I'm no wizard and just used that for a title as a poor attempt at being clever. But a real "wizard" just joined the blogosphere. His name is Neil Wilson and his cn=directory manager blog is definitely something you will want to check out. Neil is the author of SLAMD, the network load generation test tool that I think everybody in the world is using. If you haven't checked it out, you should. Neil and I worked together back at Caterpillar when he was just starting to learn about directory server and LDAP. When it comes to directory, Linux, Solaris or just anything you need a smart person's opinion on, Neil is the man.

Neil recently wrote a slick GUI (very out of character for someone we could just call Mr. CLI) for the benchmark showing how the new Sun Fire T2000 blew away the Dell PowerEdge 6850. Our directory server is the perfect application to showcase the single UltraSPARC T1 chip with up to 8 cores, each supporting up to 4 threads. It was interesting that the Sun Fire performed 250K authentications in 31.66 seconds compared to the PowerEdge's 83.93 seconds for the same number. But that wasn't the best part, which I'll share when I post a flash demo of what happened later this week.

No one asked where I went, but just in case you were wondering, I really did fall off the planet. Trust me, you do not want to go there. I can't even remember all the details, but it was on a return flight from Austin, somewhere over Missouri. All those years of agreeing with them about "Show Me" and they did. Anyway, I found my way back in a way that would have made MacGyver proud. Just in time so I can blog about some pretty interesting things that are happening.