Leal’s Blog

Well, as many of you, i remember all the criticism Sun and the OpenSolaris project did receive on the start (the license, the company behind, etc). I think i’m not radical about Open Source software, i did use GPL, BSD, CDDL, and even proprietary software. I have my personal opinion about it, but i don’t want that everybody agrees with me. I think there is space to Microsoft windows, Apple, Solaris, OpenSolaris, GNU/Linux, and etc. But let me say this: If there is someone in the computer science that i *really* respect is Richard Stallman. He did create a *masterpiece*, and gave it for developers, users, and companies. Yes, for fun and profit!
I did say that because i want to let *clear* that i think Open Source community is about philosophy (yes i do). It’s not just about lines of code. So, the license and all the surrounding in open software is important too. And that is not radicalism is just how i see the ecossystem. But my profession, my work, is not Open Source. So my point is: When talking about technology, we have an Open World for Oracle or MySQL softwares… when talking about Open Source/Community is much more complicated. How many companies have solutions using GNU/Linux? They have guaranties. Principles from GPL.
First i like technology, innovation, and quality. When Sun released Solaris as an open project it was a dream come true for me. Because i could access the source and learn a lot using the best Operanting System that i know. More, maybe i could help a little bit, and to participate of such technology. Just great. Well, you imagine all the things i did hear about participate on this… makes me remember the movie 2012, there is a funny quote about “Always remember, folks. You heard it first from Charlie“. Charlie represents many of my friends…
Now i’m receiving many emails and reading many blogs from people that i know and really respect that are leaving Oracle/SUN. 100% saying: “Don’t worry, everything is ok”.
(Another quote from 2012: When they tell you not to panic… that’s when you run!)
I know many people that say that Oracle did want to buy MySQL and could not, so did a indirect deal using SUN (that’s why the title of this post ;-). And others, saying that this is b**** …
In the end, i don’t think this has much importance… it’s done. And thinking about the $$ Sun did pay for MySQL…
What about companies that did invest in OpenSolaris as their business basement? We have many people working around that project, and all we have is: “?” (Thanks Benr for that).

ps.: Sorry if you are looking for the movie, go here. ;-)
peace

Lá blah pé blah lá lá…
Lá blah lá vier…
Lá lá nós estaremos…
Lá com blah blah estiver.

Parece que sou minoria, mas realmente não gosto desta nova fórmula do campeonato brasileiro de pontos corridos. Acho uma cópia barata do modelo europeu, e como não podia ser diferente, está indo pelo mesmo caminho…

Acontece que por lá, os países tem dois ou três times que concorrem ao título, passeando pelo país com seus times milhonários. Aqui é muito diferente, quando começa o campeonato brasileiro, temos no mínimo 10 times concorrendo ao título!

Imagine se nesta reta final de campeonato, tivéssemos os oito primeiro classificados para decisão do título: São Paulo, Flamengo, Palmeiras, Internacional, Atlético MG, Cruzeiro, Avaí, Goiás!

Teríamos: Maracanã, Beira-Rio, Morumbi, Mineirão… todos lotados! A emoção é totalmente diferente, podemos acompanhar todos os jogos, e todo o clima das finais é diferente.

Aposto que todos lembram das finais do campeonato brasileiro que seu time ganhou, bem como final da copa do mundo, final da libertadores, finais da NBA, o que quer que seja. Agora como tem terminado nosso campeonato nacional?

Só consigo imaginar este campeonato dando certo se for estipulado uma quantidade mínima de pontos do primeiro para o segundo colocado para que o campeonato termine nos pontos corridos. Algo tipo 9 pontos (ou três partidas de diferença). Qualquer coisa diferente disso é premiar a regularidade e não a excepcionalidade. O que me acostumei a ver no futebol nacional.

Imaginem que temos um primeiro colocado ao final do campeonato que tem apenas dois pontos a mais que o segundo. Sendo que o segundo colocado ganhou as duas partidas do primeiro colocado. Só que o segundo colocado jogou com o time “B” na primeira partida do returno, quando o time “B” estava na pilha de fugir do rebaixamento, jogando em casa e técnico novo. O segundo colocado do campeonato empatou. Daí, o primeiro colocado pegou este mesmo time “B” na última rodada do campeonato, jogando em casa, e com o time “B” rebaixado matematicamente e com o time sub-15 em campo. ;-)

Os melhores jogadores crescem nas finais, e tudo isso porque futebol é arte e pautar o campeonato do melhor futebol do mundo pela regularidade, mesmo que a melhor do campeonato, é muito pouco para apontar o “melhor” time.

As many of you, i did start to work with NFS when performance was not a problem. Right? Well, more or less… performance was not the first problem. The first real problem was get the whole thing working! Compatibility was a huge problem, and i’m not talking about GNU/Linux and Unix compatibility, that was some kind of art to get things working. But i’m talking about GNU/Linux and GNU/Linux. The same distro, with the same version was a problem, imagine different distros!
So, after that, in general after remove all the NFS stuff from the distros and installing from source the nfs-utils, rpc, and etc (homogeneous install), everything working… ok, now performance was the problem. ;-)

Well, welcome back to 2009! Compatibility is a problem? No, NFSv3 is a established standard and i have no experiences with incompatibility theses days. And performance? I admit that i did think that was another problem that we did leave behind too. But i’m wrong. Yeah, i know if we want to deploy a high performance environment, or we need to get *more* than a normal configuration would give us, we need to do some dirty work. But the performance numbers i do see on GNU/Linux RedHat clients were some crazy ones!
I did a simple test like:

 iozone -s1g -r8 -i 0 -i 2 -t 1 -c -o -O

And the performance for random writes were 1500 ops! Changing the threads to: 2, 3, 6 and 12 did not change *nothing*. The numbers were 1200, 1600, 1500…

A OpenSolaris client got much better numbers, like 1500, 2500, 4000, 5000! The same as the local ZFS performance/NFS server (with one intel SSD). The difference was that on the local NFS server, i got 3300 ops with a single thread.
At least the Ubuntu client was better, with numbers not so good like the OpenSolaris client (2009.06), but way better than the RedHat!

So, if Brendan Gregg or Roch see this post by accident, i think you will need to do something like NetApp GNU/Linux patches. Brendan is working in getting on the fishworks limits (I think the clients they are using on the tests are just OpenSolaris/Solaris). But as a enterprise GNU/Linux distro (RedHat), present a lot on the datacenters, i fear the Storage 7000 series from SUN/Oracle be like a ferrari without road to run. I know that thinking quickly we can say: “That’s not my proble…”, but indirectly can be.
peace

These days two of my kids did participate on a television show about their experience in GNU/Linux. The program is in Brazilian Portuguese, but i did find this youtube version with english subtitles. So, if you want to watch…

ps.: I did think they were learning MS Windows at school… now i know i will need to buy a license, and teach them at home. ;-)
peace

Hello there! I did a post about IO on demand some time ago, and that post was about some aspects i think we need to have more power on the storage land.
I think the 7410 (fishworks) is a great step in the Unified Storage Model, but in the same way, the “Unified” word is a complicated one. The problem with that word is the notion of “all-in-one”, and the lack IMO of some controls needed in such environment.

So, here i can post my wishes ;-)

1) Would be nice if we could set limits for IOPS based on datasets;
2) Would be nice if we could set latency objectives per datasets too;

And it’s more complicated when we have other vendors with solutions for that. So, we want ZFS, but that is not enough to win the war.

If we will have a giant source of power, we need a way to master it.

peace.

O programa de hoje do Olhar Digital tem um fato muito interessante sobre minha formação profissional, e sobre o GNU/Linux. Eu já trabalhei com outros sistemas operacionais que não eram “Unix like”, e inclusive já administrei servidores Windows NT e etc. Mas depois que comecei a trabalhar com GNU/Linux, minha profissão e especialização em administração de sistemas e redes, ficou totalmente dentro do mundo Unix (GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris/OpenSolaris, SCO, AIX, etc).
Isto já tem mais de dez anos, e bem antes dos meus filhos nascerem. Às pessoas que achavam difícil o ambiente GNU/Linux, eu sempre dizia que era questão de costume e não de dificuldade. Realmente achava ruim para a informática ficar reduzida a um sistema operacional, e ter o mundo inteiro vendo os computadores a partir das mesmas “janelas”. Quando meus filhos nasceram, eu sempre conversava com o pessoal dizendo que: “Eu não tenho Windows, pois não trabalho com aplicativos piratas, e realmente acho caro para pagar por um sistema operacional que tem inúmeras opções melhores, gratuitas e de código aberto”. Já paguei por sistemas operacionais sim, mas foi o Solaris 8 ainda (um pouco antes dele ficar gratuito ;( ), e pelo MacOSX (que é meu desktop atual). Bom, o que aconteceu foi que meus filhos cresceram utilizando o GNU/Linux, e este foi o ambiente que eles conheceram. Até por saber que na escola eles aprenderíam o sistema operacional da Microsoft, e depois iria comprar uma licença Windows para que eles pudessem conhecer e aprender outros ambientes. Só que depois deles aprenderem o windows no colégio, não tiveram vontade de ter um windows em casa, e continuaram utilizando apenas o GNU/Linux. Então falei para àquelas mesmas pessoas: “Viu como é questão de costume? Meus filhos tem fluência no GNU/Linux e não no Windows, e isto não diz que um é melhor do que o outro, ou mais fácil, e sim que temos mais conhecimento naquela plataforma que estamos mais acostumados”. E mais, podemos sempre aprender a trabalhar em outros ambientes se tivermos interesse.
Bom, depois de conversar com o pessoal da produção do Olhar Digital sobre este aspecto, surgiu a idéia do programa de hoje (meus dois filhos mais velhos estão lá… ;-), que acredito o pessoal que lê o blog tenha gostado e se identificado.
Por último, vou dizer que terei que comprar uma licença de windows, e instalar um computador com esse sistema operacional aqui, pois minha outorga para a escola ensinar meus filhos não está funcionando muito bem. ;-) Preciso corrigir isso… hehe
Obs.: Como vocês notaram meu blog é basicamente em inglês, e os temas giram em torno de tecnologias Unix (sistema operacional), projetos de código aberto, tecnologias, e etc. Mas para atender ao público que está acompanhando o Olhar Digital, e me mandou inúmeros emails e comentários no blog (muito bacanas por sinal), vou escrever tópicos sobre GNU/Linux em português. Por isso, podem sugerir, e criticar, que quem escreve esse blog também lê. ;-)
http://twitter.com/msleal

A really nice experience! It’s always good when we can help, and my job was help some new users of the Ubuntu GNU/Linux Distro in this television show (Brazilian Portuguese). Basically, the users had two difficulties:
1 - Install the firefox flash plugin;
2 - Install a MSN client;

The first problem is related with two problems. The first is not that easy for the users to know what “program” they really need when they do a search like “flash” and do appear many options. So, two things happens:
- The user installs the wrong choice;
- The user installs everything;

The user on the show did install everything. So, there was conflict between the packages when executing, and the sound was not working. So, my tip was: “If you want to install one software, and the system gives to you many options, it’s better you to choose one, try it out. And if it does not solve the problem, you first uninstall it before try another”.
The second user had problems trying to install the aMSN client. But the user did not want to use the aMSN program, but just use the MSN network. Well, the pidgin is already installed by default, and the user did not know about it.
In the end, a really nice experience!
peace

“The OpenSolaris Operating System as a storage operating system - everything from file sharing, file systems, volume managers, data services, and etc. Features like: ZFS, NFS, pNFS, Shared QFS, Storage Archive Manager, Honeycomb fixed content management, Availability Suite, iSCSI, etc”.
That is our LinkedIn Group, where i think we can have great discussions about Storage and OpenSolaris. So, here is the invitation for everyone to participate, and start a discussion. We have Solaris, OpenSolaris distro, Oracle/Sun 7000 storage series, Nexenta, and many use cases to discuss. How about use SUN fishworks for create a iSCSI network for other OpenSolaris NAS servers? OpenSolaris, ZFS, and VMWARE? What are your experiences with Nexenta? The fishworks does not need a centralized and integrated management interface? (Actually i was needing a more simple way to integrate it in my environment…) webservices?
So, wait for you there.
peace

There are some circuits that are the great ones, where we can see who is who. In my opinion, like Monaco, Silverstone, SPA, and now Singapore. Senna was master on the first three.
Singapore saw: N.E.R.D, Beyoncé, Simple Minds, Lindsay Lohan, and many others… but the great show was from Lewis Hamilton, No Doubt! ;-)