But, beside everything that might be happening with my business (work log never been that full, started to get employees), I decided to take 2 minutes for a big fact of life (for sysadmin/management). Watch it, watch it: Nobody (especially YOU) care about backup. You care about successful restore. There! Now, I don’t want to hear about how great your backup are, if you don’t do regular restore (even as test), they’re not worth anything.

Reread those last sentences. Important point in a sysadmin life.

… a Montreal based startup asked for a new distributed & scalable infrastructure inside the Amazon AWS cloud. All their international (localized) servers are now fully virtualized and can be managed (day-to-day) by non-sysadmin staff.

… a Chicago based investment firm is now being advised on data & infrastructure management of GLUSTERFS software.

… a Montreal based library is now able to receive book list request through a specially designed web page & database.

So, lots of interesting contracts for Les Laboratoires Phoenix – Couple more could be worked out in the next few days. While the main corporate site is being re-designed (http://labsphoenix.com) the announcement are going to be made here.

1. no more free inode on server
Database server of a client is sometimes throwing out error about inodes. This morning, I’ve decided to correct the problem once and for all.

#checking inodes
root@server:/home# df -hi | grep sda
/dev/sda1 640K 606K 35K 95% /

#checking free space
root@server:/home# df -h | grep sda
/dev/sda1 10G 5.1G 4.4G 55% /

A quick check shows 4.4G of free disk space but a little bit less than 35K inodes availables. Taking into account that each file require at least one inode… this could easily become a very dangerous situation. Resolving this issue isn’t very complicated : I’ve destroyed some of the 500k idle file on the server and move some more to another partition. Easy solution for a problem that can easily crash your server.

2. Zimbra & Sphinx ; 2 deployments
One client wanted an easy to manage, web accessible and fully featured messaging & collaboration software. Zimbra [website, download] is one of the easiest open source solution to recommend in those case. It integrate with active directory, it support full text search, tagging and got a very good web interface. Kinda of remind me of MailEnable (for Windows), but a lot less costly and available on GNU/Linux. I’ve completed quite a few single/multi-node deployment of Zimbra and I’ve always been impressed by the quality of the system. Hoo, and btw, I’m a certified Zimbra consultant.

Another wanted to add full-text search capacity to an existing MySQL database. While innodb & MyISAM built-in indexes can help speed up some queries, they are restricted by the b-tree data model. The second problems in this scenario is that the data is already partitioned in multiple database / servers. This is the perfect use case for Sphinx [website] with multi-tables/multi-databases data sources.

3. U.P.C. – BarCode reader
I’ve received a shipment of 8mm barcode reader for a client. The device is to be integrated in a point-of-sale solution my corp. (Les Laboratoires Phoenix) is developing for them. The small USB Acan device [ebay search] is easy to configure (scan specific code) and to use (act as a keyboard). True plug-and-play on Microsoft Windows XP, Vista, on GNU/Linux and Mac OSX Tiger… I’m very satisfied by the device and look forward to complete the assignment.

4. More stuff
Did way more stuff than those 3 contracts today… but hey, I can’t be writing down for all to see all my cool gigs and contracts! Some of those are actually protected by NDA or are still stealth.

Here is a quite interesting article from Intel, Improved Linux* SMP Scaling: User-directed Processor Affinity, on the subject. It shows how to distribute hardware-based interrupts to specifics CPU to lower context switching. It is way more technical that this very article, but I don’t see the need to copy/paste everything. Read it, it worth it.

So, checking out a process cpu affinity is done with following syntax:

# taskset -pc ‘pid’

The processor IDs start at 0. The CPU-ID list is available with ‘cat /proc/cpuinfo‘.

Binding a process ID (pID) to a specific processor is done with the following command. The only difference between the list/bind command is the processor id list added before the pID. It can be inserted as a single digit (1) or a list (1,2,3) or a suite (1-3).

# taskset -pc 1 ‘pid’

There you go: your now able to bind this CPU intensive oracle process on specific core on this 16-ways system.

Links : old ‘for coder’ IBM article – another one for VMWare.

On MLUG, I’ve had trouble convincing peoples that RAID arrays are not “backup system” – they are the representation of an high-availability/high-reliability solution for information system. I’ve receive couple of private email on the subject saying that I was wrong and that I should read some more on the system, that they were good backup tech. Ouch!

I really don’t know what to say… this is just too wrong. Lets be honest, I’m in fright that, one day, they’ll be called as experts in court proceeding. This sentence really is tainted by my interest in law, but still… If you are a consultant / intend to be one, please, heed my words.

Being a computer consultant is a job full of interesting challenges, and the pay is great (especially in Montreal where the cost of living is so low) but your name is the one thing you must protect at all cost… I’ve been able, in the last 5 years (taking exception for 1 year working @ SFL) to easily get contracts, without ever doing any promotional work. Currently there is so much demand that, even me – selling “myself”, I had to take a partner (which I’m very interested to be working with). So: Please, think before you post something on a public forum / email another consultant … I’m nice enough not to place names, but others might not..

Btw – If you are searching for a job in the domain, you can get in touch with me. I can give you a couple names that are in need… but be ready for a harsh response if you fail to answer some basic question before I refer you…

Mon contract avec Praized Media à été renouvellé!