For those who still believe that running Windows instead of Linux is cheaper or more cost effective let me give you a real world scenario I discovered today.

We have an application that runs on Windows and needs a new staging environment. I set out to order two simple HP servers. Once again I was dumbfounded by the additional costs associated with simply trying to run a server. So, after chastising one of my team over the fact that we use anything from Microsoft I did a simple cost analysis and came up with hard evidence of the Windows Idiot Tax, the extra costs imposed by using Microsoft products on a server.

By nat

A week of Firefox tabs, a pile of No-Doz tabs, and an open bar tab ... it must be time for another collection of things that caught my eye this week.

• Forbes Piece On Open Source--full of fascinating tidbits: 50% of JBoss deployments are on Windows boxes, Salesforce.com has competition through hosted SugarCRM offerings, Pfizer found LAMP cut development costs over J2EE, ....
• GOffice--less smooth a user experience than Writely, but they're expanding rapidly into other areas of the office space.
• Open Web Design--finally, CSS and HTML it's okay to copy!
• New Zimbra …

It's now already three weeks ago since we did the big step: The upgrade from MySQL 4.1.14 to 5.0.15 on our company's production master server. That's three weeks of experience with MySQL 5.0 in the real word. In my field report I want to tell you why I believe that MySQL 5.0 is the best available database solution for our enterprise, but I also have to tell you why in my opinion 5.0.15 was not yet the production release.

The actual upgrade was almost painless at first. I felt pretty safe, too, as we carefully checked all the points I mentioned in my own article "Safe transition to MySQL 5.0" (written just before the upgrade of our own master server). At the time of the master's upgrade from 4.1.14 to 5.0.15 we already had our 5.0.13 slave running in sync for three weeks without a single crash and we also checked the key applications against a separate 5.0.13 server.

…

I'm still plowing through David Daniell's biography of William Tyndale, translator of the Bible into English (from Greek/Latin/Hebrew). As I read tonight, I came across this quotation from the Bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall, commenting on Tyndale's (and Luther's) translation:Many children of iniquity, maintainers of Luther's sect, blinded through extreme wickedness, wandering from the way of truth and the Catholic faith, have craftily translated the New Testament into our English tongue, intermeddling therewith many heretical articles [though he was never able to name one, except when taken out of context] and erroneous opinions, seducing the common people; attempting by their wicked and perverse interpretations to profane the majesty of Scripture, which hitherto had remained …

memberdb/log.MYD:
 EXT: FILE-OFFSET      BLOCK-RANGE      AG AG-OFFSET        TOTAL
   0: [0..943]:        5898248..5899191  3 (36536..37479)     944
   1: [944..1023]:     6071640..6071719  3 (209928..210007)    80
   2: [1024..1127]:    6093664..6093767  3 (231952..232055)   104
   3: [1128..1279]:    6074800..6074951  3 (213088..213239)   152
   4: [1280..1407]:    6074672..6074799  3 (212960..213087)   128
   5: [1408..1423]:    6074264..6074279  3 (212552..212567)    16
memberdb/log.MYI:
 EXT: FILE-OFFSET      BLOCK-RANGE        AG AG-OFFSET        TOTAL
   0: [0..7]:          10165832..10165839  5 (396312..396319)     8

The interesting thing about this is that the log table grows very slowly. This table stores a bunch of debugging output for my memberdb applicaiton. It should possibly be a partitioned ARCHIVE table (and probably will in the future).

The thing about a file growing slowly over time is that it’s more likely to have more than 1 …

(a little while ago I was writing a really long entry on everything possible. I realised that this would be a long read for people and that less people would look at it, so I’ve split it up).

This sprung out of doing work on the NDB disk data tree. Anything where efficient use of the filesystem is concerned tickles my fancy, so I went to have a look at what was going on.

Filesystems store what part of the disk belongs to what file in one of two ways. The first is to keep a list of every disk block (typically 4kb) that’s being used by the file. A 400kb file will have 100 block numbers. The second way is to store a range (extent). That is, a 400kb file could use 100 blocks starting at disk block number 1000.

XFS has a tool called xfs_bmap. It gives you a list of the extents allocated to a file.

Earlier, when I wrote about upgrading to MySQL 5, I didn't transfer any databases from MySQL 3.23.56 to MySQL 5 because I was going to use the new MySQL 5 installation as a client and load all old tables to MySQL 5 server on a separate machine. Today I needed to transfer some tables from MySQL 3.23.56 to new MySQL 5 (on the same machine) so here I am writing this post.

First, I copied my database directory

cp -p -r /drive2/oldsdd4/mysql/mydb /var/lib/mysql/

Once the MySQL database directory has been copied, you may need to fix permissions (see below).

Once the database directory has been moved, the following command can be used to dump the contents of the database.

mysqldump -uroot -p"mypass" mydb > mydb.sql

To load data …

Why is it that running a monitoring system is such a marketable skill? In every company, having servers up is important. So why doesn’t everyone have a monitoring system? Sure, folks implement scripts, but those are always one-off solutions. And what IS it with folks writing scripts that e-mail them when they’re successful? Just touch a file and have a simple script check to see if the file was touched, that way you know when it failed and do not have to rely on “did I get that e-mail?”

I was lucky to have worked on Nagios while at Tufts, and have set it up everywhere else I’ve worked. I should definitely remember to check up on the plugins site from time to time, so I do not duplicate efforts. Of course, submitting plugins would also eliminate the problem of “I wrote that check at my last company, and now I want it again!” I have not yet come across that, although I did come …