We are now booting: Redhat 6.1, Centos 6.0, Ubuntu 11.04, and others (including VMs!) via tiburon. Completely painless for compute and storage nodes. This is letting us get to the next phase: Application Specific Nodes (or “appliances on demand” in more common language). Basic idea is, spend zero … identically zero time on your expensive private/public cluster/cloud/grid/yadda yadda doing an installation. Seriously, you should not be paying cloud providers for this, and if you are, this is a problem.

Have Linux loaded. And windows 7 pro (actually upgraded from the windows 7 home they had). Ok … I like it. It is very fast. About as heavy (maybe a little more so than the Dell). Keyboard is a chicklet style. I’m ok with this, Dell had a more standard type of keyboard. I can touch type on this without problem. If anything, I like it a little better. Graphics are awesome.

Yeah baby! top - 14:55:24 up 2:38, 1 user, load average: 0.13, 0.17, 0.17 Tasks: 697 total, 1 running, 696 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 0.1%us, 0.1%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.8%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Mem: 1009.840G total, 18.159G used, 991.680G free, 0.000k buffers Swap: 0.000k total, 0.000k used, 0.000k free, 148.590M cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ P COMMAND 4455 root 20 0 15532 1720 944 R 1.

Yeah, with all what we have going on, the last thing we need is a clueless company firing a lawyer-bomb across our bow. Remember that life isn’t fair, no time is ever a good time, and sh!t happens. It seems that the whole purpose of their … er … communication … was to try to get us to buy the property rather than taking us to court for rent that is not due them.

In any cancer, it appears the most important thing is to control its growth, arrange for removal, and expedite this process. You don’t want the buggers hanging around for longer than needed. We got our surgery date this past Monday. 1 day after my daughter’s 12th birthday, my wife will undergo the operation. Its the recovery process we are preparing for, though the sheer velocity of this stuff is hitting hard.

My trusty Dell laptop is about to be retired. Been a year and a half overdue. Doug was working hard trying to sell me the benefits of Mac Air (he has the company’s only unit). He also has the Mac mini on his desk. I need a serious graphics card in the laptop. An NVidia card (for the occasional CUDA programming bit, and some things I work on in the background) is preferred.

Its a long story. For those who don’t know, Catalyst is a Perl based web framework. So is Mojolicious. The person who started developing Catalyst years ago, left that group, and started Mojolicious later on. I like many things about Catalyst. Like other MVC frameworks, it lets you divide up your logic between controllers (the heavy lifters), the model (aka the database), and the display logic. Prior to this, I wrote some rather ugly looking code which combined controllers and display logic.

We have a collection of tools that we use for various monitoring. Some are the classical standards (iostat, vmstat, …), the somewhat more heavyweight (collectl, dstat), the simple (not in a bad way) graphical tools (munin, ganglia, …). We’ve found tools like Zabbix do a good job of killing some machines, as there are often memory leaks in these tools. What we’ve not found, anywhere, has been a good set of simple measurement tools that provide data in an easy manner that allow for easy inclusion into something akin to a dashboard.

Haven’t finished debugging this unit yet. Thought you might like to see top info. These are physical CPUs BTW, not SMT. top - 09:21:29 up 3 min, 2 users, load average: 0.22, 0.21, 0.09 Tasks: 219 total, 1 running, 218 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu0 : 0.7%us, 0.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu1 : 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni,100.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu2 : 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni,100.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.