. an agentd that runs on the client machine. I have chosen B for all our Linux machines (Fedora and Debian). Easy to setup and it only requires two ports to open on the firewall (makes it easy for the corporate red tape).
It does everything I need: monitor logs, check processes (like httpd/apache, (x)inetd, mysqld, oracle, jboss), monitor critical files for any alterations (via checksum), monitor network bandwidth (out and in), process load (1m, 5m, 15m), memory usage (swap & physical) and uptime. The agent hardly produces any additional load on the machine nor is it a memory hog.
Currently its monitoring our internal machines (3 development, 1 proxy and itself) and it does a mighty fine job. Oh and load on the zabbix server machine. Well monitoring 5 machines is producing a 0.05 - 0.10 load. This is after upgrading the debian box from the 2.4.27 kernel to 2.6.17… when it was running the 2.4.27 kernel its load was 0.8 - 1.0. The thing that takes up the most load is mysqld (mysql 5.0.24) which isn’t too surprising since it does approximately 30,000 queries every hour for the 5 machines currently being monitored.
Last month I stated that September was going to rock.
I predicted the following:
1. My former employer has finally coughed up my final pay check. Took ‘em a while but L&I forced their hand.
Answer: Yes they finally did. I was only employed there for a whopping 3 weeks and hated it… absolutely hated it. I guess they realized this and decided not to pay me.
2. New car somewhere in Week 2 or 3 of September (95% likelihood of this being a 2007 Scion tC)
Answer: Saturday, September 9th is when I finally got the car. Already received some damage. First time since I started driving (only a short 5 years) and I curbed a rim on a new car. Blah!
3. Giong out to blue lake tomorrow
Answer: I had a blast and ended up losing my glasses.
4. Cammy starting a new job at Whole Foods
Answer: This didn’t happen. They were asswipes. Sure the pay was more (paid almost as much as when I worked at df) but their demands were ridiculous.
5. and probably more
Answer: Got a new iPod, w00t!. Ummm my car insurance is only $111 a month now. Oh and I sold my old car within 3 days after putting it up for sale (offered $5900, got $5500).
Conclusion: Hell yes it rocked. Other then burning my savings to buy a new car… this was definitely the best month this year.
Ok so I remember vividly when Apple decided to drop the iPod mini in favor of the iPod nano last year. I was strongly opposed against this move because of the strong aluminum shell the iPod mini had and the plastic casing the Nano had. I though Apple had a hit with the Mini and I always told Cam this “The perfect iPod is the mini with a color screen”.
One year and 5 days later… Apple reintroduces the iPod that should’ve been a year ago. They call it the new iPod Nano but anyone with a little bit of common sense knows that this iPod has more features taken from the abandoned iPod Mini then Nano.
1. The casing, its aluminum just like the mini
2. The colors, all the 4gb iPod “nanos” are similar to the colors the mini had.
3. The ipod design, curved edges and a white top just like… yup you got it the mini.
The only thing it takes from the Nano are
1. The size, just as big as the Nano
2. USB 2.0 only, no firewire.
One would have to ask why Apple has decided to use the mini design again and shrink it down to the size of the nano. I am sure it has something to do with the fact that the old iPod mini was much more… scratch resistant then the 1st generation iPod Nanos, but that is just a hunch.
