Monday December 17, 2007
All
|
General
Monday December 17, 2007 A Day in the Life of Constantin 2.0
The Web 2.0 hype of the last few years asks the question of "Web 2.0: Waste of time or useful?" But to me it's clear that social websites, blogging and podcasting have changed quite a lot the way I use the web. Here's an exemplary day of my Web 2.0 style life:
Between waking up, getting dressed and driving to work (sometimes I eat breakfast, too), I sync my iPod with my PowerBook so iTunes can fill it with my favourite podcasts. On my 25 minute commute to work, I regularly listen to "Blick über den Tellerrand", "POFACS", "Extremetech.com", "EGM Live" and the "AVForums Podcast" (The current december episode has an interview with Tomlinson Holman of THX fame!). Old school radio hardly plays a role in my car, only when I forgot to bring my iPod, or when the trip is real short. If I have time (as in: long trip, airplane, etc.), I enjoy listening to "Braincast", "Scipod", "Semi-Coherent Computing", "Spektrum Talk", "The Daily Source Code" (although it has a low SNR...) and try out some new ones.
In the office, I sign in to Plazes, XING, Facebook and lately even Twitter, and Dopplr to stay in touch with friends and colleagues. It depends on my current mood whether I type something interesting into the various "What are you doing now?" fields, someone please consolidate all this stuff into a single entry mechanism!
How do these add value to me? The obvious one is that it's now easier to manage contact data with friends and colleagues using XING, LinkedIn or Faceboo. Plazes and Dopplr let you know where people are, facilitating ad-hoc meetings. As work and leisure life styles become more and more global, keeping track of your friends' whereabouts will be more and more useful. If someone robs my house while I'm away, I'll just blame Jörg, or install a wifi camera at home that sends email whenever something moves :). But there's much more to social websites as we'll see blow. Micro-blogging, such as Twitter or to a lesser degree the Facebook status or the Plazes activities are as useless and as indispensable as small-talk is in real life. IM may give us an electronic alternative to 1-to-1 or 1-to-many chatting, but micro-blogging is more like the kind of chat you have with strangers while waiting for the bus or while being at a party, only global and with many more people at once.
During work, I'm currently doing some research on the adoption of blogs and podcasts within the company with Jörg. I also help create the HELDENFunk podcast and sometimes I present on Web 2.0 in general to customers. It's interesting to see the many shades of gray between people that are into blogging, podcasting, social networking etc. and those who are not, multiplied by the permutations of IT-literate people and not, US, German, UK and other nationalities, IT producing companies vs. IT consuming ones, management type positions and individual contributors, friends, relatives etc. Large, if not worlds of varieties in terms of Web 2.0 adoption. But this is only fun, my real work is more centered around IT consulting on CPUs, Systems, Solaris, Grid Computing, Workstations, etc., but I digress.
Between pieces of useful work, I relax my mind by attacking my friends on Facebook with Zombies, Vampires and Werewolves while retaliating their blows with my Slayer. Or I challenge someone to a movie quiz. Or other senseless, but fun stuff. Is this time-wasting 2.0? I'd say this is more like a fun way to say "Hi" to friends over the web or maybe like the quick game of snooker, table-soccer, etc. down the hall. A social, fun way to take a breath in between work.
More work. We're planning to do a new movie, after our "CSI: Munich - Saving the world with ZFS and 12 USB sticks" one was so popular. The thing with user-generated content is that it enables you to reach many, many more people than you would ever be able to present physically in front of. Quite a good thing if you're in any knowledge related business. My typical customer presentation involves 5-15 people about 1-3 times a week with the occasional presentation to an audience of maybe 20-200 about 2-3 times a year. Altogether this is in the order of 1500 people that I can reach with a traditional presentation. Well, our CSI movie has been downloaded more than 50000 times so far. I have to divide this number by 5 or so for the co-authors, but that's still an order of magnitude more people than I could ever present in front of. The HELDENFunk podcasts have accumulated a couple of thousands of downloaded episodes, which again helps me better get my messages through. And my blog has hundreds of hits each day, too. Check out Alec's wonderful video on a very similar matter. And hey, producing podcasts and videos is a lot of fun, too!
On my way back from work, more podcasts are in order. At home, I usually do most of my blog-reading and blog-writing as well as some more Facebook, XING or other Web 2.0 style things.
I hope to write something useful into my blog about once a week. A blog entry consumes about 2-3 hours of work because I try to write longer, more interesting articles with good content. There are of course many other styles of blogging, but I tend to subscribe to the views of this article: "Write articles, not blog postings" that my colleague Roland found somewhere. Blogging saves me quite some time in the end: Some howto-like stuff
that I get asked a lot gets converted into a blog entry and then I can
point people to it instead of explaining things all over again. For reading blogs and other syndicated content, I find Google's reader to be quite useful. The list of blogs I like to follow is more or less what you see to the right in my blogroll. Many useful and intriguing ideas I have found in blogs that I'd never have found elsewhere...
There's still a lot of stuff in Web 2.0 land that I don't do. I'd like to create my own personal podcast, but I'm still missing some time, concept and courage, but who knows. And I'm not convinced that Second Life is useful - yet. It's a great PR outlet for some companies (including us) and virtual worlds are clearly the way of the future. It's just that Second Life is too much, well, kinday version 0.1-ish. It sort of feels like the early days of Real Networks in the early nineties when audio quality sucked due to not enough bandwidth. SL has some serious scaling problems and the user experience is not ready for the masses (which IMHO is a requirement to make any Web 2.0 service useful). But it's clearly a step into the right direction. Check out projects Dark Star and Wonderland if you want to see how scalable 3D worlds look like and how they can add value to real businesses.
Am I a Web 2.0 addict? I don't think so. I try out a lot, but the the stuff that sticks usually is the stuff that adds real value to my work and personal life. The key thing here is to try out new things often, with an open mind, then try to understand what these services really do, and decide for yourself where the value to you lies. And yes, "fun" is a legitimate value, too :).
"A Day in the Life of Constantin 2.0" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-12-17 04:01:32.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
dopplr
facebook
networking
podcasting
social
web2.0
xing
You're welcome to use this Permalink
, add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.
Thursday December 06, 2007 X4500 + Solaris ZFS + iSCSI = Perfect Video Editing Storage
During the last couple of weeks I worked with a customer who bought a Sun Fire X4500 server (you know, Thumper). The plan is to run Solaris ZFS on it, then provide big iSCSI volumes to the video editing systems, which tend to be specialized Windows or Mac OS X machines. Wonderful idea: Just use zpool create to combine a number of disks with some RAID level into a pool, then zfs create -V to create a ZVOL. Thanks to zfs shareiscsi=on, sharing the volume over iSCSI is dead easy.
But it didn't work.
First, Windows wouldn't mount the iSCSI volume. After some trying, we discovered that there must be an upper limit of 2TB to the size of iSCSI volumes that Windows can mount (we initially tried something like 5 ot 10TB). So be it: zfs create -V 2047G videopool/videovolume.
Now it mounted ok, we formatted the disk with NTFS (yuck!) and started the editing system's speed test. Then came the real issue: The test reported a write performance of 8-10 MB/s, but the editing system needs something like 30 MB/s sustained to be able to record reliably!
After some trying, we started the systematic approach:
- A simple
ddfrom one disk to another yielded >39 MB/s. dd'ing from one small ZFS pool to another exceeded 120 MB/s (I later learned thatcpis a better benchmark because it works asynchronously with large chunks of data vs.dd's synchronous block approach), so that was again more than we needed.- We tried re-attaching our ZVOL through
iscsiadmto test the iSCSI stack's performance and ran into a TCP fusion issue. Ok, I've always wanted to play withmdb, so we followed the workaround instructions and we were able to attach our own ZVOL over the loopback interface. Slightly less performance (due to up the stack, down the stack effects, I presume) but still way more than we needed. So, it wasn't the X4500's nor ZFS' fault.
Finally, Danilo pointed me into the right direction: Nagle's algorithm. What usually helps maximize network bandwidth turns out to be a killer for iSCSI performance. For Solaris iSCSI clients, we know this already, but how do we turn off Nagle on Windows?
The answer is deeply buried inside the Microsoft's iSCSI Initiator user guide: The "Addressing Slow Performance with iSCSI Clusters" chapter mentions a similar issue (although they talk about read not write performance) and they do mention RFC 1122's delayed ACK feature, which is related to Nagle's algorithm. The Microsoft document suggests a workaround which involves setting a variable in the registry, so it was worth a try (and my vengeance for having to use mdb before).
And low and behold, the speed test now yielded 90-100 MB/s (Close to a GBE's raw performance)! Yipee that was it! One little registry entry on the client side gave us a 10x improvement in iSCSI performance!
Now, can someone explain to me, why on Windows 2000 you need to set "TcpAckDelTicks=0" while on Windows 2003 the same thing is accomplished by saying "TcpAckFrequency=1" (which is the same thing, only seen from the other side of the division sign)?
So, to all you storage hungry video editors out there: The Sun Fire X4500 with Solaris ZFS and iSCSI is a great solution for reliable, fast, easy to use and inexpensive video storage. You just need to know how to tell your TCP/IP stack to not delay ACKs...
"X4500 + Solaris ZFS + iSCSI = Perfect Video Editing Storage" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-12-06 13:31:53.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
editing
file
iscsi
nagle
opensolaris
performance
registry
solaris
system
tcp/ip
thumper
tuning
video
windows
x4500
zfs
You're welcome to use this Permalink
, add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.
Comments [10]
Wednesday December 05, 2007 OMG: "Hostile" Takeover of www.sun.de
A few hours ago, www.sun.de has been "taken over" by Systemhelden.com.
"Systemheld" in german translates to "system hero" and that's what this community portal is all about. Visitors of the German Sun home page are now being asked to "honor their sysadmin", because "without his unreached knowledge, his daily commitment to his job, his angel-like patience and a mind-expanding amount of coffee consumption, things would go dark pretty soon." (s/his/her/g where appropriate).
Having been a system administrator at my university's computer center in the mid nineties, I know what this means. I administered our university' proxy server in the beginning of the dot-com boom, and I've had my share of typical sysadmin-vs-luser stories :).
Speaking of which, check out the new series of comics that were produced for systemhelden.com. Even if you don't speak german, you'll understand what they mean...
Tomorrow we'll be recording a new episode of the HELDENFunk podcast and we have a couple of cool things lined up, so stay tuned.
"OMG: "Hostile" Takeover of www.sun.de" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-12-05 12:02:36.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
heroes
podcast
system
systemhelden
web2.0
You're welcome to use this Permalink
, add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.
Comments [3]
Saturday December 01, 2007 Project Indiana in the POFACS Podcast
The german "POdcast Für Alternative Computersysteme" (POFACS) has now published their issue #14. This is the third Solaris related issue (and the fourth one featuring a Sun open source project). This time, it's about project Indiana.
Thanks to Mario for choosing me for this interview, I hope I got the basics of Indiana through. We recorded this interview over Skype, but each party recorded their local audio separately to insure good audio quality.
Speaking of recording, check out their issue #13 which is about open source audio recording and production tools.
One question that pops into my head whenever I hear from POFACS is: What is an "alternative" OS? If you look at Desktop OS dominance, then I guess anything that is not Windows is probably a pretty good alternative. I'm particularly pleased that old Commodore 64 related OSes, such as GEOS (POFACS #7) and some Amiga derived OSes (AROS was featured in their episode #12) are alive and kicking.
I guess we're lucky that POFACS isn't looking at the Unix Market where Solaris turns out to be the dominant OS of them all :).
"Project Indiana in the POFACS Podcast" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-12-01 01:53:23.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
german
indiana
opensolaris
podcast
solaris
You're welcome to use this Permalink
, add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.
« Previous month (Oct 2007) | Main | Next month (Dec 2007) »
