Test description: Transfer 685 2K frames (11MB per file, 8.1 GB total) to and from LTO 4 tape. TAR Blocking Factor Write LTO4 Read LTO4 1024 2m34s 1m16s 2048 1m24s 1m16s 4096 1m19s 1m34s The organization writing the LTO4 tape can nearly halve write time by using blocking factor of 2048 rather than 1024 as…
I have just received confirmation that the contract for the venue for the Cascadia IT Conference 2011 has been signed. We’re go for Friday and Saturday, 11 & !2 MAR, 2011 at the Hotel Deca in Seattle, WA, USA. The CfP should be out very very soon.
I will be teaching a full-day class with Marc Staveley on Using Amazon Web Services at this year’s LISA conference. The conference is being held in San Jose, CA from November 8 through 12 and my class (F1) is on the 12th. Come and join the fun!
Coolest thing I saw at SIGGRAPH 2010 was the Fusion-IO demo of streaming over 1800 DVD quality videos simultaneously from a 0.5 TB Fusion-IO drive. Here is a video of that demo: Quick 1:29 video of the demo explaining how the display works. This second link is a little old so the stats on the…
So what are we talking about when we talk about problem solving?
There are all sorts of problems sysadmins have to deal with on a regular
basis: technical problems and personal problems, immediate problems and
distant problems, easy problems and difficult problems. What I want to
address are problems of a more technical nature. I’m not going to talk much about specific tools or things like that, but rather more general topics that come to mind when I think about problem solving.
Continue reading
Finally got my own blog up: http://verticalsysadmin.com/blog/ It’ll be about configuration management, documentation, and increasing system administration efficiency.
A virtual computer in Amazon’s EC2 service, called an instance, has an ephemeral existence. They are created as needed but when they are stopped they disappear. This comes as no surprise to those of us who work with virtualization on a regular basis, but it can be a bit of a shock to the administrator…
My report from USENIX 2010 Configuration Management Summit is at http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7841
This article shows you how to install a gem (a ruby package) that provides access to Amazon APIs for EC2, ELB, and RDS. But along the way it also provides important information on the entire Rubygems environment. This information is critical for anyone who is tasked with maintaining a working Ruby environment.
Yesterday I posted an entry about using Ruby to access the Amazon EC2 API and I mentioned a gem that provided the classes needed to make such access easy. Gem is the package system for ruby, and fills a role similar to one that CPAN provides for perl. The Amazon gem is called amazon-ec2 and it is written and supported by Glenn Rempe. Continue reading
I’ve been recently extolling the virtues of Ruby on the Lopsa IRC channel so I thought it would be fun to take a real world problem and write a Ruby-based solution. This particular problem has to do with manipulating snapshots in Amazon’s EC2. Those who administer EC2 instances know (or should know) that the storage…