Ryan Arneson's Weblog

I've published two additional papers to BigAdmin. Similar to the X4500 + EBS/NBU papers posted earlier, these papers show how to use Sun's new JBODs with Solaris/ZFS and Disk Backup.

Check them out

Sun Storage J4400 Array as Disk Storage for Symantec Veritas NetBackup 6.5 Software

Sun Storage J4400 Array as Disk Storage for Sun StorageTek Enterprise Backup Software 7.4

The papers' examples show the 24-disk J4400, but all the theory and operation would apply to the 12-disk J4200 as well. You'd just have half the storage.

Enjoy.

Having grown up middle-class in North Dakota and having lived the typical teenager/college student life of cheap beer (and other substances), I never really gave wine much thought. Coors Light was considered "fancy beer" in my crowd. Recently though, I've been really getting into wine tasting. Right now, Pinot Noir seems to be the wine of choice for my palatte, but I'm open to all sorts.

My wife and I are planning to take a trip to Napa/Sonoma sometime this fall and are interested in maximizing our time touring wineries. Anyone out there have any suggestions? Must Sees? (Must avoids?) Any tips on getting around? Any and all suggestions welcome.

On a meta note, I do hope to post to this blog more than every 3-4 months.

To the person who commented in the "Sometimes I dream.." post below, the quote is from the MJ's Gatorade Commercial.

Sometimes I dream, that he is me You've got to see that's how I dream to be I dream I move, I dream I groove Like Mike If I could Be Like Mike Like Mike Oh, if I could Be Like Mike Be Like Mike, Be Like Mike Again I try Just need to fly For just one day if I could Be that way I dream I move I dream I groove Like Mike If I could Be Like Mike I wanna be, I wanna be Like Mike Oh, if I could Be Like Mike That's poetry man, poetry.

I picked up the Ultimate Jordan 20th Anniversary Collector's Edition DVD today. It's 3 double-sided DVDs featuring NBA basketball superstar Michael Jordan, that bring together all of his previously released VHS tapes, plus some bonus footage.

• Come Fly with Me (1989)
• Michael Jordan's Playground (1993)
• Air Time (1993)
• Above and Beyond (1996)
• His Airness (1999)

But what really makes this DVD set stand out is what is on discs 2 & 3 for this re-release version. You get 5 complete NBA games showcasing MJ at his best. His 63-point effort against the Boston Celtics in 1986. His 69-point game against the Cleveland Cavaliers (who else?) in 1990. The 55-points in Game 4 of the NBA Finals against Phoenix in 1993. The 38-point "flu" game against Utah in the 1997 NBA Finals and finally Game 6 of the 1998 NBA Finals, his last game as a Chicago Bull. These are complete games, not highlight reels, the only cuts are the commercials.

I've finished watching the Celtics game where he dropped in 63 in Double OT (only to lose) and am about halfway through the Cavs game and I'm loving every minute of it. Confession time, I have every Chicago Bull NBA Final game on VHS tape. 1991 versus the Lakers, 1992 versus the Trailblazers, 1993 versus the Suns. I have the ECF games versus the Knicks in 1994. I'm missing Jordon's comeback game in 1995 (but I specificallly bought the group Live's album Throwing Copper for the "Lightning Crashes" track, it was the theme music NBC played during the game intro), but I'm still hunting. I've got the great 1996 season cap against the Sonics and the 1997 and 1998 battles against the Jazz. Scattered through there I have various other playoff games as well. The 4 game sweep against the Shaq and the Magic, the battles against the Knicks and some against the Heat. As you can see, it is something of a sickness..as my wife reminds me everytime I scream when she suggests we throw out some of those old tapes. Humph! What does she know?

Anyway, if you're a fan of Number 23, I suggest you run, don't walk mind you, run, and get this DVD set.

I just saw a post on the internal Mac alias that mentioned the ecto blogging tool . I was in the market for such a tool so I downloaded it and after a few configuration missteps, here I am. Looks fairly promising for a non-power blogger like myself. *Update* Just noticed that even though my Textism markup worked in the ecto preview, it wasn't honored here on the site. I had to fix it manually. I'll work on figuring that out in a bit. *Update2* I think what happened is that I overrode the Textile Plugin setting in my preferences by mistake. Let's try a link to "Textile":http://textism.com/tools/textile to verify.

Since the dear wife is out of town for a few days, I'd thought I'd take the bike into the office and get some odds and ends done. It's only a 8 mile ride to the campus here in Broomfield from my place in northeast Westminster. My shortcut takes me west along Midway Blvd. until about the Hunter Douglas buildings. From there, I take a dirt path over the railroad tracks, under US 36, into the Interlocken Office Park and on to the Sun Campus. Those of you in the Denver area know that we've gotten a lot of snow and rain the last few days so there was a chance for mud, however as far as I could recall the dirt track was actually mostly sand and gravel. Overall, I felt fairly safe in taking that route. Again, as far as I recall, sand and gravel.

I recalled wrong. It was wet sticky clay. About 200 yards of it down a steep hill to the railroad tracks and then back up the gully to the pavement. So here I sit in my office, covered in mud, my bike, sitting in the bike lockers outside, is weighed down by about 10 pounds of clay. Good thing it's Saturday. Should be a lovely ride home

On to the obligatory introductions! I'm a Test drone from sector 7G in the Network Storage division here in Broomfield, Colorado. I mostly dream up ways of acting like a customer and then break stuff accordingly, in the hopes of getting problems noticed before they hit customers. My focus is more on Customer Emulation of workloads than your normal Functional or System Test.

Right now, I'm mainly focused on incorporating Oracle RAC with various bits and pieces of Network Storage products, the QFS filesystem software in particular. I'll post various tidbits of interest as I go along.

A quick caveat though, I have no responsibility for any official qualifications at the moment, QFS, Oracle, Cluster or otherwise, so don't take any particular configuration you may see here as being officially being supported by Sun or Oracle. Check with the "Official Docs"(tm) at all times.