Tag Archives: linux

Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS released | The Fridge

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Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS released | The Fridge.

This is pretty cool. I know as a system administrator, I never wanted to run .0 anything. So 10.04 is really like 10.04.0, and means “let somebodye lse find the bugs.”.

Well 10.04.1 means that the more conservative administrators can at least have a reasonable expectation that it will be even more stable than it was on release day in April.

If you’re already running Ubuntu servers, btw, check this out:

http://maps.ubuntu.com

Hit it and be counted as a server user. Pretty amazing how many little orange circles there are all over the world.

For those of you who’ve been telling me that my blog posts sound like “gleep ork boog florg”, a quick primer:

Ubuntu is an operating system, like Mac OS X or Windows (except more awesomer).

10.04 was their April, 2010 release (10 == 2010 04 == april).

LTS means Long Term Support. This means that the people who maintain Ubuntu will support this release for 3 – 5 years (depending on the context.. 3 for desktops, 5 for servers).

10.04.1 is a fixed up release, mainly marking the release of updated CD images for installing. If you install 10.04 and choose automatic updates, you’re already on 10.04.1 before the release.

The lost joy of LEDs

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Today I realized that a quest I set out on long ago was achieved, and I don’t know how happy I am about it. As I look around my house, I see but one laptop running. The wife has a little Netbook, and you might count the Wii or evne the AT&T U-Verse cable boxes as computers, but when it comes down to it, the only thing I need is my 15″ laptop.

Back when I got into computers, I was cobbling together every little piece of funky hardware I could to build a pseudo-production network inside my house. I had an old AMD 5×86-133 based box that served as my firewall and router. I had a little AMD 900 with redundant cheap IDE disks that was my server. I ran Debian GNU/Linux on them because thats what all the smartest people I knew recommended, and it was incredible because it let me do everything I wanted to do my way, without making me do anything to get it working. Even though I had just a 56kbit modem connection, I used squid and heavy tuning to make it the best web browsing experience possible.. for.. me.

Oh sure, at work I had servers to play with and I definitely enjoyed work. But the autonomy of doing this my way, and learning new things, was what really made it a passion.

One of the most amazing things that came out of that exercise was the realization that while I had the most amazing modem based home network ever, I wasn’t always aware of what was going on. Sometimes I’d wonder, what the heck is going on? Continue reading →

MemcacheDB fault tolerance procedures

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It semeed so simple, just setup two memcachedb instances and point them at eachother. Instant fault tolerance, Right? If only it were so simple!

Its not entirely clear from the documentation how to setup memcachedb for fault tolerance. Here’s the procedures I’ve found useful.
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Query Cache defeats Serverzilla

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So a few days ago, my big mean MySQL server started having problems that were very hard to explain. It was slowing down, taking a minute to run queries that usually take a few seconds, and Linux load averages were in the teens, despite having quiet disks (less than 0.1% cpu IO wait time) and plenty of RAM (128G for about 200G of data total…).

The developers were stumped. The other systems guys were stumped. So was I. But it still seemed ok. We found all sorts of things to point fingers at, but nothing made sense.
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OpenOffice’s achilles heel

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Anybody who is in IT in America, has probably experienced that sinking feeling when somebody somehow introduces the latest version of Microsoft Office into their organization. It usually comes in like some corporate ninja while you’re not looking. Whether its an application that your accounting department writes with the new version of Access, or that Outlook plugin that somebody locked in to, you have to deal with it.

The most frustrating part of this for me is never that people are going to use Office. Its not a bad product. Whats frustrating, is that every 3 or 4 years, Microsoft somehow gets people to pay $300-$400 per user. Continue reading →

The Thread_Concurrency myth

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Just a few weeks ago, I found out that thread_concurrency’s purported magical effects at correcting MySQL’s concurrency limitations (especially in 4.1) were something of a myth. It was a post on mysql’s lists that alerted me to this. Apparently it only works on Solaris, Linux’s threading library ignores this parameter completely. This is not to be confused with innodb_thread_concurrency, which is quite useful in controlling the flow of transactions through InnoDB. I think the problem really lies in the fact that the default my.cnf example configs tell us to set thread_concurrency to the number of CPU’s*2. They fail to mention that this only matters on Solaris, though the manual is quite clear.
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