It’s been assumed for a long time, by myself and others, that RAID 1+0 is the obvious choice for enterprise storage from a performance and reliability point of view. I’ve recently had cause to review this opinion and (re)read some articles about the subject.

Read on for links to some interesting articles and my conclusions.
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There are 3 ways to run Linux binaries on a Solaris Express X86 server.

• xVM VirtualBox
• xVM Server
• Linux Branded Zone

This post takes a look at the interesting world of the Linux branded zone. I’ve posted about VirtualBox before and I hope to take a look at xVM Server (Xen) in a future post. Read on for my first steps with Linux branded zones.
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For many years I’ve used an install of Gallery to manage my photos online, with a customised front end written for AxKit, and I’ve also been using Aperture to manage my photo library. Managing two separate libraries became a chore and meant that photos weren’t been uploaded for friends and family to view. I tried the built in Aperture web gallery functionality and found it to be rather inflexible and it didn’t handle hierarchies very well, the other option was to export to flickr or something similar, which I wasn’t keen on as I’d rather host the images myself.

So instead I decided to write my own exporting tool, you can see the end result at http://photos.tyr.org.uk the default view is a match of the project/folder/album structure within my Aperture library and the ‘quilt’ view (see top right) is just for fun.  To export photos to the website I just tag them with the ‘Web’ keyword then run the export/sync script, it couldn’t be quicker and certainly much less hastle than maintaining two libraries.

Read on if you want to know more about how it was put together

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‘Your Next Bus’ is the system used in West Yorkshire (and other regions) to provide live bus timetables. Some time ago I wrote a Dashboard Widget to display live timetables on a OS X Dashboard. I had a request to develop this for the iPhone and so I knocked something together with Dashcode and came up with tyr.org.uk/bus. Browse to in in your iPhone and see it in action, requires Version 2.0 of the OS.

Please feedback with any bug reports or feature requests.

Read on for some of the behind the scenes info.
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I’m writing some training documentation for Veritas Cluster Server (VCS). Reading through my notes I was reminded of the ‘VCS Simulator’. You can import an existing cluster config into the Simulator and use the (Windows) GUI as if it was a live cluster, changing the config, faling things over etc. It’s just the ticket for a training aid, it’s just a shame there isn’t a CLI simulator.

You can download it here (needs a Symantec login) and there’s a Flash video explaining how to import an existing cluster here.

I’ve been wanting to have a play around with both the Solaris Cluster Express work that’s coming out of OpenSolaris and also VirtualBox, a virtualization platform that Sun recently acquired and have moved under their xVM banner. So wanting to kill two birds with one stone I thought I’d try setting up a VirtualBox Solaris Express cluster. Here’s a run through on how to get the same thing going if you’d like to try.

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VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta is out. It’s a free upgrade for all current VMware Fusion users. Notable updates include Multiple Monitor support and Direct-X 9 Shader Model 2.

To give the Shader Model 2 a whirl I fired up Half Life 2. It had refused to run in any previous VMware Fusion release but this time it runs! Ok, it’s runs but it’s nowhere near playable as it’s getting about <5 FPS. However it’s a promising development.

Recently I posted about installing Solaris Express on a Mac Pro. This morning OpenSolaris was released, the first release of what was Project Indiana. Prior to this release the outputs of the various OpenSolaris projects were available within Solaris Express, however now they have their own distribution which has several differences notably the use of a new packaging system called IPS (Image Packaging System).

I will look further into the workings of OpenSolaris in some future posts but for now I thought I’d take a quick look at how the install ran on a bare metal Mac Pro (2006 version).

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I’m on the train! Finally WiFi is free in standard class on the east coast mainline. So that’s at least one thing National Express have done right so far.

I’d always assumed that the train WiFi was supported by a 3G network, or something similar. However my outbound IP address is 217.28.34.132 which a whois indicates belongs to

inetnum: 217.28.32.0 - 217.28.35.15
netname: NSAB-NET
descr: NSAB backbone and address-pools for VPN Services
##########################
In case of improper use, please contact:
<abuse@nsab.se>
##########################


nsab.se redirects to SES SIRIUS AB which is a satellite broadband provider. Well there you go.

Now if only the train was on time…

P.S. Google comes up in Swedish

In the March 8th edition of The Economist this article appeared about Wikipedia. This section piqued my interest

Mr Lih and other inclusionists worry that [the current Wikipedia administration and bureaucracy] deters people from contributing to Wikipedia, and that the welcoming environment of Wikipedia’s early days is giving way to hostility and infighting. There is already some evidence that the growth rate of Wikipedia’s article-base is slowing. Unofficial data from October 2007 suggests that users’ activity on the site is falling, when measured by the number of times an article is edited and the number of edits per month. The official figures have not been gathered and made public for almost a year, perhaps because they reveal some unpleasant truths about Wikipedia’s health.

I thought ‘perhaps because they reveal some unpleasant truths about Wikipedia’s health’ was a possibly a bit strong, especially against the lack of any properly referenced statistics. Whilst the official statistics might not be regularly updated at the moment a full export of the Wikipedia is still available at regular intervals. As such it’s possible, given a bit of work parsing the data, to generate some unofficial statistics. So that’s what I set out to do.

The results are at wikivitals.newswall.org.uk, or read on for more information about how they were created.

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