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The new member of the family...

So here it is.  I bought a MacBook.  After literally 10+ years of being a “Dell Guy”, well Dell finally ran out of laptops that I found interesting, and my one experience with HP laptops has convinced me to never buy another one.

My last notebook, the Adamo13 was one of my favorites.  Ultra slim, solid state just about everything.  Could do a 5 hour plane-ride almost without issue.

But I needed something else.  After flipping back and forth between Linux and Windows I realized I needed something that could go both ways.  The more I thought about it, Apple seemed like the way to go.  Apple runs on a BSD Linux kernel after all, has a linux command-line (if you know where to get to it) and pretty good compatibility.

So when I finally got it in my head to upgrade, well I went ahead and dropped the hammer on a 15″ macbook pro.  (so to speak, no actual hammers were involved.)

So far I’m pretty happy with my choice.  But when the first person at work saw me on it and asked me the idiot question I got pissy.

“Are you a Mac now?”

Under breath: “No idiot, I’m a person.  I’m *USING* a Mac.”

Let me break it down.  I have in my arsenal the following systems.

In my household and business I have:

3 Desktop PC’s running windows 7
3 Laptops running Windows 7
1 Dell 1850 running Windows 2003 Server . (That despite all my kajoling, refuses to survive a P2V)

4 VMWare ESXi hosts containing the following:

11 Windows 2008 Servers
2 Windows 2003 Servers
10 CentOS 5 Servers
5 CentOS 6 Servers
2 SUSE Enterprise 11 Linux

and now

1 15″ MacBook Pro

This is the thing.  I’m a technology pragmatist.  I use what works best and does what I need it to.  In the limited scope of a transportable computer, a Mac seems to do what I need nicely, and yes, it comes in an attractive and (so far) fairly durable package.

But I’m not a Mac.  Nor am I a PC.  I’m a *PERSON* who uses a computer.  (Several actually)

Religion has no place in technology.  Leave it in the church.

Oh, and I’m still not buying a #$!@!? iPhone.

That's a lotta ethernet...

First impression of the XiV in “action”

The GUI is fancy.  Looks like a Mac turned on it’s side. The GUI is also NOT web-based.  It’s an app-install. I do believe however it’s available for multiple platforms.

It really does seem to take all of the guess work out of provisioning since you don’t really have any say on what goes where in your array.

Our first use?  Backing up 6+ TB that was stored on Clariion and moving it to XiV…

Now first off, I’m glad it was decided to do it this way.  Whereas a copy straight from one to the other is possible, utilizing both arrays at the same time, it wouldn’t have provided any comparison as to performance.

The backup was done using Veritas NetBackup, over the network.  The data consisted of a pair of hosts running an extensive XML-type database used for indexing and categorization of unstructured content.  The backup and restore were both done to the same host, over the same network, and the storage was addressed over the same switches, just zoned to different arrays.  The only significant difference was that while the backup was done multiplexed, the restore had to be done single-threaded…(because NBU multiplexed both backups to the same tape)

I have to get the final start/stop-times out of NBU, but from the halway conversation I had with the NBU guy, the backup took 6-8 hours (for both hosts), the restore took 21+ hours…

The most interesting part of it was the first restore took almost the same amount of time as the backup, which is kind of what we would expect.  The second host took dramatically longer to restore than to back-up.

This would indicate to me that, as expected, the XiV didn’t handle the long, sequential write very well.  Since the host only connects to two of the six data nodes, virtually 100% of writes have to be destaged over the Gig-E backend.  My guess is we nailed the cache to the wall with the first restore, and then kept it pegged with the second one.

I like sequential write-tests on this scale because it shows without a doubt whether the cache is masking a back-end issue or not.  If it is, this is exactly what you’ll see.  An initial burst of writes followed by a sharp drop as cache is saturated.  This is even more pronounced in a more utilized array (rather than an idle one) because a certain percentage of cache will already be utilized by host reads/writes.

This doesn’t bode well for an application that requires occasional complete reloads of the XML database…

I can’t wait to see it in action.

My definition of “Day” changes…well…daily.

I’m having to do some shuffling of data off my old PC Workstation and I found something interesting.

MacOS can’t WRITE to an NTFS volume without a third-party driver.  It can read from it just fine.

I ran into a situation where I had to consolidate data from 2x 2TB drives onto one to free space for “The Next Step” (which you’ll read about tomorrow if you care) and so I connected them both to the Mac to hopefully do a quick ‘copy’ from one to the other.

Nope.  Not a chance.

MacOS can’t write to an NTFS volumes.  Now I found a few third-party drivers and tried one that had a 15 day trial version…  Only to find my way into what I can only assume is the Mac version of the “Blue Screen of Death”  (The “You must turn your computer off NOW” screen – how rude.)

What I find interesting about this is this.  Linux can read/write from an NTFS volume just fine.  Since MacOS is BSD Linux, I can only assume that Apple has made the conscious decision not to support NTFS writes.  Probably because it provides people with a simple migration path OFF Apple hardware, which, as any hardware vendor would like to believe, no-one would ever want to do.

Still – my experience is largely positive.  Got my work VPN up and running on it without too much angst and work.  And my son is sufficiently horrified at the sound of the power-on chord (there’s probably a fancy word for it) that I make up reasons to reboot when he’s in the room.

I can see that the entertainment value of this investment will be limitless.

Ok, I’m curious as to whether anyone has an answer for this.

Why don’t more people boot VMWare ESX from the SAN?

It occurred to me the other night that I have 2 36G drives in each of my servers that I use possibly 10G of, when I already have a High-Availability storage solution at my fingertips.  I’ve got plenty of storage space, not even including the vault drives.

So I tried it.  I took one of my off-line VMware boxes. (I use DPM so at any given time 2 of my 3 VMWare hosts are probably in StandBy mode) and popped the drives out of it.

I turned it on, went into the BIOS and disabled the onboard RAID controller and enabled the boot BIOS on one of the Emulex HBA.s

I created an 18G lun on the clariion and assigned it to the host as LUN0 and poof, I have a boot disk.

Worked like a charm.  The one surprise (pleasant) is that VMWare seems aware of the multi-pathed boot device even without any form of powerpath on the system.  (That was my biggest concern)

So now I have my VMWare infrastructure running on a host with ZERO fixed-disk drives spinning in it.

So has anyone else tried this and know of any gotchas involved that I may not have run across yet?  I’ve done windows and Linux native boot-from-san many many times, but this is my first attempt at VMWare.

I’ve not however tried pulling a path to see just HOW resilient it is…I should probably should try that before I convert the other two systems to diskless operation, right?

This may be a more well-known reference than I earlier thought.

I grew up watching Happy-Days.  The show was great until the episode where Fonzi jumped the shark-tank.  After that it pretty much went down-hill quickly.

Hence the term “Jumped the shark” or “Jumping the shark” has come to mean any single event that marks the point where something degenerates into crap.

My VMWare NFS server jumped the shark this weekend.  It was hilarious.  I had a beautifully quiet afternoon on Friday, from about 14:30 on my blackberry was quiet.  Turns out that the NFS server that I use for storage experienced an unexplained (and apparently barely logged) kernel panic and rebooted.

In the process, the 6 adapters, in what I can only guess was a techno-square-dance, all switched places and lost their bonding configuration.

All went south, right in the middle of one of my busiest travel weeks as far as work goes.  So my wife, god bless her, earned her stripes this weekend as I walked her through ‘ifconfig eth0 10.1.1.10′ and ‘ping 10.1.1.254′ etc.  trying to figure out what happened.

Still don’t know.  But with everything down (including this site) my first priority was to get it all back online, troubleshoot later.  (When my desktop goes down I know why, I have an inquisitive 3 year old with a fetish for power-buttons), but the server power buttons are protected by a key – for that very purpose.

So I ordered a bunch of 146G drives for the hosts, and I’m going to move criticial apps back to internal storage until I figure out what in the hell happened and how to fix it.  It might give me an opportunity to eval. some new FC Target toys I’ve been thinking about.

Who knows.  No more shark-jumping though. 

Hope everyone had a great new-year.

I spent mine stripping every last bit of Windows Vista off my desktop at home.

I played with it for a while, mostly to see what all the fuss was about.  Most of it comes down to yet another example of the dumbing down of America.

Vista has managed to so idiot-proof the software that only the idiots seem to be able to understand it.  This concerns me because Vista is in large part the user-interface of the future, that is, it’s what Microsoft is going to use it’s monopoly-power to force the world into.

So I went back to XP on my desktop and will continue to use it until they end-of-life it.  Then I’ll move to Ubuntu or another flavor of Linux, though I’m starting to hear rumors that certain patent-infringment cases may mean that free-Linux is going to be a thing of the past.

I couldn’t understand (with Vista) how a system with a dual-core 3.0Ghz processor and 4Gigs of RAM could run as slowly as it did.  I mean the difference between Vista and Xp is so noticible it’s amazing.

partly I’m suspecting that it’s all the DRM that Vista runs.  Not just music/media, but software as well.  Vista tracks your every move, suspiciously keeps track of every move you make, and boy does it discourage you from installing anything Microsoft doesn’t like and approve of.

Way too big-brother for me.

(/jg)

Ok – a bit off the storage side.

I recently undertook the daunting task of installing Fedora Core 7 on my Dell Latitude D620 laptop.

The hardware summary is as follows:

Intel Core2 Duo – T7200 (2x 2.8GHZ)
2GB Ram
Intel 3945 802.11 Wireless
Broadcom 10/100/1000 Network
Sprint EVDO Express (Novatell internal)
Dell 350 Bluetooth module.
Now in deference – I was afraid because the first thing it did when I installed it was failed to boot. I figured I was dead in the water from the start – this was solved by adding the following to my grub.conf file:

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.22.9-91.fc7 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet clocksource=acpi_pm

I don’t understand the dynamics of why, but apparently there is a timing issue that needs to be fixed.

The Bluetooth and Wired network modules worked right out of the gate, I was fairly impressed because I remember installing fedora some years ago and finding that NOTHING worked.

Next came the Intel 3945 Wireless card. This was a pain because there is a driver that ships with FC7 that ALMOST works. It recognizes the card, and the average user will spend about a day messing with it before realizing that the easiest way to fix the problem is to dump the stock ILW driver and go with the IPW3945 driver from FRESHRPMS.NET. Once I got it installed (YUM is a wonderful thing) it took just a little tinkering to figure out how to get it to pass my WEP key to the router and grab an IP address.

Last but not least was the sprint card. I wasn’t hopeful because I hadn’t seen a single document on FC7 and the Dell 5700 EVDO card.

I found one on Sprint’s website for Ubuntu Linux, didn’t really help because Fedora and Ubuntu put their configuration options in different files in different places. I found another document for the Sprint card (again for Ubuntu) at This Link.

Luckily everything translated almost exactly.

And so it works. I can TermServ back to my Vista desktop if I need to do any Windoze stuff.

You’d think I have too much time on my hands – I don’t. However I get pretty single-minded about some things.

-J

I started playing with CentOS today, at the suggestion of a few of our network geeks in the office.

The great thing about it is that it’s binary compatible with RedHat Enterprise 5.  So things like EMC Solutions Enabler and Veritas Netbackup work perfectly with it.

It’s handy because as anyone who has every tried to write a script in the windows shell knows, what Microsoft knows about scripting can fit on the back of a postage stamp.

sed and awk are my friends.  Say it with me…. 

“We Love Sed”

“We Love Awk”

I truly am a geek.  My wife lets me know this on a daily basis.  She doesn’t understand how someone can spend 10 hours at work in front of a computer and come home and relax in front of a computer.

Nuff said.