Tag Archive - jobs

backup or restore?

January 17, 2010 in , , , with 1 Comment

Been away for 2 month (from this blog). This isn’t from the lack of thing to speak about – my life have been really busy. In fact, never been so interesting and full – I’ve got at least 10 posts drafted. From photography to sysadmin work, to writing. The problem : time was lacking – to be honest, it still is.

But, beside everything that might be happening with my business (work log never been that full, started to get employees), I decided to take 2 minutes for a big fact of life (for sysadmin/management). Watch it, watch it: Nobody (especially YOU) care about backup. You care about successful restore. There! Now, I don’t want to hear about how great your backup are, if you don’t do regular restore (even as test), they’re not worth anything.

Reread those last sentences. Important point in a sysadmin life.

new projects

September 17, 2009 in , , , , , , , with 136 Comments

There we go. Just got a proposal accepted by one of my Montreal based client for a new joint venture in the field of cloud computing. Estimate time before full disclosure of the project is 2 weeks from now. Might not be really cute at first, but it’s going to be very useful. Hardware is pseudo-ready (not yet in rack) but we are speaking of nice stuff.

And I’m finishing the draft for another proposal, this, however, would be a lone venture from Les Laboratoires Phoenix for a specialized service (yet very used) that isn’t readily available (at a normal cost). We are speaking of about 100x less (in respect of recurring cost) of what’s currently available. Also a 2 weeks ETA for this one.

Might even have found an employee. Things are really moving fast.

FibreNoire Internet

August 26, 2009 in , , with 156 Comments

FibreNoire Internet, un ISP spécialisé dans la fibre optique à Montréal est à la recherche d’un spécialiste réseau. Si vous avez les aptitudes techniques, je vous conseil fortement de les contacter (le plus rapidement possible, car j’ai été un peu lent a poster ça). Note: Je n’ai aucune part dans le processus de sélection, ni le moindre avantage à poster ca ici – autre que d’aider cette firme qui est fondée par des amis.

Lien vers le pdf de l’offre. Toutes les informations de contact sont disponible dans le pdf.

new contracts @ labsphoenix…

August 20, 2009 in , , , , with 5 Comments

Because testing on live systems is bad …

… a Montreal based startup asked for a new distributed & scalable infrastructure inside the Amazon AWS cloud. All their international (localized) servers are now fully virtualized and can be managed (day-to-day) by non-sysadmin staff.

… a Chicago based investment firm is now being advised on data & infrastructure management of GLUSTERFS software.

… a Montreal based library is now able to receive book list request through a specially designed web page & database.

So, lots of interesting contracts for Les Laboratoires Phoenix – Couple more could be worked out in the next few days. While the main corporate site is being re-designed (http://labsphoenix.com) the announcement are going to be made here.

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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