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After much wait­ing my iphone is all setup and con­fig­ured i am going to have to get used to typ­ing on it though. I have fat thumbs.

And yes — it is as good as you’ve heard.

After much wait­ing my iphone is all setup and con­fig­ured i am going to have to get used to typ­ing on it though. I have fat thumbs. And yes —...

Via var­i­ous places, I’ve noted that there has been dis­cus­sion about the pos­si­bil­ity of imple­ment­ing Bugzilla in alter­na­tive lan­guages (:cough:python:cough:). I doubt that the core bugzilla team would pull up their roots and really switch but a python-version of bugzilla (trac doesn’t count) in Django would be really, really hot.

I linked to the main wiki page up top — but here’s a link to the dis­cus­sion page.

The pri­mary page lists come com­mon (albeit silly for the most part) “cons” that python is viewed as hav­ing. I think the dis­cus­sion page is more inter­est­ing per­son­ally, but in either case — who is up for doing an imple­men­ta­tion anyway?

I would shave every hair off my body and paint myself blue for a Bugzilla/Testopia imple­men­ta­tion in Django it’s been on my “list of things to do one day” ever since I started pok­ing at Django a year or so ago.

Via var­i­ous places, I’ve noted that there has been dis­cus­sion about the pos­si­bil­ity of imple­ment­ing Bugzilla in alter­na­tive lan­guages (:cough:python:cough:). I doubt that the core bugzilla team would pull up...

I saw this post on Slash­dot the other day — it’s a paper called ” Fail­ure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Pop­u­la­tion”. It’s a good read for any­one in the stor­age busi­ness — hell, it’s a good read for any­one inter­ested in com­puter. In sec­tion 5, under con­clu­sions, they state:

In this study we report on the fail­ure char­ac­ter­is­tics of consumer-grade disk dri­ves. To our knowl­edge, the study is unprece­dented in that it uses a much larger pop­u­la­tion size than has been pre­vi­ously reported and presents a com­pre­hen­sive analy­sis of the cor­re­la­tion between fail­ures and sev­eral para­me­ters that are believed to affect disk life­time. Such analy­sis is made pos­si­ble by a new highly par­al­lel health data col­lec­tion and analy­sis infra­struc­ture, and by the sheer size of our com­put­ing deploy­ment.
One of our key find­ings has been the lack of a con­sis­tent pat­tern of higher fail­ure rates for higher tem­per­a­ture dri­ves or for those dri­ves at higher uti­liza­tion lev­els. Such cor­re­la­tions have been repeat­edly high­lighted by pre­vi­ous stud­ies, but we are unable to con­firm them by observ­ing our pop­u­la­tion. Although our data do not allow us to con­clude that there is no such cor­re­la­tion, it pro­vides strong evi­dence to sug­gest that other effects
may be more promi­nent in affect­ing disk drive reli­a­bil­ity in the con­text of a pro­fes­sion­ally man­aged data cen­ter deployment.

These two points are inter­est­ing. In some of the labs I’ve worked in, an aston­ish­ing num­ber of dri­ves die reg­u­larly. The manufacturer/distributor excuse has always been “heat issues” or “use cases”. Admit­tedly, the temp. range Google capped at was 50 cel­sius (122 Fahren­heit). In a rack with densely stacked servers (1-2U machines, rack filled) and with those machines run­ning close to 75% and above CPU load with non-stop disk I/O (read, write, delete/format) and con­stant machine power cycles the temp. inside the racks could spike far past the 122 mark at which point the failure-trend Google marks starts to spike again.

Of course, in the labs I’ve been in, we were using these as test bed machines — total/high reli­a­bil­ity was not some­thing direly impor­tant for the sim­ple fact that these machines were disposable.

Even with that in mind: You should always assume your disk dri­ves are going to fail sooner than you expect. The MTBF on a large enough pool of disks not con­fig­ured in a “smart” con­fig­u­ra­tion (i.e. raid, arrays, etc). I’m not talk­ing about consumer-use pat­terns (although, I just had a drive go south on my lap­top) — I’m talk­ing about datacenter/IT/etc use cases.

The Google paper is a good ref­er­ence case, but you should remem­ber that all use pat­terns are dif­fer­ent. An application/test or sys­tem that really puts the disks to use can cause drive fail­ures much ear­lier than you (or any paper) might assume. A good chunk of the “stor­age indus­try” real­ized this long ago — this is why com­pa­nies (cough) work on soft­ware appli­ca­tions and intel­li­gent hard­ware “wrap­pers” (arrays, raids, etc) to work around the basic assump­tion that in a large enough pool of dri­ves, you’re going to have near con­stant drive fail­ure. Peo­ple might dis­agree with the prices or method­ol­ogy, but the fact remains that the basic assump­tion is true.

Of course, that rea­son­ing can be held for any piece of hard­ware in the typ­i­cal data cen­ter. Apply too much heat/load to a pool of machines and your fail­ure rate it going to be high unless the machines were designed with high-reliability in mind (which nor­mal indi­cates RAID/Fiber/etc storage).

In any case, the paper is a good read. I’ve gone and started ram­bling. If you’re look­ing for some tools to test drives/filesystems in gen­eral, I’d take a look at the stan­dard Bonnie/Bonnie++ and other tools, but also take a look at Rugg (built in python) and also remem­ber that it’s impor­tant to stress a drive below the filesys­tem layer. Typ­i­cally, this means raw-writing to the device — if you’re job is to test drive speed/reliability or test the reli­a­bil­ity of drive dri­vers for your oper­at­ing sys­tem, that’s a step you can’t forget.

Update: Stor­age­Mojo has a more detailed break­down.

I saw this post on Slash­dot the other day — it’s a paper called ” Fail­ure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Pop­u­la­tion”. It’s a good read for any­one in...

That’s right. My awe­some employer, a stor­age startup called Archivas is being pur­chased by Hitachi Data Sys­tems, a wholly owned sub­sidiary of Hitachi Limited.

This is of course, awe­some new for us as a com­pany — but on a per­sonal level this pur­chase shows a belief and com­mit­ment on the part of Hitachi when it comes to the prod­uct and tech­nol­ogy I’ve put blood and sweat and tears into for the past 3 years.

Some of the news links:
From the HDS site
Search Stor­age
eWeek Cov­er­age
Mar­ket­Watch

When I go to pyCon this month — I get to go as an HDS employee. This is truly awesome.

That’s right. My awe­some employer, a stor­age startup called Archivas is being pur­chased by Hitachi Data Sys­tems, a wholly owned sub­sidiary of Hitachi Limited. This is of course, awe­some new...

HDS, Archivas team on fixed-content archiv­ing
Hitachi Data Sys­tems and Archivas Forge Global Part­ner­ship to Cre­ate Solu­tions for a New “Active Archive” Mar­ket Space
And that’s all I am going to say about that.

HDS, Archivas team on fixed-content archiv­ing Hitachi Data Sys­tems and Archivas Forge Global Part­ner­ship to Cre­ate Solu­tions for a New “Active Archive” Mar­ket Space And that’s all I am going...

You should read this: The essence of a long-term dig­i­tal archive

An excel­lent arti­cle describ­ing dig­i­tal archives in the mod­ern IT field. For most peo­ple, this arti­cle might seem irrel­e­vant (in the scope of things I have talked about pre­vi­ously — it is). How­ever, given that this is the field I work in, it’s a sub­ject near and dear to me.

Of course, in the inter­est of full dis­clo­sure, I work in this field, and I also hap­pen to know the article’s author.

You should read this: The essence of a long-term dig­i­tal archive An excel­lent arti­cle describ­ing dig­i­tal archives in the mod­ern IT field. For most peo­ple, this arti­cle might seem irrel­e­vant...

Text­Mate 1.5 is released!

I’ll tell you this much — ever since I watched this screen cast by a guy using it for Python, I’ve spent a lot more time work­ing on the more inter­est­ing lan­guage features.

I’ve added a lot of stuff per­ti­nent to my work in the snip­pets, tab trig­gers, etc. I really have not been this happy with an edi­tor in some time.

Really, you should check it out.

Text­Mate 1.5 is released! I’ll tell you this much — ever since I watched this screen cast by a guy using it for Python, I’ve spent a lot more time...

This is actu­ally a big thing (that I haven’t seen talked about a lot) — some­one has posted a work­ing pro­gram capa­ble of gen­er­at­ing MD5/4 col­li­sions in under 45 min­utes on a 2.4 GHZ processor.

Bug­track Email here

Web­site with Source

This is sig­nif­i­cant because pre­vi­ously, while every­one knew that MD5 was basi­cally worth­less at this point (due to the How to Break MD5 and Other Hash Func­tions paper, peo­ple con­tin­ues to say “but there’s no exploit code!”.

Now there is. Peo­ple need to start using some­thing in the realm of SHA-256 for hash­ing (SHA-1 is “weaker” then expected) or some other authen­tic­ity method, but really, MD5 is worth­less, and SHA-1 is going to go down as well.

You can see Bruce Schneier’s writ­ing on this as well.

Add: Oh look. Slash­dot finally caught it

This is actu­ally a big thing (that I haven’t seen talked about a lot) — some­one has posted a work­ing pro­gram capa­ble of gen­er­at­ing MD5/4 col­li­sions in under 45 min­utes...

Ran across this app via ver­sion tracker: AlmostVPN — Trac

It’s inter­est­ing — it’s an SSH tun­nel­ing man­ager that sits in the Pref. Pane in OS/X instead of being a stand­alone appli­ca­tion. For those of us who have to VPN a lot, but despise things like the offi­cial Cisco VPN client (on any damned plat­form) this might be use­ful (if you have ssh access into the cor­po­rate network).

Ran across this app via ver­sion tracker: AlmostVPN — Trac It’s inter­est­ing — it’s an SSH tun­nel­ing man­ager that sits in the Pref. Pane in OS/X instead of being a stand­alone...

I use growl on my mac — but I haven’t browsed the site in ages. Today, from del.icio.us I found this gem: Growl­No­ti­fier class (Python)

I am going to use the hell out of this. Python bind­ings for Growl? Heck yeah!

Some notes for myself: Make sure to view the scripts and Extras fold­ers, and also enable “remote noti­fi­ca­tion” in the pref­er­ence pane.

This will be incred­i­bly use­ful for track­ing net­work events — also, it’ll be kind of cool. I need to make a bugzilla growl plu­gin to tell me when new bugs hit my queue (but that’s redun­dant with email noti­fi­ca­tions, I know.)

I use growl on my mac — but I haven’t browsed the site in ages. Today, from del.icio.us I found this gem: Growl­No­ti­fier class (Python) I am going to use...