Tag Archive - GNU/Linux

breathing space

January 28, 2010 in , , , , , , , , , with 139 Comments

Last couples of weeks been pretty crazy. The number of drafts I’ve got prepared for this blog keep growing while my time to edit/publish them seem to strangely dissolve in the event around me. I’ve done my share of ‘This blog will get the time it deserve’ quite enough to know not to do that anymore. I won’t apologize for having a full schedule, I’ll just outline why I got one so full:

– Les Laboratoires Phoenix welcomes a new managed client, at the same time as I got my two first contractual employee (with enough job to drive them for years).
– I’ll be giving a talk at ConFoo, March 12th, called ‘Massive Scalability’. Be there, its going to be a pretty good one.
– I’ve been mandated to write another article for the European edition of Linux+DVD. Deadline is in a couples days.
– I’ve started dancing classes. (No comments please ;-))
– With the wedding happening soon, we are totally swamped with stuff to do. From food tasting to getting whatever I will wear, going through hotel reservation, decoration choices… By themself, each task is quite easy to manage, but add to that the fact we are doing most of it remotely and that Catherine schedule is just crazy.

At least, this morning, I’ve got a 20 minutes break, waiting for the bus thats going to take me to Montreal – on yet another ‘business trip’.

Cutting-edge of Cloud Computing

November 25, 2009 in , , , , , , , , , , with 17 Comments

Just got off the bus in Montreal, Québec. This is a lightning visit, in 48 hours, I’ll be back in my office in Ottawa. But, right now, I’m taking a drink in one of my favorite downtown coffee shop and I’m planning.

The next few hours will see little sleep and lots of action ; More precisely I’ll be deploying lots of hardware (2 IBM SAN, 2 core servers, 2 switchs, 2 APC, 5 branchs servers – supporting up to 20 ‘leaf’/virtual servers), and then somes (3 couples of 2 systems in high redundancy (wackamole IP ‘fencing’, shared-storage through DRBD). All that will go in ‘my’ new 48U cage @Hypertec (old nortel building) to act as a demo for some clients.

Once that’s completed, the true fun start: A very big part of this infrastructure is going to be self-healing, failure resitant and high performance. We are speaking of :

  • automatic & dynamic launch of new ‘branch’ systems (xen dom0), without having to do anything more than to rack them (no OS install needed, can be upgraded by rebooting them),
  • high redundancy at the leaf level (xen domU, automatic migration toward less used dom0),
  • failure resistace through bonded interface, multi-path & multi-host fiberchannel SAN & controller…

    • This is going to be solid, scalable, fast : the holy grail of a lot of service provider that are aiming at automatization of their ‘hosting’ business. The result of a lot of planning and testing ; the cutting-edge of cloud-computing.

    Couples of stats/facts.

    October 10, 2009 in , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , with 86 Comments

    As I look over 6 very interesting projects overview on my desk, I’m forced to do a bit of thinking about how the last year went by. A year is a lot of time, and so much plans finally came to fruition that I can’t think of listing them all here today. Which is kinda a good sign for me and my enterprise ;-)

    Most of my readers doesn’t really know who I am, even when you take into account that I blog under my real name. Most don’t know that I bought a condo in Hull (now part of Gatineau, near Ottawa – the capital of Canada), that I still have a rent in Montreal, that I proposed to my girlfriend (she said “Yes!”), that I own a dog (greatest experience of forcing a regular schedule I ever had), that my greatest motivation in life is to be able to go where I want, whenever I want. My dream is going back to Yosemite, California… and bring hiking gear.

    Another big aspect of my life is my business, Les Laboratoires Phoenix. I’ve been working full time at it for the last 9 months and its been a great experience. Over those months : I’ve worked with clients from 7 countries, contributed to 3 major open source projects, went to the “Free Software Foundation” Libre Planet confrence in Boston, went to the DefCon in Las Vegas, I’ve been named SME for {Zabbix, Zimbra, Asterisk, OpenLDAP, extended LAMP Stack, Mailman, GlusterFS, Lustre, MySQL, Cloud Computing, …}, 3 of my articles have been published (>40K prints), and I’m involved in a book project (from a major publisher)…

    And, even thinking about all those achievements, I still look for the future of Les Laboratoires Phoenix. I guess that working with startups influenced me a lot : those 6 projects are all different from each others, they represent good revenue potential (clear business plan) and require low capital input to be started. So, I guess I’ll stop speaking about them and work ;-). Btw, two of those projects would be online services (SAAS) for well known parts of Internet infrastructure (not webserver). Another is a cloud computing infrastructure services based in Montreal (this one if almost finished! & I got an hardware provider)… A lot of fun to be had.

    More news to come.

    computerized procrastination

    September 6, 2009 in , , , , , with 159 Comments

    I have a lot of computers. Most of them are ‘throwaway‘ systems (no important data) that are destined to be used in any of the plethora of labs I am (through les Laboratoires Phoenix) conducting these days.

    However, this week-end, I’ve been away from home and I’ve brought only one (nymph, my Thosiba Portege M200, tablet PC). The official reason is to work… but then, this is without counting my tendency to do a bit of procrastination with my coffee in the morning.

    So:
    * I now have Firefox 3.5.2 installed.
    * My Debian (sid) system is up-to-date.
    * My GIT server is getting re-designed.
    * I’m currently waiting for my (new) kernel compilation linux-2.6.30.5…

    Which bring me to the point of speaking about new options in the kernel. I had 2.6.24-1 (yeah, I know, old kernel) and I jumped to 2.6.30.5… and there is one nice feature that I really want to try!:
    * Group CPU Scheduler (grouping tasks by user_id)

    Zimbra & Sphinx & inodes & U.P.C. ; Being a free software consultant is all about diversity

    July 13, 2009 in , , , , , , , with 137 Comments

    Being a free software consultant is all about the ability to adapt to any given situation… As the main conduit between my clients and the world of cutting edge technologies, they often call me to complete mandate that have little to do with my specialties. Officially, I build high throughput, high redundancy information system. However, here is a quick glance of my ‘monday’:

     

    1. no more free inode on server
    Database server of a client is sometimes throwing out error about inodes. This morning, I’ve decided to correct the problem once and for all.

    #checking inodes
    root@server:/home# df -hi | grep sda
    /dev/sda1 640K 606K 35K 95% /

    #checking free space
    root@server:/home# df -h | grep sda
    /dev/sda1 10G 5.1G 4.4G 55% /

    A quick check shows 4.4G of free disk space but a little bit less than 35K inodes availables. Taking into account that each file require at least one inode… this could easily become a very dangerous situation. Resolving this issue isn’t very complicated : I’ve destroyed some of the 500k idle file on the server and move some more to another partition. Easy solution for a problem that can easily crash your server.

     

    2. Zimbra & Sphinx ; 2 deployments
    One client wanted an easy to manage, web accessible and fully featured messaging & collaboration software. Zimbra [website, download] is one of the easiest open source solution to recommend in those case. It integrate with active directory, it support full text search, tagging and got a very good web interface. Kinda of remind me of MailEnable (for Windows), but a lot less costly and available on GNU/Linux. I’ve completed quite a few single/multi-node deployment of Zimbra and I’ve always been impressed by the quality of the system. Hoo, and btw, I’m a certified Zimbra consultant.

     

    Another wanted to add full-text search capacity to an existing MySQL database. While innodb & MyISAM built-in indexes can help speed up some queries, they are restricted by the b-tree data model. The second problems in this scenario is that the data is already partitioned in multiple database / servers. This is the perfect use case for Sphinx [website] with multi-tables/multi-databases data sources.

     

    3. U.P.C. – BarCode reader
    I’ve received a shipment of 8mm barcode reader for a client. The device is to be integrated in a point-of-sale solution my corp. (Les Laboratoires Phoenix) is developing for them. The small USB Acan device [ebay search] is easy to configure (scan specific code) and to use (act as a keyboard). True plug-and-play on Microsoft Windows XP, Vista, on GNU/Linux and Mac OSX Tiger… I’m very satisfied by the device and look forward to complete the assignment.

     

    4. More stuff
    Did way more stuff than those 3 contracts today… but hey, I can’t be writing down for all to see all my cool gigs and contracts! Some of those are actually protected by NDA or are still stealth.

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