Older blog entries for huge (starting at number 8)

My tests are almost finished, I will polish the report tomorrow, and I need to make the conclusions. There is a few things to know to use efficiently the filer, so I will add it. And I will have the opportunity to see some people from NetApp in Paris, they've got a demo lab.

Ok, just a little update :

1. the URL of the report is now http://xenon.medisite.net:8080/huge/report.html
2. one guy from the VAR which sells us our servers came this morning and helped me tuning the NetApp. It seems that there is a few tricks to know.
3. our switch *have* the trunking feature, which is cool :-) I just need to activate that on the switch and to configure the Quad Ethernet NIC on the filer.

Ok, one thing I remembered after posting my entry yesterday :

- In fact I was running *2* bonnie on the filer, the first on /vol/vol1 and the other on /vol/vol2, so the 2900 K/sec on per char / Sequential Output is just wrong. Quickly, I think I had to double that number. In fact, just forgot these

Here is the method I will use :

My test host (xenon) will be on a 10/100 switch (DLINK 3216) with the filer (using the built-in NIC). There is also 5 or 6 servers on the switch but I don't think it will interact. I will mount the filer /vol/vol1 with NFS (v2) and do a bonnie -2000 (not -1000 cause the filer is a 512 MB one). This first test will test the HD stuff and the network stuff of the filer, but I think the bottleneck is the network between my host and the filer. Yesterday I got 3/5 MB / sec traffic, it seems that bonnie generate a lot of traffic, maybe it is the data to be written in the file. I will look at the source later.

To test only the HD stuff, I think I will create a 10/20 GB file on one volume and mv it onto the other. I hope there will be the least possible networking stuff involved in this second test to stress the HD.

I also updated the report to add a SCSI 2 HD I have at home and a IDE HD.

And it seems that my lwm screenshot was a lot more popular than the bonnie report :

9:56 [huge:pts/2] xenon ~% grep screenshot.png /var/log/apache/access.log | wc -l
     26
9:56 [huge:pts/2] xenon ~% grep report /var/log/apache/access.log | wc -l
     3

I got my potato CDs Saturday and I installed the beast yesterday at home, no surprise, it is Debian. I'm running a woody at work, thanks to the large bandwith but at home I just have a little cnx, only IRC, little dls and a little web surfing. It will be cool to have a tested platform so I can work without do software install and worrying about that. I plan to test GTK developpment, GNOME libs and XML stuff, I have some ideas in mind so I will play with that. Unfortunaly, I don't have the source CDs but I can buy them at Ikarios and I will.

I also switched on lwm, E annoyed me. lwm is cool, although I made some "configuration" : put the cursor in black instead of red, the borders are 6 pixels wide, I use helvetica, I set the DEFAULT_TERMINAL to "term-custom" which is a alias on 'xterm -bg grey -fg black' so I can change that easily, and I swapped button 1 and 2 on the mouse. I also removed the "hostname:" in the title of the windows. The lack of "Alt-Tab" combo annoy me cause I must use the mouse to change windows and the lack of virtual desktops also. I will see if I can hack this one easily from wm2 and for the "Alt-Tab", it will be harder cause I never do X coding.

This afternoon, I tested our demo NetApp, I will put some results online when finished. I had some trouble cause the bottleneck is IMO the network system, not the disks system. There is the built-in 10/100 NIC and a Quad 10/100 NIC which support trunking or fail over. So a 4 * 100 Mbits virtual interface would be cool if we had a switch which support trunking. And we don't have one. The test procedure is : NFS mount, bonnie -s 1000 and look at results. I will say more on this tomorrow.

You will find the preliminary report here. There is also a screenshot of my lwm desktop.

I didn't put the NetApp benchmark but I had 2900 K/sec versus 5017 K/sec for my box. As sh pointed to me, "it sucks". But I will redo the test tomorrow.

I'm currently writing this at work, in the NOC, because the office smells, there is people putting some stuff on the roof to protect against the rain. So I decided to emigrate near our servers and telco equipments. There is a console with a screen, keyboard and mouse to ... manage our NT internal server. So I take thatand put it on one Linux box, then ssh on my workstation to work. I'm hacking some Perl stuff, must be finished tonight. Fortunely, I've got my MD recorder with me so the noise is not a problem. And I am behind 3 19'' racks, so there is nobody to annoy me : "hey, you must do that and that for yesterday !".

I tried yesterday to buy Sona Fariq at the "FNAC", sort of music' Wall Mart in France, they don't know anything about this band, so I will have to relaunch my "gnapster" ...

I also registered myself to make a presentation about Cocoon in Paris with Parinux, a Paris LUG, I don't know if it will be accepted nor if it will be good, but hey, I can try :) stefano, if you've got slides about that, it would be cool to send me :) I plan to present XML (basic knowledge), Cocoon, XSP, EJB and a live web site built with Cocoon and EJBs ...

I'm happy to be the first to certify stefano. He is the leader of the Cocoon Project. Stefano, you might want to add a project entry in Advogato. I would like to put you as Journeyer, but I will do it later, when enough people certify you :)

I'm fine, cool :) But, I wiil have to return to work tomorrow, not so cool :(

I'm better than yesterday.

I think tomorow will be the end of the pain :) But it was 1 week long, too long.

Not a lot of things to say. I'm going to read my Sterling book in my bed. Will be cool I hope.

Salut les gens !

Ok. First entry.

I am ill, tired, I've got a headache and my English sucks.

Here we go.

I just began "Islands in the net" from Bruce Sterling yesterday. Pretty cool, readable, not like William Gibson whose books IMHO sucks.

But, for the little I read, it seems to me that Sterling is a little too optimistic; this is first impression, so I might change. This week-end, I also read "Animal Farm" from George Orwell, which is a little book, this is a "metaphore" about a democracy turning into a dictatorship. Go read it.

My TOREAD list is like that : the 2nd book from Bret Easton Ellis, Huntington's "The Clash of civilizations", Tom Wolfe's "The right stuff", Orwell "1984", Stephenson's "Snow Crash", Meyer Levin's "Compulsion" and a book about Turing. And also "Amber" from Zelazny, too much time since I read it. And in IT books, I have "Java and XML" and "Java Servlet programming" from ORA and "The annotated XML Specification". More on this soon.

The weather is fine in Paris this afternoon, too warm, cause I am ill and I hate the heat when I am tired. Life sux. Cause I saw a groovy band called Sona Fariq live at the TV this week-end, and can't go out and buy the CD :( And not enough BW to wait with Napster.

And I can't play Quake III anymore for the moment, it just gives me more headaches.

In two days, I will be fine, I hope.

Ok, I'm tired, EOT