Archive for the 'News' Category

23
Nov

Load Average > 680

I just found this old screenshot from one of my previous jobs. It was taken on December 9th 2003, while one of the web hosting servers went woowoo due to badly optimized web site. Load average went sky high to 682! Anyone else had such a high load before or am I the absolute champion? :)

PS: I was using Fluxbox back than! Wow, crazy youth! :)

10
Oct

Pidgin status v2

As requested by bleketux, I made some modifications to pidgin_status.py script.

Main news is that now it is possible to change Pidgin status message periodically. Script will go to background (it is a real daemon now :P), change the status, and wait for the set time interval until it changes the message again, and then all over again, wait-change-wait-change.

To change status message every 5 minutes with a random line from file /home/miljan/quotes/dusko_radovic.txt:

pidgin_status.py -d -t 5 -f /home/miljan/quote/dusko_radovic.txt

And in Pidgin you would get something like this every five minutes:

To show the song you are listening to as status message:

pidgin_status.py -s “Mukeka di Rato – Kustapassaaessedrmobral”

And in Pidgin it would look like:

You can see all possible options by running script with -h argument for help.

bleketux, I hope you are still around to enjoy this. ;)

Download: https://github.com/miljank/pidgin-status

25
Sep

American SPAM

This is so funny that I have to post it. :)

We all know about Nigerian SPAM, but how about American SPAM? :o)

13
Sep

Building Scalable Web Architectures

I just read a very interesting presentation done by Aaron Bannert for ApacheCon 2005. Presentation is on “Building Scalable Web Architectures” and it is a very good reading for anyone interested in high scale web environments. Here is the link to the presentation.

08
Sep

Listen to…

Red Union – The Partisan

03
Sep

I am on Planet SysAdmin :)

It may be old news, but I have just found out (late as always :P). This blog was added to Planet SysAdmin list of blogs. Woohoo! ;) Seems that someone is reading this after all. :)

02
Aug

La la la

It’s been a while since I posted my last music recommendation so I think it is time for a refreshment. Something light for these hot summer days. :)

Debeli Precjednik – Ready to Fight

Enjoy. :)

12
Jul

AIX 6 ready for download!

Like I previously announced, IBM AIX 6 Beta will be openly available for free download and testing. This time has come and you can start downloading it right now from this page. More info here.

AIX 6 should bring a lot of new stuff especially when it comes to virtualization and high-availability issues. Some new features are ported directly from fault-tolerant systems which should provide even more stable and reliable systems. There will be no official support for Beta testing, but you can ask for help on one of the IBM forums.

Openness of IBM is a pretty new thing. This change in IBM policy is probably influenced by SUN’s opening of Solaris to the community. But even though some changes started, IBM is still far away from OpenSource and from opening code of it’s product to the OpenSource community. And that is a pity because I would really like to see the same usability features on some other UNIX operating systems. Sadly, even Linux is far behind AIX when it comes to usability.

10
Jul

Snow in Buenos Aires

Yesterday Buenos Aires received first snowfall in 89 years! As I don’t watch TV or any other form of news, I would probably never hear about this if Tatiana didn’t surprise me this morning with information about the snow. The news is even more surprising since Marica and I were visiting her two years ago at approximately same time of the year and the weather was everything but cold. We wore shorts and t-shirts all the time, even in the evening, and we used to sunbath under the Obelisco.

This seems to be one of the coldest winters in South America in a long, long time. Global worming works in strange ways, indeed. While you think about it enjoy in the pictures of beautiful Buenos Aires covered in snow.

Buenos Aires in Snow

Buenos Aires in Snow

Photos are courtesy of Jeff.

29
May

Velikim koracima napred

Power6Prethodnih par nedelja su bili dosta burni za IBM – izbacena je nova serija Power procesora a u isto vreme najavljen je i slobodan download nove verzije AIX-a. Novi p6* procesor je, kako tvrdi press release, najbrzi procesor trenutno dostupan. S’ obzirom da je u pitanju dual core procesor brzine 4.7GHz i kesom od 8MB nesto mi govori da je vest tacna. :) Ono sto je vrlo interesantno je da iako su performanse novog procesora skoro duplo bolje od njegovog prethodnika elektricna potrosnja je ostala na nivou “starog” p5* procesora. Ne znam kako su to uspeli ali svaka cast. :)

AIX LogoNovi AIX (6.1) se trudi da iskoristi sve mogucnosti novog procesora. Tako, na primer, uvodi novu tehnologiju zvanu WPAR (Workload Partitions) koja omogucuje da se aplikacije, pa i citav operativni sistem, prebaci sa jednog servera na drugi – bez restarta sistema tj. aplikacije. Ovo ce IBM-u doneti veliku prednost na High Availability trzistu. Vecina HA klastera su uglavnom zamisljeni kao fail over klasteri – u slucaju gubitka servera kriticna aplikacije se prebacuje na novi server i nastavlja sa radom. Medjutim, cak i sa najbolje odradjenim scenarijom postoji odredjeni downtime koji se ne moze izbeci – vreme dok se ne uoci gubitak servera i vreme koje je potrebno da se aplikacija startuje na novom serveru. U idealnoj situaciji ovo vreme bi bilo oko minut-dva sto je opet u odredjenim situacijama previse. WPAR (virtuelna verzija LPAR-a :)) tu dolazi kao ispomoc HACMP-u i skracuje taj neizbezni downtime na najmanji moguci minimum – detekciju propustenih heartbeat-ova. BTW, za par mesceci se ocekuje i nova verzija HACMP-a koja bi trebala da podrzi ove nove funkcionalnosti.

Inace, kao sto rekoh, beta verzije AIX-a namenjene za testiranje, ce po prvi put biti javno dostupne za skidanje, pa ko voli nek izvoli. :) Vise informacija mozete ocekivati uskoro na adresi http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/aix/.

* p ne stoji za pentium vec za power. :)