Archive for May, 2010
The desktop I would buy today
by specialj on May.08, 2010, under Hardware
While choosing an SSD may be difficult at the moment, other components for a solid workstation are not. Here’s what I’ve been looking at for the past few months:
Getting more entropy for virtual servers
by specialj on May.04, 2010, under Uncategorized
It is not uncommon for people to have performance problems with the their virtual servers and chalk it up to virtualization as the problem instead of insufficient entropy. Running a mail server or SSL web server are particularly vulnerable to virtual servers without much entropy. I have noticed that my virtual servers have had a lot less entropy in the past 6 months or so. I decided to revisit what simple and effective solutions exist to solve this problem.
My kingdom for the perfect Linux filesystem
by specialj on May.04, 2010, under Sysadmin
It is extremely difficult to keep up with all the filesystems being developed for Linux these days. Clearly, so much activity represents an understanding that the current filesystems do not address the needs of users. However, as is all too often the case, development is extremely fragmented with very small groups each trying to build the 1 true filesystem and thus each effort taking longer than a collaborative project.
What I want from a filesystem: snapshots, replication (local, aka RAID and network), checksums (at least optionally), compression (at least optionally), and some basic intelligence such as when a checksum fails and replication is used to get the data from another replica. Yes, fast error recovery and good performance are important too.
