Building and Promoting a Linux-based Operating System to Support Virtual Organizations for Next Generation Grids (2006-2010). The emergence of Grids enables the sharing of a wide range of resources to solve large-scale computational and data intensive problems in science, engineering and commerce. While much has been done to build Grid middleware on top of existing operating systems, little has been done to extend the underlying operating systems to enablee and facilitate Grid computing, for example by embedding important functionalities directly into the operating system kernel.
The Boot Process From the moment a user turns on a Mac OS X system to beyond the time the login window appears, Mac OS X executes a boot sequence that readies the system for use. If you provide system services to all users, you might need to execute some code during this process. The following sections explain the basic boot sequence and the places where your code can tie into it.
In Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger, Apple introduced a new system startup program called launchd. The launchd daemon takes over many tasks from cron, xinetd, mach_init, and init, which are UNIX programs that traditionally have handled system initialization, called systems scripts, run startup items, and generally prepared the system for the user. And they still exist on Mac OS X Tiger, but launchd has superseded them in many instances. These venerable programs are widely used by system administrators, open source developers, managers of web services, even consumers who want to use cron to manage iCal scheduling, and they can still be called with launchd. The launchd daemon also provides a big performance boost to your system. At any given time, only those daemons that are actually used are launched
Need to monitor Linux server performance? Try these built-in command and a few add-on tools. Most Linux distributions are equipped with tons of monitoring. These tools provide metrics which can be used to get information about system activities. You can use these tools to find the possible causes of a performance problem. The commands discussed below are some of the most basic commands when it comes to system analysis and debugging server issues such as: Finding out bottlenecks. Disk (storage) bottlenecks. CPU and memory bottlenecks. Network bottlenecks.
Edit the following file to fix this problem Add or modify text as follows: # vi /etc/sysctl.conf net.ipv4.tcp_tw_reuse = 0 net.ipv4.tcp_tw_recycle = 0 # sysctl -p The above command will help the new settings to take effect.
This tutorial will cover the basics of the GNOME desktop environment and application framework. GNOME uses the GTK and GNOME API to provide the software developer interfaces.
Many biomedical terminologies, classifications, and ontological resources such as the NCI Thesaurus (NCIT), International Classification of Diseases (ICD), Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine (SNOMED), Current Procedural Terminology (CPT), and Gene Ontology (GO) have been developed and used to build a variety of IT applications in biology, biomedicine, and health care settings
"Yet another storage technology? Yes. Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) has arrived on the scene for a number of reasons, which Steve Looby of SANBlaze Technology, Inc., a designer of SAN Emulation test products and manufacturer of a complete line of AMC, PMC, AdvancedTCA, and CompactPCI board-level storage solutions, outlines here. Steve then goes on to discuss the new test capabilities for developing and deploying FCoE storage equipment."
"Chapter 4. The DM-Multipath Configuration File 4.1. Configuration File Overview 4.2. Configuration File Blacklist 4.2.1. Blacklisting by WWID 4.2.2. Blacklisting By Device Name 4.3. Configuration File Defaults 4.4. Multipaths Device Configuration Attributes 4.5. Configuration File Devices By default, DM-Multipath provides configuration values for the most common uses of multipathing. In addition, DM-Multipath includes support for the most common storage arrays that support DM-Multipath. The default configuration values and the supported devices can be found in the /usr/share/doc/device-mapper-multipath-0.4.5/multipath.conf.defaults file. "
"The lecture notes reference the 15.075 course textbook: Statistics and Data Analysis from Elementary to Intermediate by Ajit C. Tamhane and Dorothy D. Dunlop, Prentice Hall, 2000. They also occasionally refer to: Casella, George, and Roger L. Berger. Statistical Inference. Belmont, CA: Duxbury Press, 1990."
SystemImager is software which automates Linux installs, software distribution, and production deployment. SystemImager makes it easy to do automated installs (clones), software distribution, content or data distribution, configuration changes, and operating system updates to your network of Linux machines. You can even update from one Linux release version to another! It can also be used to ensure safe production deployments. By saving your current production image before updating to your new production image, you have a highly reliable contingency mechanism. If the new production enviroment is found to be flawed, simply roll-back to the last production image with a simple update command! Some typical environments include: Internet server farms, database server farms, high performance clusters, computer labs, and corporate desktop environments.
Many enterprise data centers rely on Ethernet for their LAN and data traffic, and on Fibre Channel (FC) networks for their storage infrastructure. With increased adoption of 10GbE in the data center, the availability of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and new lossless 10GbE technologies, it is now possible to consolidate FC SAN storage data flows with LAN and data traffic onto the same unified Ethernet cable. Network convergence will enable enterprises to preserve their existing investments in FC storage, reduce data center costs and complexity, and simplify network management.
Save a file you edited in vim without the needed permissionsI often forget to sudo before editing a file I don't have write permissions on. When you come to save that file and get the infamous "E212: Can't open file for writing", just issue that vim command in order to save the file without the need to save it to a temp file and then copy it back again. :w !sudo tee % Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.commandlinefu.com%2Fcommands%2Fbrowse%2Fsort-by-votes
Linux Professional Institute (LPI) exam prep Self-study tutorials to help you learn Linux fundamentals and prepare for system administrator certification
If you've never abandoned your 4th grade obsession with the night sky (and who has?), Star Viewer is a web-based tool for peeking at some of the most interesting and vivid sights in the night sky. Star Viewer is not as complicated as, say, the previously mentioned open-source and feature-rich astronomy tool Stellarium
The Nikon system of digital single-lens reflex (SLR) bodies and lenses is a popular choice among serious photographers worldwide. This page makes it easy to shop for Nikon digital bodies and Nikkor lenses. Every component manufactured by Nikon is covered, plus a few exceptionally good third-party components. If you are new to photography, you might want to start with my article "Building a Digital SLR System".
"apt-fast and Axel: Roughly 26x Faster apt-get Installations and Upgrades Monday, 02 June 2008 Updated 12/17/2009 Since apt-fast has gotten popular due to acolades in the Ubuntu community and from mention in Linux Format, I've gotten lots of hits, and a few bugs. I believe that apt-fast is now golden, though, thanks to travisn000 on the PCLinuxOS forums. From now on, you can find the latest version "source" (it's just a shellscript) at http://www.mattparnell.com/linux/apt-fast/ ... the latest version will always be the one named "apt-fast.sh." Yes, this will work for any distro that uses apt-get, and the concept should work most of the others...it may even be as simple as removing wget and replacing it with a symlink to axel. Since I last updated this post, I have started using Archlinux, whose package manager has a system in place that allows any download manager to be used, for example."
Summary: Vimscript provides excellent support for operating on collections of data, a cornerstone of programming. In this third article in the series, learn how to use Vimscript's built-in lists to ease everyday operations such as reformatting lists, filtering sequences of filenames, and sorting sets of line numbers. You'll also walk through examples that demonstrate the power of lists to extend and enhance two common uses of Vim: creating a user-defined function to align assignment operators, and improving the built-in text completions mechanism.
swatch (the “Simple WATCHer”) does. swatch, written 100% in Perl, monitors logs as they're being written to and takes action when it finds something you've told it to look for. This simple, flexible and useful tool is a must-have for any healthily fearful system administrator.
"For a while now, IBM has had multiple and competing tools for managing AIX and Linux clusters for its supercomputer customers and yet another set of tools that were used for other HPC setups with a slightly more commercial bent to them. But Big Blue has now cleaned house, killing off its closed-source Cluster Systems Management (CSM) tool and tapping its own open source Extreme Cluster Administration Toolkit (known as xCAT) as its replacement."
"How to set up for usage with yum (minimum required version: yum 2.4.x): RHEL5, CentOS, Scientific Linux, RHEL4 yum, SLES yum Note: The version of yum distributed on CentOS 3 by default is too old (yum 2.0.8). You will need to upgrade to a yum 2.4.x version in order to use these repositories. The older version of yum does not support plugins or mirrorlists, which are required for these repos to work. "
"Linux Explorer ( LINUXexplo ) is a script that collects software and hardware information about a linux server for support purposes, similar to the Solaris explorer ( SUNWexplo ) , Redhat's "sysreport" and SuSE's "siga" script. The script is designed to collect information about a server to help service departments support linux and have a common set of scripts for collecting information about linux no matter what distro users are using. The information is stored in seperated directories, once all the information has been collected it then tar's up those directories into a single gzip tar file which can then be attached to an email for your support organization or copied to a remote server for safe keeping. "
ConVirt provides enterprise-class management of open source virtualization platforms, making open source virtualization an extremely viable and cost-effective choice for enterprises. ConVirt lets you manage the complete lifecycle of Xen and KVM virtualization platforms from a central, GUI dashboard. With sophisticated template-based provisioning, centralized monitoring, configuration management and administration, IT administrators can now automate the entire virtual machine lifecycle on open source platforms. ConVirt is an open source product backed by commercial, enterprise-class support, so you get the best of both worlds: a sophisticated, commercially-backed solution that is also highly cost effective. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.convirture.com%2Fproducts.html
ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn reports today on a new open source navigation project launched by European GPS company TomTom that adds additional functionality to navigational devices, regardless of the make or model. The OpenLR project aims to put navigation data on top of a GPS unit's existing database so drivers can access local traffic, weather, and other useful information as they travel.
The information you keep in Google apps like Gmail, GCal, Reader, and Voice doesn't just live in one place. Check out a few easy but non-obvious ways to plug different Google apps together and share their data and features.
Ever since Lifehacker turned me on to Dropbox, it's become one of the most essential pieces in my daily workflow. Sure it syncs files extremely well, but Dropbox is an excellent tool for so much more.
Ooh, shiny! A new machine, and it has a Core 2 Quad processor! Everything's going to run so much faster now! Or is it? When you have four processor cores, does that mean everything runs four times faster? Or is everything still running on the first CPU and ignoring the others? How do you find out, and how do you make the best use of that shiny new multi-core processor?
device-mapper (dm): working with multipath-tools. Part 1 Filed under: SCSI, Linux — admin @ 10:33 Device-mapper (hereafter, dm) is one of the best collection of device drivers that I have ever worked with. It brings high availability, flexibility and more to the Linux 2.6 kernel. Device-mapper is a Linux 2.6 kernel infrastructure that provides a generic way to create virtual layers of a block device while supporting stripping, mirroring, snapshots, concatenation, multipathing, etc. While many modules are built on top of device-mapper, the focus of this article is on multipath-tools. Note that I will be using the terms multipath, multipath-tools and dm-multipath interchangeably to signify the same package. Also note that dm-multipath is the name of the repackaged multipath-tools redistributed under Red Hat in their Advanced Server Linux distribution.
One of the main advantages of using Negative type film is the ability to capture a wider dynamic range than can be achieved with Reversal types (slide/chromes). Unfortunately the image data is usually compressed into a much smaller density range. The big trade-off is our inability to immediately see the information due to the orange mask.
Create an iso image from the contents of a directory: mkisofs -hide-joliet-trans-tbl -l -J -f -T -r . > "../directory_dump_`basename $PWD`.iso" When run in a directory (say tmp) it will create a file called directory_dump_tmp.iso one directory higher, which will contain the contents of the tmp directory in it's root.
Friday, March 13, 2009 Extra Repositories for Ubuntu 8.10 You Might Want Ubuntu logoImage via Wikipedia The repository system is a great strength of open-source operating systems, but some people want the latest-and-greatest of a particular application while keeping the core system unchanged. There is also the situation where non-free applications aren't available from within the standard repositories. In these two cases, adding outside repos can help you get the functionality you want. I've done some homework for you and here are the "Extra Repositories for Ubuntu 8.10 You Might Want." Simply open up System > Administration > Software Sources and add the repository lines listed below as a third-party repository.
FOR MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Princeton, N.J., on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, this country’s most rarefied community of scholars. Lately, however, since coming “out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned,” as Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him. Chat rooms, Web threads, editors’ letter boxes and Dyson’s own e-mail queue resonate with a thermal current of invective in which Dyson has discovered himself variously described as “a pompous twit,” “a blowhard,” “a cesspool of misinformation,” “an old coot riding into the sunset” and, perhaps inevitably, “a mad scientist.”
The Thinsy Alfresco 3 for Active Directory is a Virtual Appliance that takes the monstrous complexity out of installing and configuring an Alfresco system. It enables you to bring up Alfresco for Active Directory in a matter of minutes! Download a virtual appliance, and fire up the VM. Full GUI Configuration is included in the virtual appliance. You will not need to log into the underlying linux system to perform any administration tasks.
Talis Connected Commons The Talis Connected Commons scheme is intended to directly support the publishing and reuse of Linked Data in the public domain by removing the costs associated with those activities. The scheme is intended to support a wide range of different forms of data publishing. For example scientific researchers seeking to share their research data
Feb. 25 (Bloomberg) -- It was 2004 and Tim Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, had a message for the Federal Open Market Committee in Washington. He told his 18 colleagues gathered around the long mahogany table that a clearinghouse was needed to monitor risks in the burgeoning $5 trillion market for credit-default swaps -- the over-the-counter derivatives that would later spin out of control and help take down Wall Street.
EUCALYPTUS - Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems - is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing "cloud computing" on clusters. The current interface to EUCALYPTUS is compatible with Amazon's EC2 interface, but the infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces. EUCALYPTUS is implemented using commonly available Linux tools and basic Web-service technologies making it easy to install and maintain.
I have written many administration guides which cover all of the VMware Enterprise Products (ESX, vCenter, P2V). They have been created in a PDF format.
#2: Replacing same text in multiple files * Difficulty: Intermediate * Application: find/Perl If you have text you want to replace in multiple locations, there are several ways to do this. To replace the text Windows with Linux in all files in current directory called test[something] you can run this: perl -i -pe 's/Windows/Linux/
Steampunk is Goth, Punk, Geek, and Maker Culture whipped into a delicious melange with a healthy seasoning of political and environmental activism. It's the intersection of science and romance, it's sustainable rebellion.
Energy efficiency is not related just to power (kWh) requirement, or cooling requirements, or performance (MIPs) - it pertains to all of these variables. And it's not just a data center issue - it is critical for organizations of all sizes and scopes. To get started improving your energy efficiency, use the Dell Data Center Capacity Planner to understand how your choices impact your energy use.
Dimdim Open Source Community Edition v4.5 “Liberty” is meant for developers, highly technical enthusiasts and for use in non-critical environments. It has the most of the features of Dimdim Enterprise and is based on open source streaming and media components. Dimdim Enterprise is based on commercial streaming and media components (Adobe Flash Server) and runs on top of our SynchroLive Communication Platform to ensure robust scalability and reliability and is fully supported and certified by Dimdim, Inc. The Open source community supports the Open Source Community Edition.
Software Requirements In order to run the applications in the JChem package Java Virtual Machine version 1.4.2 or later has to be installed. JChemManager (jcman) has more requirements. See the Administration Guide for details. Setting Environmental Variables Some environmental variables should be set manually. How to set environment variables ? Windows: Under Windows these variables can be set from the Control Panel. For example in the case of Windows XP: Start menu -> Control panel -> System-> Advanced -> Environment variables After changing the environment variables a new console (Command Prompt) should be opened so the changes can take effect. To check the current setting of an environment variables, type "set" in the console. To print a specific variable type "echo %VARIABLE_NAME%".
In 2007, the National Center for Genome Resources (NCGR) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, best known for the development of bioinformatics tools, established the Schizophrenia Genome Project. Taking Illumina GA sequence data, NCGR scientists used a combination of homegrown Alpheus software and JMP Genomics (from SAS) to develop a streamlined workflow for the acquisition, analysis, and management of huge amounts of next-generation sequencing data—in this case, mRNA.
Nmap Network Scanning is the official guide to the Nmap Security Scanner, a free and open source utility used by millions of people for network discovery, administration, and security auditing. From explaining port scanning basics for novices to detailing low-level packet crafting methods used by advanced hackers, this book by Nmap's original author suits all levels of security and networking professionals. The reference guide documents every Nmap feature and option, while the remainder demonstrates how to apply them to quickly solve real-world tasks. Examples and diagrams show actual communication on the wire. Topics include subverting firewalls and intrusion detection systems, optimizing Nmap performance, and automating common networking tasks with the Nmap Scripting Engine.
Red5 is an Open Source Flash Server written in Java that supports: * Streaming Video (FLV, F4V, MP4) * Streaming Audio (MP3, F4A, M4A) * Recording Client Streams (FLV only) * Shared Objects * Live Stream Publishing * Remoting
Last year, some of our commenters steered me toward ImgBurn as a Nero alternative, and it's been my CD and DVD recording app of choice ever since. It's an excellent lightweight program, handles just about every kind of disc-related task imaginable, and it's totally free.
"This project," said Sergiu Sanielevici, PSC director of scientific applications and user support, who also leads user support and services for the TeraGrid, "exemplifies how powerful systems like Pople can open doors to data-mining and data-centric research in fields not traditionally associated with HPC, such as the social sciences, and make it possible to get answers that would otherwise be impractical or impossible." PSC supported this project through the NSF TeraGrid program, which allocates large-scale computing resources free to researchers at U.S. universities on a peer-review proposal basis.
For around seventy years, 800 rolls of early nitrate film sat in sealed barrels in the basement of a shop. Now miraculously rediscovered and restored, the Mitchell
The goal of Tidydoc is to make documentation organization easier. It addresses the following problems: Add documents to a pool of documents. Give them the right names and put them into the right directories. Reorganize them a posteriori. Generate a set of HTML pages to browse your documents. Generate a bibtex file referencing all your documents.
Evolution of Google File System August 08, 2009 07:26:40 EDT There is an interesting interview about the evolution of the Google File System in ACM Queue. I think it is readable by anybody, not just ACM members. One of the morals of this story is that, even if you are building what you think will be the world's biggest, you still will make design decisions that you know are not scalable because you know how to implement them. It is better to get something running right away and start using it. Of course, they also ran into scalability problems that they did not expect. So, some of the evolution of GFS was planned, and some was unplanned.
So you have heard of all the advantages and geeky babble about how Linux is better and you have finally decided to try it? Just one thing, you don’t know an awful lot about Linux to get you started. How about some free downloadable ebooks to teach yourself Linux, that you can download today? Would that help? Free – you ask? Yes, free. Welcome to the world of Linux where things are free both as in free speech and also as in free beer (mostly)!
Personal supercomputers that lash together a stack of graphics processing units and can sit on a desktop are becoming popular with researchers. These machines can be used to run calculations by the desk instead of waiting for time on one of the national supercomputers.
SUSE Studio is a free, web-based service designed to build virtual appliances, such as pre-installed hardware-appliances, or "software appliances" -- pre-configured Linux server stacks suitable for installation by users on real or virtual commodity hardware. Recently released from beta, SUSE Studio can produce appliance images in raw disk image, Live CD/DVD iso, VMware, and Xen formats, and there are plans in the works for supporting Amazon's EC2 ami format, says the review by our sister publication, eWEEK.
To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 8 top free Linux compilers. Hopefully, there will be something of interest here for anyone who wants to transform source code into another computer language.
VMware to xen migration German original: http://www.eisxen.org/49.html To convert a Linux VMWare Image to a normal image, below the most important commands: install qemu convert the VMware image to a RAW-Image qemu-img convert -f vmdk /var/vmware/vm/vm01.vmdk \ -O raw /tmp/vmimage.raw A vmware imange is a containerfile. The partitions have to be spilt up to individual images for xen. To find out what is in the VMware image, take a look with: fdisk -l -u /home/xen/vmimage.raw Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System linux1 * 63 208844 104391 83 Linux linux2 208845 7550549 3670852 83 Linux linux3 7550550 8193149 321300 82 Linux swap I presume there are already some lvm’s available. Now use the command below a couple times to extract them dd if=vmimage.raw of=/dev/vg01/xendomU01slash bs=512 skip=208845 count=7341705 Of course, check the result (with a (loop)mount)
Re: How migrate vmware guest to xen Hi, It's possible with the qemu tools Install the qemu package (which is available from the OpenSuSE Build Service) and use the following command: qemu-img convert -f vmdk /path/to/vm01.vmdk -O raw /tmp/xenimage.raw This will create a raw disk which can be used with xen from a VMware vmdk disk.
The United States increasingly relies on information networks for the conduct of vital business. These networks are potentially subject to major disruptions from a variety of external sources. To date, there has been no clear statement of the magnitude of this threat or the ability of the various networks to withstand or respond to such disruptions. This project examines the national communications and information infrastructure. The research was conducted for the Office of Science and Technology Policy with task funding from the National Science Foundation.
Before specialized graphics-processing chips existed, pioneers in the field of visualization used multicore supercomputers to realize data in three dimensions. Today, however, the speed at which supercomputers can process data is rapidly outstripping the speed at which they can input and output that data. Graphics-processing clusters are becoming obsolete.
Bacula is a set of Open Source, enterprise ready, computer programs that permit you (or the system administrator) to manage backup, recovery, and verification of computer data across a network of computers of different kinds. Bacula is relatively easy to use and efficient, while offering many advanced storage management features that make it easy to find and recover lost or damaged files. In technical terms, it is an Open Source, enterprise ready, network based backup program.
Collaboration on End-to-End Research Cyberinfrastructure Platform San Diego and Cypress, CA, July 22, 2009 -- National LambdaRail (NLR), the coast-to-coast, high-performance network owned by the research and education community, and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a University of California, San Diego and University of California, Irvine partnership, have agreed to form a collaboration, the goal of which is to help researchers and institutions around the country construct end-to-end research cyberinfrastructure platforms.
eBox Platform eBox Platform is a unified network server that offers easy and efficient computer network administration for SMBs. It can act as a Gateway, an Infrastructure Manager, a Unified Threat Manager, an Office Server, a Unified Communication Server or a combination of them. These functionalities are tightly integrated, automating most tasks, avoiding mistakes and saving time for system administrators. eBox Platform is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and runs on top of Ubuntu GNU/Linux. eBox Technologies S.L. is the company behind eBox Platform and all the technologies and services related to them, providing a comprehensive set of deployment, support and managed services for the Global eBox Partner Network.
Wolfram Alpha to open data feeds Wolfram Alpha, a project from the makers of math software Mathematica, will soon be opening up its data sets, opening up new possibilities for data mash ups
NxTop delivers secure, controlled desktops to any PC in the form of a virtual desktop or a virtual laptop, greatly reducing the cost and complexity of desktop management and patch management while improving desktop environment security. NxTop provides numerous advantages over traditional VDI solutions.
Future of the Screen: After the CRT, a Display Deluge By Jon Stokes | 09.02.09 For the seven decades following the debut of television at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, the term "cathode ray tube" (CRT) was virtually synonymous with "display." Shortly after the turn of the millennium, liquid crystal display (LCD) technology began to replace the venerable CRT in desktop-computer applications, and by the middle of the decade LCD was rapidly squeezing the CRT out the television market that the latter had invented. Just two years ago, it seemed obvious that the display space was in the final stages of a relatively straightforward evolutionary shift, with LCD replacing the CRT in the same way that the gas-powered automobile had replaced the horse and buggy.
At Backblaze, we provide unlimited storage to our customers for only $5 per month, so we had to figure out how to store hundreds of petabytes of customer data in a reliable, scalable way—and keep our costs low. After looking at several overpriced commercial solutions, we decided to build our own custom Backblaze Storage Pods: 67 terabyte 4U servers for $7,867. In this post, we’ll share how to make one of these storage pods, and you’re welcome to use this design. Our hope is that by sharing, others can benefit and, ultimately, refine this concept and send improvements back to us. Evolving and lowering costs is critical to our continuing success at Backblaze. Below is a video that shows a 3-D model of the Backblaze Storage Pod. Continue reading to learn the exact details of the design
The purpose of our centre is to provide a national focus for research and development into curation issues and to promote expertise and good practice, both national and international, for the management of all research outputs in digital format. Find out more about the DCC.