Get out and vote today

Make sure you get out there and vote today!

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Found this great post in my RSS feads by the CEO of Bluehost.com and Hostmonster.com, Matt Heaton.  I love his blog and even if I wasn’t a customer of Bluehost I would still be following him for these kind of gems.  I wish as a sysadmin that I had the kind of time to fine tune our systems to the degree that they are able to, however, we have a much wider range of uses that a hosting company.  I think that makes it even more difficult.  If you are in the hosting business you should be following Matt’s blog.  http://www.mattheaton.com

I’m going to include some of Matt’s post.  Please check out the rest of it at his blog and feel free to comment here or there.

The Linux Kernel = The Solution = The Problem

Linux is an amazing operating system. I have written about it several times over the years. All of our company’s servers run on CentOS Linux (about a thousand) and a good chunk of our desktops and work stations run Ubuntu linux. The speed and reliability of the main linux kernel (Think engine of a car) is unmatched in my estimation. What is even more impressive about the Linux kernel is its unbelievably rapid pace of development. Herein lies our problem.

The linux kernel is developed simultaneously for so many different work loads that it is impossible to ship a Linux Distribution that is tuned for your specific workload. If I could use the car analogy one more time - Linux could just as easily be an all electric 50 HP car, or a 1,000 HP Dragster, or a Semi Truck. It literally can and is used to power your phone to the fastest super computer in the world. With that type of flexibility how do you wrangle the most power out of the linux kernel for your specific needs?

…

I feel that given the same exact hardware specifications that we could generally squeeze at least twice the performance from MySQL, Apache, PHP, and underlying CPU and IO intensive tasks compared with any server loaded up with a standard install of CentOS or Redhat Enterprise Linux.

While I think that is great, and it gives us a huge advantage over our competitors I don’t really think it ought to be that way. Many of these tunable options simply need to be applied to a system to make it faster, while other methods require a historical approach before tuning becomes effectively.

Regardless, my opinion is that the linux kernel DESPERATELY needs some software that will real time evaluate you servers CPU, Memory. I/O bottlenecks and makes these adjustments for you on the fly based on a constantly changing workload. This should have been written a long time ago. Having a thousand different tunable options is great if you know what every one does and how it affects every other setting. My experience is that 1% of the users know about 10% of the possible settings to change and the rest never gets touched. Thats a shame, because as fast as Linux is, as long as these “default” kernel settings are in place you will NEVER get the performance that you could out of existing hardware without your own kernel guys on staff (Like we do).

Realtime kernel adjustment by the kernel itself for the workload being operated on is what the kernel needs now. I can tell you that we have some aspects of this done already. If nobody else steps up the plate, we may release our own version of this to the community at large to build up and use for the betterment of all.

Thanks,
Matt Heaton / Bluehost.com

Just great stuff Matt!

During class we did some set up to give ourselves 3 cluster nodes. To do this set up it was a simple kickstart to get a fresh install on Dom0. Once I had Dom0 installed I installed the cluster software with “yum groupinstall Clustering” and yum installgroup “Cluster Storage”. Once I had all of the clustering software installed I shutdown the Dom0. Then I shutdown the Dom0 and used another script to clone Dom0 to 3 new nodes. This allows for quick rebuilds of any of the nodes during the class as it just uses an lvm snapshot of Dom0 to create nodes 1-3. Pretty slick! I’ll see if I can post the pertinent parts of the scripts from Red Hat tomorrow.

So let’s say I was writing a blog post about some new Nikon equipment that had just been released like a Nikon D300.  It would look at the text I had typed in my blog post and make suggestions to articles on D300’s or images taken by D300 or of D300’s.  This is great!  It will make for much more interesting blog posts.  I just went past 600 characters and now on the right hand side of my blog post in Word Press I see 9 images.  4 are images taken by a D300, 3 are images of a D300 or it’s components, 1 is a Firefox logo and 1 is a Nikon logo.  The other really cool thing is that as you hover over the image it tells you what the license  of the image.  I’ll post a few of the items suggested now.  How cool is this.

• Tips From The Top Floor
  • http://www.tipsfromthetopfloor.com
• The Digital Photography Show
  • http://www.thedigitaphotographyshow.com
• The Russell Brown Show
  • http://www.russellbrown.com
• Photoshop User TV
  •  http://www.photoshopusertv.com
• The Nikonians On Location
  • http://podcasts.nikonians.org/on_location.html
• Layers TV
  • http://www.layerstv.com
• PixelPerfect
  • http://revision3.com/pixelperfect
• Photoshop Killer Tips
  • http://www.photoshopkillertips.com
• Nikonians Podcasts
  • http://podcasts.nikonians.org
• Meet The GIMP
  • http://www.meetthegimp.org
• LightSource Studio Photography Podcast
  • http://www.studiolighting.net/
• Focus Ring
  • http://www.photocastnetwork.com/

I tend to be a bit of a podcast junky. I am subscribed to around 100 podcasts in total. Most of the podcasts I listen to are technical in nature, and as of late I’ve subscribed to a few virtualization podcasts. Here is a list of podcasts about virtualization that I’ve found and subscribed to myself:

• DBACC Radio
  • http://www.dabcc.com/podcast.aspx
• InfoWorld Virtualization Report Podcast
  • http://weblog.infoworld.com/virtualization/archives/podcast/
• Virtualization Strategy Magazine
  • http://www.virtual-strategy.com/en/podcasts

If anyone else knows of any other virtualization podcasts I’d love to hear them and give them a listen.

Matt

I will be taking a serious at the RHEL Advance Platform options for virtualization and high availability. They are included in the subscription price and you no longer have the issues of waiting on a 3rd party vendor to play catch up with your OS. Sounds like a good idea to me!

More updates coming soon!

With Adobe Photoshop Express it is possible to resize, tint, distort, sharpen etc.Go and try it out and provide feedback to Adobe on how they can make it better. I sure will be.

http://www.photoshopexpress.com