For the rest of us. Facebook (who cares), Twitter and Youtube are still blocked and flickr is as usual suffering from split pers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZTxY2mojCs

Well I fired up a new tab in my always open terminal and hilarity ensued. I could not work it out. I thought at first that maybe this text response that I got was to stop the registrar being hassled with google problems.

No.

Turns out that the OSX whois command likes to do a bit of regular expression matching on my behalf.

Try it yourself….

Terminal > Whois google.com > Enter > Laugh

Well apart from some systems using GiB and others GB and then some manufacturers using base10 and not base3 and saying that 1GB is 1000MB and not 1024 – I have found another one.

When making a file system that is not your root file system (/) or var (/var) or root (/root), etc – say a second drive or partition used for something else, try to format with the “-m 0″ command so that 5% is not reserved for the root user.

On a 1024GB array – say 1TB – that is a whopping ~52GB!!

Also if you will have many files in said system, also throw in the “-O dir_index” flag too, to enable hash tree’s for directory look ups – =big= speed increase.

I always try to get the best prices within the scope of common sense for clients. Mainly because as a integrated stack vendor, the pricing on one component can blow out the total price of the whole stack. And hardware is the first place to start (given an understanding of the management systems and risk credentials of the project at hand already).

One thorn in my side is mandated “Installation and Configuration” charges. Which are basically extortion attempts.

On the one hand no tech from SUN or IBM from their mainframe/mini computer division is going to know or be able to setup all variables in our system as we need – and as we will do over a long period of time – IE: the process of “Configuration” is Iterative and not finite to one small window of time. :-\

And going back to that whole vertical stack business. Why should a client pay a hardware vendor for support and then pay the integrator for support? These built in service charges make it harder for us to win business and sell anything as we have to protect ourselves as we will be doing the support – and that usually means that the client pays twice!

As much as these hardware firms like to chase the integrators and system builders as a great “Channel” to their products buyers in the market place. Mandatory setup and Configuration fees (Yes they apparently are mutually exclusive in charging if not in the vernacular of the Queen’s English!) are a great way of say “Up Yours” to said channel partners/integrators.

It is not yet clear who will get the Gold Medal – but the race is very competitive!

:-\

In any case, the short of it is, that we were juggling PERC4 cards around servers (PCI-X here, PCIe there..) and also complete raid 1 and raid 10 arrays too. The cards are supposed to “detect” the correct array type from the drives if the firmware was missing. Anyway, through a comedy of errors, it worked exactly 1/3 times. The other times we had to remember the exact settings of our arrays (stripe, etc) and how it was structured. So we could clear PERC cards and then recreate the arrays – taking special care to not initalise the new arrays.

So in the end, you can move arrays and channels about. And with LVM, even designations like /sda /sdb reording is also not an issue. However you should rely on good old fashioned hand held way of doing things. Before you start write down all the salient details of your arrays first.

DRAC RESET