c0t0d0s0.org

Interestingly the most power-efficient desktop platform isn´t the purpose-build Atom CPU from Intel. It´s an AMD Opteron. Tom´s Hardware found this in tests (i don´t like this news outlet but sometimes there are some good articles there) A good example for "the system is key": Even when you CPU runs at two watts, a CPU alone doesn´t compute a single command. You need a power-efficient chipset as well. And the chipset is the achilles heel of Atom at the moment.

PS: That´s good news, i was afraid of being forced to buy Intel for my next homeserver ....

They are somewhat similar, but at the end both represent really different concepts of building a server: Sun announced today the Sun Fire X2250 and the Sun Fire X4250. Both systems are systems in the 2-socket server class, but after this fact the system get really differnt.

Sun Fire X2250 Server

The Sun Fire X2250 is a 2 socket XEON system in one rack unit. It can provide room up to 2 disks. It was primarily developed for HPC deployments as a cheap compute node or for highly budget sensitive customers. By the way: It provides an ILOM interface, it´s not equipped with the ELOM.

Sun Fire X4250 Server

The Sun Fire X4250 is a two rack unit, dual socket system. The additional rack unit was used in an efficient manner. You can plug up to 16 harddisks in this chassis. At this moment this leads to a total capacity of almost 2.3 TB raw disk capacity. So it´s the Xeon based brother to the Opteron based X4240. The website specifies it´s an ELOM system, but docs.sun.com already contains the documentation for the X4250 with ILOM.

I forgot to post the conclusion and the table of content when i published the JET tutorial some weeks ago. Okay ... here they are. This is a real long tutorial. 16 parts in total - the longest tutorial so far:

• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: Basic Jumpstart
• Part 3: Files controlling the installation
• Part 4: Jumpstart FLASH
• Part 5: The Toolkit
• Part 6: Prerequisites
• Part 7: Installing the JET Server
• Part 8: Preparing the first installation
• Part 9: Basic installation of a new system
• Part 10: A polished basic installation
• Part 11: Mirrored boot disks
• Part 12: Automatic hardening with SST
• Part 13: Deep dive to post installation
• Part 14: Using flash archives
• Part 15: Using flash archives for recovery
• Part 16: Conclusion

I hope this tutorial is useful for you!

JET and Jumpstart are incredible powerful tools to ease the installation of your solaris systems. You can install your systems via network, configure and customize them. With tools like Jumpstart FLASH it´s easy to clone systems for large computing cluster.

Even when you have only a few systems, it´s a good practice to install you systems by a Jumpstart server. A bare metal recovery of your system is much easier, you can use a common template to setup your system and beside the hard disk space the jumpstart server needs only resources at the moment of the installation.

There is a nice piece of server porn at silicon.de: The dissection of a X4450 in fifty photos. A nice peek into the chassis of the only available Tier1 2RU quadsocket system.

Da wird ein Trip nach Kalifornien mit einem Hauch von Dienstreise getarnt und einige Mitglieder unserer Politischen Kaste sind immer noch nicht zufrieden: So schreibt der Spiegel Online im Artikel "Neger gesucht":

Sozialdemokrat Krüger, Potsdam-West ist sein Ortsverein, sann auf Abhilfe. Vor der Stadtführung fuhr er den Generalkonsul nach dessen Erinnerung an: "Wir brauchen einen Neger, der den Rollstuhl schiebt."

Einfach mal den Artikel auf der Zunge zergehen lassen und sich dann über nichts mehr wundern.

Next year in February i have to buy or lease a new car. I think, i just found my new car. A Volvo. To be exact: The Volvo XC60. Not because it´s a Volvo or because of the fact that it´s a really cool car. No, because of a little function integrated into the car. It´s called City Assist. The car has the capability to automatically brake the car in such situations like stop-and-go at a traffic light. As accidents in such situations hit me once or twice in the time i own a car, this would really reduce the costs for repairs and this feature would let my car insurance finally drop to a decent level. Sometimes technology is really a heaven-send...

I´ve integrated the CacheFS and the JET tutorials in the standard release of the LKSF book, thus now all links refering to the released version of the book should deliver the version 0.28 of the LKSF book (with the date of the 18.08.2008 on the titlepage). You can download it here.

Yet another tutorial finalized - this time about one of the really hidden features of Solaris - CacheFS. CacheFS is something similar to a caching proxy. But this proxy don´t cache web page, it caches files from another filesystem. I divided the tutorial in 8 parts.

• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: Theory
• Part 3: A basic example
• Part 4: The Cache
• Part 5: On demand consistency checking
• Part 6: A usecase for CacheFS
• Part 7: The future of CacheFS
• Part 8: Conclusion

I hope, this tutorial gives you some new insights into Solaris. Have fun while trying out the stuff in the tutorial

CacheFS is one of this features even some experienced admins aren´t aware of. But as soon as they try it, most of them can´t live without it. You should give it a try.

CacheFS is one of this hidden gems in Solaris, it´s even that hidden, that it´s in sustaining mode since 1999. That means, that only bugfixes are made for this features but no new features found their way into this component since that day. In the recent days there was some discussion about the declaration of the End-of-Feature status for CacheFS which will lead to the announcement of the removal of CacheFS. After a few days of discussion the ARC decided in favour of the removal.

Let´s take an example: Let´s assume you have 50 webservers that serve static content or that serves and executes .php files. You may have used scp or rsync to syncronize all this servers.

With CacheFS the workflow is a little bit different: You simply put all you files on a fileserver. But you have noticed, that there was a large load on this system. To reduce load to the fileserver you use your new knowledge to create a cache on every server. After this you saw a lot of requests for directory and file metadata for the documents directory. You know that this directory is provisioned with the changes only at 3 o´clock in the morning. Thus you write a little script, that checks for the file please_check_me and starts cfsadmin -s all on the client in the case of it´s existence and it will check at the next access to the files if there´s a newer version.