1. Apple Is Killing Off the Optical Drive Just Like the Floppy Disk

    Sat 23 October 2010

    With the release of the new MacBook Air we are one step closer to killing off the cd-rom and the dvd. As with the previous MacBook Air, this device has no optical drive. And that is a good thing. People do not need an optical drive. You have the network and you have USB disks. They are faster, more reliable and have more capacity.

    I may expect that in the upcoming years this trend may continue with the other laptops. Just as Apple killed the floppy disk, it is killing the optical drive, one step at a time. I'd rather have a smaller and lighter laptop or more disk or battery capacity, than an optical drive. So I hope this is a trend that will continue and all other manufacturers will follow.

    Tagged as : Uncategorized
  2. Linux Software RAID Benchmarking Script

    Wed 29 September 2010

    Just a small post.

    To benchmark your Linux software RAID array as setup with MDADM, please use my new benchmark script. I used this script to create these results.

    You may need to configure some values within the header of this file to make it fit your enviroment.

     DEVICES="/dev/sd[a-f]"
     NO_OF_DEVICES=6
     ARRAY=/dev/md5
     CHUNKS="4 8 16 32 64 128 256 512 1024"
     MOUNT=/storage
     LOG=/var/log/raid-test.log
     LOGDEBUG=/var/log/raid-test-debug.log
     LEVEL="0 5 6 10"
     TESTFILE=$MOUNT/test.bin
     TESTFILESIZE=10000 (IN MB, thus this is 10 GB)
     TRIES=5 (how many times to run a benchmark.)
    

    By default, the script wil format the array using XFS, feel free to format it with another filesystem such as EXT4 or EXT3 or whatever you want to test.

    Tagged as : Uncategorized
  3. Debian Lenny and Dell R410 Network Card Not Supported

    Fri 20 August 2010

    For those who are running Debian Lenny and want to order the new Dell R410 server, beware!

    There is no safe solution to get Debian Lenny working with the on-board Broadcom network cards. A fairly recent kernel is required. Basically, you will have to install back-ported kernels, more recent modules and thus must violate the reasons why you were running Debian Lenny in the first place.

    There is one solution, although it may not be an option: run VMware on the hardware and run Debian Lenny in a virtual machine. I think that in most cases, this will be sufficient for many cases and it has all the benefits of virtualisation and the stability of Debian Lenny.

    It is unfortunate that Broadcom or Dell do not support Debian.

    If you do have an easy and quite safe solution to get the Broadcom network cards working with Debian Lenny, please drop a note.

    Beware though: the H200 and H700 RAID controllers are also not supported by Debian Lenny.

    dell-s300-h200-and.html

    Tagged as : Uncategorized

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