Partner wants a 4 way bond on their unit. No problem. [root@jr4-1 ~]# /opt/scalable/sbin/mkchbond.pl --bond=bond0 --eth=eth0,eth1,eth2,eth3 --ip=10.100.243.80 --netmask=255.255.0.0 --mode=0 --write mkchbond.pl: v0.9 Create channel bonds easily by Joe Landman (http://scalableinformatics.com) This software is Copyright (c) 2005-2007 by Scalable Informatics and licensed under GPL v2.0 only. You may freely distribute this software under the terms and conditions of the GPL 2.0 license. You may not alter, remove, or prevent printing of the copyright notice and information.

Several years ago, we had an academic customer literally steal our time, our effort, our design, etc. for their system. The signals were there, and we didn’t pay attention to them. Something like that happened again, though this time we recognized it. Customer still is operating off the assumption that they got something for nothing, but … well … when they put their system together, discover that it doesn’t work, I expect a few probing emails.

This is about the business side, and AMEX in particular. A customer bought something. Paid for it on AMEX. We use Authorize.Net, as do many people. It handles the card processing for us. Makes our life easy. But it doesn’t do AMEX directly, AMEX does AMEX. And they don’t play well with Authorize.Net. So now we are in the position of having to decline this AMEX transaction, and remove AMEX from our accepted card list, because AMEX is more interested in wasting my time and erecting barriers to doing business, than actually doing business.

Over at Enterprise Storage Forum, Henry Newman and Jeff Layton started a conversation that needs to be shared. This is a very good article. In it, they reproduced a table comparing file systems coming from this page at Redhat. This is really showing a comparison of what the “limits” are in a theoretical or practical sense between the various versions of RHEL platforms. The file system table compares what you can do in each version.

ok, some of these are riffs on our older things, but they are very exciting to everyone we speak with. Need a chassis mod for one of them. The other is … well … an extension of an earlier idea. Been doing some testing with it, and its working out far better than I had thought. Sorry for being so vague. I don’t want to let these cats out of the bag … yet икони

Good version of busy; lots of quotes, orders, builds, …. A new market has emerged for us, one I wasn’t sure how to break into, that looks like it is going to do good things for us. Entrenched expensive and slow competitor, everyone looking for better systems. Should be interesting coupla months. I hope I get time for a vacation in there somewhere.

Wow … uploaded a presentation I was working on for a customer and it worked well. Rendered everything correctly (OpenOffice doesn’t always do that). Anyone else using Google Docs on a more or less professional/constant basis? Any outage issues? Compatibility issues? I like OpenOffice, but its occasional glitches and … er … interpretive re-renderings of Powerpoints are … er … amusing. The downside to Google docs are storage offsite, privacy/security issues, and access in the event of a network outage.

See here . money quote My gosh … a follow the money mystery? Who woulda thunk it? At any rate, its good to see people resume the healthy skepticism that is needed for real scientific inquiry and advancement. Science is never settled, and anyone telling you otherwise is trying to sell you something. Sure enough, some of those doing the selling have a strong economic incentive for doing so. Go figure.

This is interesting. SANdisk now has an enterprise play. Flash is getting more interesting. Basically creating the same sort of sea change in storage that GPUs created in computing.

We have a nice pair of Qlogic 7220 DDR HCAs in house. Direct connecting a pair of machines for a simple point to point bit. Using our updated 2.6.32.39.scalable kernel. Want to set up SRP target. So we have to get OFED compiled. Need 1.5.3+ due to their … er … issues tracking kernels. Basically the OFED build process is an abuse … a very severe one … of the RPM process.