Fred’s Notes

After much speculation, Steve Jobs finally announced the Apple iPad. I love it, but there is one thing missing: no built-in camera. I was expecting to use Skype on the sofa with this nifty device. Should I wait for 2nd generation? Good coverage of the announcement here (Gizmodo).

I’ve been working as a Technical Support Engineer for VMware since July 2009 and my work life is virtualization, storage and solving stuff everyday. I felt the need to document information and new things that I’m learning, so instead of using a notepad, why not put it on a blog? Let’s get virtual with All Things Virtual. Cheers.

Remember this? Now you can send a disk to Amazon and they will put it on S3. Talk about opportunity…

I’m a big fan of WordPress but I still use MovableType for some blogs. Recently I had to upgrade an old MT 3.25 to the newest 4.25 and decided to that cleanly. Created a new blog on 4.25 with all the required configurations. Then I’ve tried to export all the entries on 3.25 and imported everything back on 4.25. Everything went well except for the minor glitch of MT 3.25 doesn’t export the BASENAME information for each entry (that’s useful if you want to preserve the old links). So, here’s what I did. On your old MT 3.25 edit your lib/MT/ImportExport.pm and just add the BASENAME for the template text on the export sub, just before the DATE:

BASENAME: < $MTEntryBasename$>
DATE: < $MTEntryDate format="%m/%d/%Y %I:%M:%S %p"$>

Now, you’ll export a .txt wit all the entries, including the basename. MT 4.x will import this. All you have to do is press the Publish button.

Oracle now owns Sun. And also MySQL.

I always wanted to know more about the customized Google servers. The cool part is that they have implemented a distributed UPS (each server has his own battery and charge controller):

Instead of having a centralized UPS, Google integrated a battery into every server with a charge controller and test circuit. The battery is sealed lead-acid. Basically, it is a car battery. The goal is to keep the server running for “about a minute” until the generator turns on or the A/C power source is switched.

The power supply ONLY provides 12VDC (notice the yellow 12V wires coming out of the power supply), and the power only goes to the motherboard. The motherboard then directly supplies power to the disks (at 5VDC) and no other voltage conversions occur (with the exception of 1.2-1.8V for the processor). As such, the AC feed of either 208VAC or 230VAC flow directly to the server with no UPS in the middle. The battery backup directly supplies 12VDC during power outages, so no more inverters.

The power supply is about 92% efficient according to Google.

The “distributed UPS” solution is estimated by Google to be “99.9%” efficient since there’s no power distribution losses by operating directly at the DC voltage of the server.

Pictures and more info here. A great video (and pics) describing a Google Datacenter (servers, cooling, etc).

Ah pois é Tózé. Não sou nenhum anti-DRM zealot mas desde que ouvi esta alma na Antena3 a dizer que o download “ilegal” de mp3 servia para financiar o crescimento do terrorismo mundial (presumo que para comprar AK-47′s para gajos barbudos no Afeganistão) começo a ter pena de cromos como este que vêm o tapete a ser-lhes puxado e daqui a uns anos ninguém se vai lembrar deles. Não foi por falta de aviso.

There are two things that makes me coming back to Solaris: ZFS and DTrace. Have a look at Fishworks, a dream for every admin out there. Sun’s storage appliance offer is based on this.

But, why on earth would Microsoft want to buy Dell? What is the deal here? According to this article, the idea is to become the Apple of PCs. Is this for real?

Is there a hidden agenda, an underlying reason for this momentous movement? Well, some have suggested that Ballmer and Dell have seen the flaws in their ongoing plans for the traditional hardware and software split. And that the only way to ensure their mutual survival is to reach out and embrace the methods and ideals of their rival in this space, the one who manages to maintain year-on-year growth by the clever provision of a totally unified platform of hardware, OS and world-class applications wrapped together in a singular vision.

Thus, the visionary new name for the combination of Microsoft and Dell that pays homage to their inspiration: welcome to Pair.

Now, I will not laugh about the “Pair” name, but seriously, first it was Yahoo and now Dell? Microsoft has clearly a taste for troubled companies.

This is absolutely amazing. Great idea, GE.

I have a MacBook laptop that I want to backup. What should I do? Normally, I will buy a decent disk (500G or 1T SATA are very affordable these days) and I will normally use something like TimeMachine. Happy, joy. Now, I want more. What if I don’t want to spend more money with a second drive, deal with RAID and choose a storage service “in the cloud” for backing up the backup? What if want to access some files from everywhere? There is Amazon S3 (cheap, copy&forget). There is a lot of services and there is Mozy ($4.95 for unlimited storage). Hmm, I have unmetered ADSL @ home. So I’ve signed up and there we go, started the backup. Of course, my ADSL has 512K of upstream limit. Slow has hell. But I only want 12G “in the cloud”. I’ve waited and it took me more than 1 week to upload all the stuff to Mozy (mostly at night). That’s a pain in the ass. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to guess that what is pulling down the real adoption of online backup services (or storage) for SME’s and home users is the ridiculous upload speeds of most of the broadband pipes over there (I’m not talking about South Korea, Japan or some lucky FTTH beta-testers). But I have an idea. What about Mozy sending me a disk so I can do an initial backup just before sending it back to them? That could speed up things. I could even burn a DVD and send to them (for some initial digital media, for example). Mozy has an option for restoring files. They burn a DVD and send it to you with the files as long as you pay the Fedex bill. What about sending the user a big disk for the initial backup. For a 500G drive sent in the mail, 3 or 4 days for arriving at the datacenter is way faster than an 512k upload. Netflix + backups, anyone?

If you just installed a brand new Ubuntu 8.10 server and tried to run daemontools the Debian Way (apt-get install daemontools daemontools-run), you, just like me, realized that there is no more /etc/inittab. Since Edgy Eft that someone decided that inittab should be deprecated in favor of a thing called Upstart. So, the best you can do is to remove the daemontools-run package:

# apt-get remove daemontools-run

Create a new file on /etc/event.d/svscanboot with:

# svscanboot
#

start on runlevel 2
start on runlevel 3
start on runlevel 4
start on runlevel 5

stop on runlevel 0                                                              

stop on runlevel 1                                                              

stop on runlevel 6

respawn
exec /usr/bin/svscanboot

Create /etc/service directory and start the service with:

# mkdir /etc/service ; initctl start svscanboot

That’s it. You should have svscanboot started, together with svscan and readproctitle.