Yonah Russ' Journal

Sun SPARC T3 Servers

Yonah Russ — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 23:14:44 +0000

Oracle announced their new line of Sun SPARC T3 powered servers at Oracle Openworld 2010. The SPARC T3 processor includes several improvements on T2 and T2+ processors... All in all they have packed more T-Series goodness in a smaller package but I'm not making goo-goo eyes yet. As a platform for consolidating tens of smaller applications, the thread to RAM ratio is too low making it hard to get 100% utilization out of these servers. With the T3-4 servers loading even more processing power into a single machine, the thread to machine ratio high as well.

Vendor Lock-In or One Stop Shop

Yonah Russ — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 14:04:09 +0000

One Stop Shop is a dream for IT people. Support is hard enough to get when you've isolated a problem to a specific vendor. It is even harder when your problems are between two vendors and each points the finger at the other. When does the One Stop Shop strategy become a rationalization for Vendor Lock-In? It is a delicate balance around how much better your IT could be with Best of Breed vs. how much worse they will be integrating all the different pieces of the puzzle.

EMC Fully Automated Storage Tiering

Yonah Russ — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 23:00:19 +0000

Storage Tiering is nothing new. We use fast 15K RPM disks for high performance applications, slower 10K RPM disks for less demanding applications, and 7.2K RPM SATA disks for archive storage. Recently, solid state disks (SSDs) have also become more common for really high performance needs. The trick is managing it all. Two or three [...]

Portsnap, Apache Configurations, and CGI – Questions Answered

Yonah Russ — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 07:01:24 +0000

Explain the importance of installing and running portsnap after installing a current version of FreeBSD. Portsnap is a system for securely distributing the FreeBSD ports tree. Approximately once an hour, a “snapshot” of the ports tree is generated, repackaged, and cryptographically signed. The resulting files are then distributed via HTTP. The first time portsnap is [...]

32 or 64 bit MySQL

Yonah Russ — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 12:22:30 +0000

Recently, I wanted to confirm that I was running the 64 bit version of the MySQL server as opposed to the 32 bit version... one of my admins had made a symlink from the mysql/bin directory to the 64 bit binary directory. On the command line, you could no longer tell if the mysqld command was run from the 64 bit directory and there doesn't seem to be a built in MySQL command which shows what version is currently running (show status, \s, show variables, etc) In the end I ran...

Oracle’s New Line of Sun x86 Servers

Yonah Russ — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 09:37:02 +0000

Oracle just announced a new line of Nehalem based x86 servers and they are beasts: The long and short of it for me seems to be that the machines are beasts but power hungry beasts. None of the lower power Nehalems really seem to be on the table. Until we see prices, it will be hard to tell if these are worth the pdf's their printed on.

Better User Management for MySQL

Yonah Russ — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 19:23:42 +0000

If you're like me, you love the granular permissions capabilities of MySQL but hate the work that goes into managing them... Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be anything like groups in MySQL and according to plans won't be added officially until MySQL 7.0 (WL#988)... While searching around, I found Securich...

Flattr.com – New Micropayment Service Coming

Yonah Russ — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 18:44:24 +0000

Just saw this on Slashdot. Basically the idea is that you give them a certain amount of money each month which you then use to "flatter" Internet content that you like... While it seems like a good idea, and the domain name it great, I'm not sure there is any market for more "buttons". They should probably try integrating this directly into Twitter, Digg, etc. so if someone retweets, they get a piece of the cake. There are already too many social networks as it is.

Cute Site Based on Google

Yonah Russ — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 12:10:17 +0000

I just ran into an interesting site goosh.org. Goosh = GOOgle SHell - basically the guy has built a CLI or shell interface to google services....

Google Analytics Showing Strange Statistics

Yonah Russ — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 09:35:46 +0000

Google Analytics has been showing me weird numbers since the beginning of February. While it is completely possible that these numbers are correct, it is also hard for me to believe. Usually, the traffic looks like a rough bell will low traffic on the weekends. The number of visitors each day is almost exactly the [...]