asnaedae @ home » computers

interesting benefits of solaris

mike — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 05:59:22 +0000

well this is slightly surprising, but in a very good way, and does lead to some interesting suggestions on how to best to improve matters, but look at the following graph of FAST ESP query latency: Notice that the average latency drops as we use the server more . . . but WHY? Well that’s

playing with tcptrace and xplot

mike — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 08:27:19 +0000

# tcpdump -ni en0 port 80 -w output.trace # tcptrace -G output.trace # xplot *tput.xpl From the online manpage: Yellow: instantaneous packets Red: Throughput for the last few packets Blue: Throughput since the start of the stream/connection Other useful graphs: _owin.xpl – outstanding data/congestion _rtt.xpl – round trip time/time _ssize.xpl – segment size/time _tput.xpl –

argh, SNMP can really chafe!

mike — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 20:40:57 +0000

Using version 1: % snmpget -c COMMSTRING -M /usr/local/share/snmp/mibs -v 1 -m USAGE-MIB:PROXY-MIB:REDLINE-STATS-MIB:REDLINE-STATS-MIB:REDLINE-CONFIG-M IB hostname REDLINE-STATS-MIB::sessActive.0 Error in packet Reason: (noSuchName) There is no such variable name in this MIB. Failed object: REDLINE-STATS-MIB::sessActive.0 Using version 2 (2c): % snmpget -c COMMSTRING -M /usr/local/share/snmp/mibs -v 2c -m USAGE-MIB:PROXY-MIB:REDLINE-STATS-MIB:REDLINE-STATS-MIB:REDLINE-CONFIG-M IB hostname REDLINE-STATS-MIB::sessActive.0 REDLINE-STATS-MIB::sessActive.0 = Counter64: 12247 Slightly

solaris zone utilisation via SNMP

mike — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 18:15:21 +0000

It’s been a bug-bear for a long time for me that the CPU metrics when querying a Solaris 10 host are global and not zone specific (which of course makes sense, just makes it harder to track zone utilisation). So finally wrote a basic perl script that will provide that information via a SNMP mib,

scaling web apps

mike — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:02:05 +0000

A little video, thin on detail of course, but hints at some home truths on building/designing scale-able applications (and i'd go so far to say that they are applicable to ALL applications not just webapps) http://joyent.vo.llnwd.net/o25/videos/LinkedIn-Bumpersticker-LED-Scaling-Rails.m4v Of course, I know Ben Rockwood like's his solaris and F5's - but that's not going to surprise many (and I just LOVE f5s) And here's a blog entry with the details on /how/ that's done:- http://www.joyeur.com/2008/04/18/the-wonders-of-fbref-and-irules-serving-pages-from-facebooks-cache . . . basically as simple as:-

when HTTP_REQUEST {
  if { [HTTP::uri] contains "/popular_something/list"} {
    HTTP::respond 200 content "<fb:ref handle='[HTTP::uri]'/>"
  } else { 
    pool facebook.application_server_pool
  }
}

recent applications window

mike — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 22:33:17 +0000

This little snippet will give you a new little window for all those recent applications you launch - I seem to have picked up a habit for closing applications down when I stop working with them for an hour or two (pages etc.)


 defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add \
   '{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }'
 killall Dock

rss browsing on macos

mike — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 20:16:34 +0000

Hmm, so far in the last month or so I've been slowly running into issues with Mail.App just deciding not to download/refresh RSS feeds until I explicitly tell it to (which is annoying to say the least). So first had a play with Endo which is pretty good - apart from the annoyance that I have enough busy RSS feeds (blogs.sun.com and java.sun.com for instance) that the only real way to keep on top is to use Apple + 9 to only show unread posts. The does have the little drawback that I then lose sight of the ones I've tagged - and it is a global option across all groups - yuck. So having just exported my feed list into OPML and then imported into NetNewsWire and it just worked (also looks a lot more like a mail client which i prefer) Will have to see how it goes . . .

the leopard has it’s cafine!

mike — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 22:21:01 +0000

Hopefully I wont get into trouble from apple for even mentioning that they posted a new preview for java 6 on http://developer.apple.com/ on 18th Dec 2007

I'll have to install and see how well it runs!

Memcached in Solaris

mike — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 22:07:52 +0000

Oh, so OpenSolaris is going to come with memcached pre-configured/installed - which is pretty nice; now just for the integration into other things . . .

Memcached in Solaris

helping hands with puppets

mike — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 18:35:45 +0000

Will have to have a good look at [http://puppet.reductivelabs.com/ puppet], looks like a re-invention of cfengine, just using ruby instead (which is a good thing). Some of the recipes look really useful, though might have to write a few for solaris zfs/zones etc. Just a big shame that the trac pages look so very broken within the theme (does kind of put you off)