Random thoughts, observations, and comments. I'm not creative, so deal with it.
Phillip Wagstrom's WeblogHere's an absolutely wonderful site. http://www.jibjab.com
You'll like it if you're a "liberal sissie" or a "right wing nut job" (to borrow from the site's song.)
Unfortunately, it appears that some people fail to see the humor in the site and think that its damaged the meaning of the song.
Is there no hope for some people?
Here we are now at the end of July. This month has completely flown by. Along with that flying, it seems that the wind blew things around quite a bit too.
Starting out, my youngest brother got married. It was a nice ceremony and my wife and I had a great time down there. I'm not going to say it was a wonderful ceremony though. I'm still a bit upset about him deciding to get married in Texas... In July... at 4pm in the afternoon... and making me wear a tux. He should remember that we're from the frozen tundra and not used to heat.
I spent a week out in San Diego (La Jolla actually) out at Hitachi Data Systems taking some training on their NAS blade. As you may or may not know, Sun resells/OEM's HDS's 9910/9960 and 9970/9980 arrays. The NAS blade basically acts like a CHA and provides gigabit ethernet instead of fibre-channel out to NFS/CIFS clients. Its a pretty slick implementation.
While in San Diego I got to see both the USS Nimitz as well as the USS Ronald Reagan in port. The Reagan came in the day that I was leaving. I didn't get to see it steam in, but I did get some good pictures of both of them.
Okay, so why the "Sill Here..." title? Its the end of the month... so what? Well, the reason its "Still Here..." is that I'm still here!
Sun had a pretty significant RIF (Reduction in Force, aka Layoffs) this past week within Enterprise Services. A chunk of it was restructuring and pulling out a layer of management (this is a good thing). There were also some good people that were let go. Some services were changed and altered as well. I don't really expect to see any drops in service for our customers.
Along with the changes in structure, I got a promotion. Though its not really a promotion, more of a name shift. My title now is Area SSE, instead of Regional SSE. The change was due to the elimination of the Regions and having one big area. It shouldn't affect my day to day job at all. Stuff still breaks and I'm still there to fix it.
Okay, as I mentioned before, I would come back to Jimmy Buffett's Licese to Chill album with what I think about it.
This one is a hit to. Well, its a hit if you are a Parrothead. Of course its got more than a few Country singers. Or are they Western singers? Anyways...
The first track, "Hey Good Looking" is a bit of annoying. Not that its a bad track, I just don't like the vocals switching from one person to another every verse.
My favorite tracks have to be "Piece of Work" with Toby Kieth. This is probably because I like Kieth's attitude. Also along with that "Boats to Build" with Alan Jackson is another good one. "Boats to Build" suits me just because it says, "You do your thing, I'll do mine." At least that's what it means to me.
"Scarlet Begonia's" for some reason sitcks in my head too. Its just got a good beat to it.
"Simply Complicated" is pretty funny if you listen to it. I get a kick out of the line that you mom tells you that "you and your wife of ten years might just be related." Life isn't hard, its just simply complicated.
This album will be on the playlist for quite a while.
Picked up a new CD today. Jimmy Buffett's new album. Its called License to Chill.
My first impression, stemming from the big FBI warning on the back and the "FBI Anti-Piracy Warning: Unauthorized copying is punishable under federal law" written on the CD itself in nice big letter was "Gee, the RIAA has been busy" and "Is this going to rip corrected to iTunes." and "Why don't we just assume that everyone is a criminal to start out with?" (I should be note that I don't download music. I just buy CD's, rip them to mp3 and play them on my RioVolt or via iTunes)
My second impression was that there are a lot of people playing on this Album with Jimmy. I wonder if this has anything to do with the success of "Its Five O'Clock Somewhere" with Alan Jackson? Anyways, He's got Toby Kieth, Clint Black, Alan Jackson, George Strait, Martina McBride, Bill Withers and Nanci Griffith contributing. Jimmy's comment in the liner is that cowboys and country singers seem to be spending more time at the beach lately. Why not?
Seems like a pretty good album one time through (though I kept on getting interrupted while listening to it.) It'll take me a couple of days to form a good opinion.
Its the 4th of July weekend finally. This will be the first time since I've been with Sun that I've actually taken it off. Up until the last 3 or 4 years, we were running will full staff in Service over the week of the 4th. Recently, apparently due to some accounting discount/writeoff we can take by forcing people to use vacation time (There are a LOT of Sun people that never take vacation) Sun started to shutdown over the 4th of July.
I always opted to work because 1) I hate dealing with the crowds on the 4th and 2) I take a 2 week vacation towards the end of August that usually had me wind up in Glacier National Park and one sometime earlier in the year to Las Vegas.
This year is different. My youngest brother is getting married. Poor guy. Of course his wedding is in Texas... In Texas in July. Its gonna be hot out.
We'll see how that goes. It looks like I'm going to have to come up with some ideas for some form of a bachelor party. His Best Man isn't flying in until late on the night before the wedding and I don't think that anyone else is coming up with anything. This could be especially challenging as I've been told that the county that Austin is in is dry! (aka. Nothing stronger than soda pop!)
More when I get back.
On a side note, my cars fixed. Just need to go pick it up now.
So I figure that I might start to ramble about the things that I see causing the most problems for admins.
I'm simply amazed at how many things in Solaris that I think are pretty obvious and have been around for a while that aren't used.
UFS Logging being the least of them.
UFS logging has been around since Solaris 7. Considering that Solaris 7 has been out since pre-2000 days and that there aren't lots of people that still use Solaris 2.6, you'd figure that we'd have these kind of features set on all of the systems out there.
Nope.
So what is logging? From the mount_ufs man page:
logging | nologging
If logging is specified, then logging is
enabled for the duration of the mounted
file system. Logging is the process of
storing transactions (changes that make up
a complete UFS operation) in a log before
the transactions are applied to the file
system. Once a transaction is stored, the
transaction can be applied to the file sys-
tem later. This prevents file systems from
becoming inconsistent, therefore eliminate-
ing the need to run fsck. And, because
fsck can be bypassed, logging reduces the
time required to reboot a system if it
crashes, or after an unclean halt.
The default behavior is nologging for file
systems less than 1 terabyte. The default
behavior is logging for file systems greater
than 1 terabyte and for file systems
created with the -T option of the newfs
command or the mtb=y option to the mkfs_ufs
command.
The log is allocated from free blocks on
the file system, and is sized approximately
1 Mbyte per 1 Gbyte of file system, up to a
maximum of 64 Mbytes. Logging can be
enabled on any UFS, including root (/). The
log created by UFS logging is continually
flushed as it fills up. The log is totally
flushed when the file system is unmounted
or as a result of the lockfs -f command.
Clear as mud, right? Lets put it in simpler terms. If the system crashes, and you have logging on, you don't need to fsck the entire filesystem. All you need to do is look at the log. The log will tell you what was being changed from a filesystem metadata perspective (there is no way to guarantee the actual data was written completely, you'd need a different type of filesystem to do that.) This makes your fsck take seconds instead of minutes (or hours for really big filesystems).
This is even more important in that Solaris fsck will stop and await input if it finds an inconsistency in the filesystem that would cause data to be changed or files to be removed. So your big, busy E25K crashes due to something (bad driver, hardware problem, vodoo) you're going to possible have lots of temporary files around. As the fsck might encounter them and determine that the way to make the filesystem consistent is to remove them. So it sits an prompts the user. As this is done before the filesystem is mounted you're sitting there with your E25k in single user mode waiting for input while your business is at a standstill. Not good.
Enabling logging is simple. Just add "logging" to the /etc/vfstab for the options field of the filesystem that you want. All ufs filesystems can do this.
What about performance?
From everything I've read, all of the old performance bugs for UFS logging have long since been fixed. Performance should be the same or better with logging turned on.
With Solaris 10, logging will be the default.