Jul 28 2010

Congratulations Adobe….

Received this little popup while running the Adobe Acrobat Reader setup/updater.

What's wrong with this image?

Congratulations Adobe.

I am impressed.

:rolls eyes:


Jul 21 2010

Check if your blog is working.

Ran across a nice little utility site which can help to ensure that your blog is visible to the internet:

http://ismyblogworking.com/blog.jeffels.net

You can substitute any blog URL, and you’ll not only get information about whether your blog is up, but you’ll also find some nice load-time and indexing stats.


Jul 20 2010

New Employer

Today I start with my new employer.  I certainly hope to be more “inspired” in this position and to have more opportunities in my spare time to update this blog.

I’ve certainly appreciated all the positive [and critical] feedback given both on-line and off-line, and will attempt to produce something that is more worth reading.

Thanks for your patience, guys and gals!


May 27 2010

BP Oil Spill Cam – view from a rover

Check out this link: of the oil spill video in the gulf from the rover cam.


Apr 24 2010

4 ways to create web-based visualizations

An interesting article from Carsonified.com on web-based data visualizations.

http://carsonified.com/blog/design/4-ways-to-create-web-based-data-visualisations/


Apr 23 2010

Checking for String permutations in MySQL

Okay, so this can easily be superseded by your source language when connecting to a SQL database, but it’s an interesting way to check for string permutations/matches.

http://planet.mysql.com/entry/?id=23103


Apr 22 2010

Alternative to 4.2.2.x

I read an interesting article on http://www.tummy.com/Community/Articles/famous-dns-server/ and found that google offers public DNS on 8.8.8.8.  Maybe it’s time to stop using 4.2.2.x to relieve some of the load on the servers and start using 8.8.8.8?

Thoughts?


Mar 24 2010

Reflections on Google Apps

An awesome writeup from Paul Hite on migration considerations for Google Apps:

http://www.paulhite.com/2010/03/reflections-on-google-apps.html


Mar 22 2010

2GB/sec from SSD Raid?

Interesting video regarding SSDs and RAID.  No technical backup data to verify this, but it does seem feasible!

http://goo.gl/f7Of


Mar 15 2010

Checking a linux MD raid array

Sorry for the long delay in posting.  Illness and long work hours prevented much time for this, but I just wanted to offer this little tidbit…

For those of you familiar with Linux, you may be aware that it supports both hardware and software RAID types.  Naturally hardware RAID tends to make better use of the resources available due to things such as bus and CPU offloading, but software RAID typically leaves you with more control should something disastrous happen.

In this little post I’ll go over a quick-and-easy method of verifying the soft-RAID array.  A lot of sysadmins I know will use mdadm to force a rebuild which is…clunky at best.  I believe the example below to be safer.  In my example, my RAID array will be md0.

fs1:/ # cd /sys/block/md0/md

fs1:/sys/block/md0/md # echo check >sync_action
[Wait a few moments]
fs1:/sys/block/md0/md # cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4]
md0 : active raid5 sdc1[0] sde1[3] sdd1[1]
1953503488 blocks super 1.0 level 5, 128k chunk, algorithm 0 [3/3] [UUU]
[>....................]  check =  3.1% (30306176/976751744) finish=283.3min speed=55672K/sec
bitmap: 0/466 pages [0KB], 1024KB chunk
unused devices: <none>

You can check on the /proc/mdstat as often as you like during the consistency check.  The RAID is up and running during all of this and you don’t have the risk of a disk failing while the array is broken [which could happen during the mdadm method].  Not saying that a disk won’t fail, but if it does then at least the RAID is as intact before it failed rather than definitely being broken!
Comments, as always, welcome.