Some interesting tidbits ...

A server reliability report is out, comparing OSes and machines. Had a few surprises in it. They did note that Redhat and others had good uptime.

[spam@scalableinformatics.com:~]
1 >uptime
 11:43:37 up 462 days, 21:23, 11 users,  load average: 0.25, 0.20, 0.31
[spam@scalableinformatics.com:~]
2 >cat /etc/redhat-release
CentOS release 4.3 (Final)

that email is a real email address, and yes, if a spammer sends to it, our spam filtering will get better …

Hmmm…. Last downtime was due to an errant yum run, which invoked OOM, and went all wild west on me. There are a few folks who think that OOM is safe, it isnt. Sort of like having an unpredictable uncle in the house, with weapons and a trigger. Don’t go past that trigger and all is well. Then I also saw last week, the Collaboration summit kicked off, with some positively amazing data.

Read that bold-faced line again, for good measure. The paper IDC references is here. The day job’s high performance storage platform, JackRabbit, runs often as a Linux machine or cluster (though can do others if requested). This is a segment of the market that, if we believe these numbers, should be growing by about a factor of 2 in 5 years. Wow.