Crackpot Ideas

VMWare HA is not Oracle RAC

mzito — Thu, 14 May 2009 23:01:36 +0000

This originally started out as a much longer rant about EMC/VMWare vs. Oracle in general, but WordPress managed to eat the draft, and there’s no way I’m going to rewrite the whole thing, so I’m going to instead write a series of blog posts, each one covering a point in EMC’s recent salvo against Oracle [...]

“SSH macbook”

mzito — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 06:11:25 +0000

“ssh macbook” is one of the most random large hits to this blog. Unfortunately, it leads people to the first section of a post I have yet to complete about setting up ssh equivalence. And that post has nothing to do with ssh on the macbook, I just get hits because my hostname has “macbook” [...]

“Cloud is the new dotcom”

mzito — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 05:03:44 +0000

George Zachary is a partner at Charles River Ventures, and at the recent TechCrunch Cloud Computing Summit, he said, “Cloud is the new dotcom”. This statement has inspired a variety of responses, but one I’d like to highlight is Reuven Cohen’s. Reuven is the Founder of Enomaly, a company that makes a software product designed [...]

Virtualized Hardware Faster than the Real Deal?

mzito — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:59:46 +0000

Timothy Prickett Morgan over at The Register has penned an article entitled, “Fake server beats real server in web test”. The gist of the article is that VMWare has released results showing that virtual Linux servers running on VMWare’s ESX hypervisor have garnered the highest single-server performance for a 16-core machine, and significantly beat out [...]

Using OCFS2 the right way

mzito — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 14:05:34 +0000

After responding to Jeremy’s message on Oracle-L, it got me reading his blog. On one post, he asks if OCFS2 has a future given the rumored introduction of “ASMfs“, and if it’s worth considering for various purposes, specifically: ” database binaries (vs local files or NFS) diag top (11g) or admin tree (10g) (vs local [...]

Why OS Packages and Databases Don’t Mix

mzito — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 02:54:36 +0000

There was an interesting post to the Oracle-L mailing list today about using OS packages in cluster database environments. A quick snippet from the post: “We typically repackage database binaries as RPMs for wide-scale deployment. Most of the clusters we have currently utilize a CFS. Support scripts are installed onto the CFS with a tarball [...]

Plura Processing’s in ur Browser, stealing yr cycles

mzito — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 04:04:04 +0000

So, I apologize upfront for the title, but I couldn’t resist. Plura Processing came to my attention through my participation in the Cloud Computing Form as someone with a genuinely interesting idea – harvesting browser time spent on websites to process compute cycles on behalf of third-parties. Put another way: you browse to a website, [...]

Google is broken!

mzito — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 15:17:04 +0000

I’m not actually pleased about this, since I used to deal with a 24/7 web infrastructure and having to keep it up (and how painful that is), but Google is so omnipresent that any downtime is devastating. At the moment, every link from a search gives you a “Warning – visiting this web site may [...]

Fun & Games with SSH Equivalence Part 1: The good

mzito — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 03:39:07 +0000

In my day job, I rarely get the opportunity to get as “hands on” as I used to – I still work with Oracle, and of course I still work with our software every day. But the days when I get to roll up my sleeves and dig into a UNIX, storage, or networking problem [...]

Time() Gets Sequential

mzito — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 14:06:57 +0000

A friend of mine pointed out today that UNIX time is approaching an interesting event – one day next month, the number of seconds since the Epoch will (for one second) be 1234567890. As if that’s not weird enough, it will happen on Friday the 13th at 6:31. Clearly the world will be coming to [...]