Sat, 12 Aug 2006
Internet Save and Restore
It’s about time. Instead of it being “your” computer, it’s “your OS image”. Walk up to a participating machine, log in, and your VM is demand loaded from the network, just like a laptop which has been resumed from sleep.
Lots of problems (for example, the prototype uses VMWare for VM, so no 3d acceleration, and it’s unclear what happens if you switch between radically different hardware platforms), but it is apparently a functional prototype.
Interestingly, they are using CODA for a backing store. I’ve been keeping an eye on CODA for a while; sadly, the rate of development on it is very slow, otherwise it could be a seriously awesome network file system. What’s neat about ISR is that they are using the VM to work around some of the CODA file system limits.
Details here:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~satya/DOWNLOAD/isr-ieee-computer-july04.pdf
Sun, 18 Jun 2006
Some time has passed
Had this message come up while trying to get an old Cobalt Cube 2 online:
Checking root file system...
fsck 1.37 (21-Mar-2005)
/dev/hda2 has gone 47349 days without being checked, check forced.
/dev/hda2: |================================== - 60.6%
Yikes! That’s some old bits.
Mon, 02 Jan 2006
Atomic Feed Monkeys
I’ve added an Atom feed, after hacking on the blosxom atomfeed plugin for a couple of hours to update it to spit out proper Atom… the one posted on the site does Atom 0.3, which is old and busted.
If you’re using the RSS feed, try out the Atom one. It’s “better”, somehow. Really.
Sun, 09 Oct 2005
Filesystems: Back to ext3
At work, we’ve now completed the grand cycle of filesystems. When I started at Linden Lab 3.5 years ago, Linden was using ext2 by default. One of the first things I did was convert our few servers (only 10!) to ext3. As we grew, we switched to ReiserFS, which served us well for a while, but we ran into some problems with it (filesystem corruption after power failure and high CPU utilization on file delete). These issues caused us to then evaluate XFS. Our initial evaluation appeared positive, so we changed our default filesystem again.
XFS proved to have better raw performance than ReiserFS and lower CPU utilitization (which was nice); unfortunately, it suffered from the same filesystem corruption issues after power failure that ReiserFS did. In addition, it appeared to be not well maintained on 64 bit systems. Since we have started to deploy AMD64 systems, XFS was no longer a viable option.
So we’re back to using ext3. It’s not so bad, actually; so far it is proving to be a stable, reliable filesystem with reasonable performance.
Wed, 15 Dec 2004
MacBreakZ
When I was using a Linux workstation I used a utility called xwrits to remind me to take breaks from the keyboard. Now that I’ve mostly switched to MacOS X workstations, I’ve found that MacBreakZ is a reasonably nice little application that does the same thing.
It’s not as polished of an OS X application as I would like; for example, instead of having a Preferences menu item like every other Mac application, it has a Settings menu, and a File menu that is completely empty. From investigating it a little more closely, it’s seemingly an OS 9 application that was ported in a hurry to OS X. On the other hand, it does stay out of the way until it’s time for a break, which is the key functionality that is desired.
It’s the first piece of shareware I’ve purchased in a while, and I do find it useful, but I find it a little annoying at the same time; there are bugs that I would want to fix if I had source, but I can’t because I don’t.
Tue, 30 Nov 2004
Firefox
It rocks; super fast, easy to use, and it works great on the computers that I use (MacOS, Windows, and Linux). My only real gripe with it is that it doesn’t use any of the OS security facilities (like the MacOS Keychain), which means that setting up some of the more esoteric SSL stuff is a little more of a pain in the ass.
I happen to use it combined with the Foxylicious extension, which integrates your del.icio.us bookmarks into the Firefox bookmarks, which so far has turned out to be a nice way to keep my bookmarks shared on the machines I use.
Yeah, I know I’m way behind the curve on this one, but I’ve been busy lately. I’m happy to have switched, though.
Mon, 15 Nov 2004
I love CUPS
I just setup a printer using CUPS, and I can’t even being to explain how much I love this software. I mean, I remember the days when LPRng was the top of the line Unix printing subsystem, and it was, compared to the utter trash that was BSD lpr.
Now, the peanut gallery is probably thinking that I’m just used to shitty Linux hardware support, and while they do have a point, I have setup printers under several operating systems, and let me tell ya: the ones that use CUPS are easy. Too easy, even… I spent a good 45 minutes the first time I got printing running on MacOS X because it didn’t occur to me or Dave to just try printing… we thought we needed to configure the printer, or install a driver, or something. Boy, was that 2000-era thinking. It Just Worked.
You can even beat the Windows boxes into printing shape via the cupsaddsmb command and Samba, which is just super sweet; no more fiddling around with crappy Windows print drivers; just have your print server auto-install the good Microsoft PostScript or Adobe PostScript driver on the clients, and be done with it.