// February 23rd, 2009 // No Comments » // Business
A recent IDC report on piracy in Brunei states that for every $1.00 spent on software licenses, an additional $1.25 is also spent in value added services.
Why is this important to us? And why is an OSS friendly guy blogging about software licenses?
Turn the equation around.
More after the break:
// February 16th, 2009 // No Comments » // Business
I was reading up on the audit profession and I came across a CFO article on “Top 10x ways to cut your audit bill“. Article has some good practical advice on managing the auditors.
More after the break:
// February 15th, 2009 // No Comments » // Musings
Reading through Guy Kawasaki’s twitter stream, I came across a productivity blog post advocating people write personal mission statements. The gist of the article is that one very powerful way to attain success is to begin with clarity. I am definately an advocate of having a clear statement of purpose!
// February 12th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology
So the shop somehow managed to deliver my custom PC with 2x EADS drives and 1x EACS drive. Normally, to rectify this kind of mishap would require backing up the data on the drive and restoring the data to the replacement disk.
Not so with ZFS. Because my three drives are in a raidz storage pool, ZFS automatically partitions and manages my data. This allows up to one device in the pool to fail (single parity).
Replacing the drive was a case of:
1. Pulling out the old disk.
2. Cabling up the new disk in the, now-empty slot.
3. Booting the OS as normal.
4. Resilvering the raidz zpool with a single command: zpool replace <name of device to replace>
5. Go get coffee, rebuilding the array will take some time. Once it’s done, check status with: zpool status
After the break I give some examples of what you may see:
// February 12th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology
ZFS saved my data!
root@opensolaris:~# zpool status -x
pool: tank
state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices has experienced an unrecoverable error. An
attempt was made to correct the error. Applications are unaffected.
action: Determine if the device needs to be replaced, and clear the errors
using ‘zpool clear’ or replace the device with ‘zpool replace’.
see: http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-8000-9P
scrub: scrub completed after 0h44m with 0 errors on Thu Feb 12 13:27:23 2009
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
tank ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz1 ONLINE 0 0 0
c5d1 ONLINE 0 0 0
c6d0 ONLINE 2 0 0 128K repaired
c6d1 ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors
root@opensolaris:~#
I wonder if this is a symptom of poor PSU performance? I’ll be monitoring that disk c6d0 (SATA3).
// February 7th, 2009 // No Comments » // Business
In a “zero-sum game“, there is always one loser and one winner. Just like in a game of poker, what one party wins, the other party loses. I’ve been reading a lot about the economic downturn lately and it reminded me of a conversation I had with one of the chaps at the office –> The Chinese character for “Risk” is written as = Crisis + Opportunity.
So – in these times of economic downturn and crisis, who stands to gain? Sun Microsystem’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz blogs:
In the midst of this economic downturn, discussions related to free and open source software have substantially heated up - this is no longer a peripheral discussion with CIO's - cost reduction related to open source adoption has become a focal point for decision makers across the world.
I also found this gem of an article about a hedge fund manager who bet big on the eventual credit crunch and failure of large financial services institutions.
This really shows two completely opposite ways to squeeze an opportunity out of these current crisis. Either (1) through leveraging on cost efficiencies and delivering a lower TCO product than the competition and competing on price, or (2) winning through zero-sum games on the way the market is going to go. John Paulson made a filthy amount of return on (2), although at a staggering amount of risk. The jury is still out – whether Sun can pull the fat from the fire and turn around that great company and really make a comeback.
// February 7th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology
One other benefit of using ZFS and it’s ability to take snapshots of an entire filesystems … is that I can upgrade my boot environment inside a clone of my existing system. If I have problems, I can always roll back with a single command line.
Those days of maintaining a 2nd set of hardware for testing operating system patches may be numbered!
[see: OpenSolaris getting started guide, and OpenSolaris Boot Environments docs] (more…)
// February 7th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology
This is a screen shot of my OpenSolaris install. I created an approx. 2,000 GB storage pool out of 3x 1TB hard disk drives. You’d think it should add up to 3,000 GB of storage … but one of the disks is being used to provide redundancy to the pool. My data is being spread out over 3x disks, so now, if one of the disks fails, I can easily replace it with any disk of similar capacity and OpenSolaris will automatically recover my data for me.
The real cool part? After copying all my data across to the new storage pool, I took a backup of the data using a single command, zfs snapshot -r tank/share@20090205
This is all made possible by the Zetabyte File System (ZFS) feature in OpenSolaris, an open source project from Sun Microsystems.
Somewhere there’s a sysadmin slaving over some tape backups or wrestling with logical volume management, manually copying old data over to new disks. ZFS takes manageability of disk resources to a whole new level of simplicity. Adding more space to the pool is simply a matter of unboxing the new drives, connecting them and adding them to the pool. The pool automatically grows larger to accommodate the new disks and data is magically spread over the new enalrged pool.
// February 1st, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology
Havoc! Let me summarise my long list of problems with my custom PC. The spec is roughly:
A little summary of my troubles after the break:
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