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Identi.ca

Goodbye Twitter and your buggy service. Goodbye Jaiku and your spammy bot. Goodbye Pownce and your 20 users. Hello Identi.ca and Free Software. Reasons for switching to Identi.ca for my microblogging service:

Wait a minute. Rehash that list. Free Software, OpenID, Jabber and an Open Network Service. Sense what I’m sensing? Identi.ca is all about openness and freedom\. Uh, yeah. Signed up, and ditched the other proprietary solutions. I would be surprised if RMS had issues with this service (actually, I probably wouldn’t be surprised, but you get my point).

However, Identi.ca is a bit wet behind the ears currently. Jabber interactivity with the bot is extremely limited. SMS is planned, but not currently implemented. Subscribing to other users is a bit of a pain currently. No search feature. Other shortcomings are listed as bugs and feature requests are welcomed.

You can subscribe to my posts at my page. Happy microblogging.

2008 07 02 Blogging
Freedom
OpenID Comments (4) Permalink

OpenID Re-Enabled…. Again

It’s important to me that my blog support OpenID for commenting under the posts. For the past few months, I have had some database problems which have kept this fine tool from working. It seems to be working currently, but I have only done limited testing. For those with OpenID accounts, please test a comment under this post, seeing if OpenID is working.

Thanks.

2008 06 30 OpenID Comments (11) Permalink

DASH on Ubuntu

A couple recent posts have started on the Utah Open Source Planet regarding popd and pushd not being available on a default Ubuntu install. As discovered, popd and pushd are shell built-ins for the BASH shell, and not provided by the Debian Almquist Shell (DASH). Why has Ubuntu made the change from BASH to DASH as the default shell? Well, there some reasons for it, as identified by the Ubuntu Wiki.

BASH is full-featured bloat. Yes, bloat. If System V Init scripts are relying on BASH to start their service, your boot process will be slower. DASH, in comparison is light and snappy, thus greatly improving the time it takes your computer to boot. If your scripts are adhering to POSIX standards, and are using /bin/sh rather than /bin/bash, you shouldn’t notice any problems. However, if your scripts are relying on /bin/bash features, such as popd or pushd, and you change the interpreter at the top of your script to /bin/sh, you’ll have some breakage.

For what it’s worth, this isn’t anything new with 8.04. DASH became the default in Ubuntu with 6.10, so we’ve had it in this manner for some time. If you would like to change it, then point the symbolic link from /bin/sh to /bin/bash rather than /bin/dash, and you’re done. However, as you may have noticed, it could cause some breakage if you Bourne-compatible scripts contain “Bashisms”.

Personally, I recommend the Z-shell (ZSH) to anyone looking for an alternative to DASH or BASH. Much more capable, flexible and configurable shell.

2008 06 27 Scripting
Ubuntu Comments (3) Permalink

Why Online Ads Aren’t Working

I’m a HUGE fan of AdBlock Plus coupled with EasyList, the awesome extension for Firefox. The reason being? I hate seeing ads on websites.

Not that I have anything against advertising. I don’t. I watch the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the World Series and even the Heavyweight Title Bout just for the commercials. I couldn’t care less about sports, or the televised event. Why? Because the ads are incredible. They are fun, creative, hip and all around just great, yet, they still manage to reach me as a viewer advertising their product. I can remember specific Nike, Budweiser, GoDaddy, BMW, Dell, Levi’s, and many other ads from several years ago (remember the Budweiser frogs?). They left an impression on me. On rare occasion, even ads on everyday prime time television seem to “hit home”, and stay logged in the memory banks of my mind.

What’s great? These ads have been so effective, that there are sites a plenty following the main event dedicated to people who want to watch just the adverts, such as superbowl-ads.com.

For the most part, however, ads just come and go. Radio ads. Mailbox ads. Television ads. And even online ads. Nothing original. Nothing creative. Nothing hip. Nothing fun. It’s the same thing, over and over and over, just using different graphics, or a different theme. The presentation remains the same. Think of the paper ads that you find in your mailbox or in the newspaper. Do you recall any specific ad insert, or do they all just blend in as the same thing? Do you recall anything specific that the insert was advertising? What’ about a radio ad? I have a few good ones that have stuck with me, specifically a Pringles ad, but for the most part, it’s just the same dull audio. I think you get the point.

The Internet sits at a different position than its other media outlet cousins. It has the ability for anyone, including me with this blog, to push their opinion, product or content. So, you would think that advertising marketers would take advantage of this outlet, and present ads that influence the browser. However, that’s just not the case. With online ads currently, it’s either:

  1. Flash-based
  2. Text-based

First off, both suffer from great irrelevance. I have personally seen ads of both nature, that have nothing to do with the site I’m visiting. For example, when recording my workout on an exercise site, I don’t want to see something on improving my love life. If viewing a page about something related to Ubuntu, I probably don’t want to purchase an enterprise rack system with Linux preinstalled. We all know what I’m referring to. Advertisements using text on the page to create a “relevant” ad. While some ads have gotten better in this department, for the most part, I’m unimpressed.

Further, picking on just the flash-based sites, I hate to see moving objects on a web page while I’m trying to read a document. It’s annoying, obnoxious, and I end up adjusting my window size and page location, so the advert is out of my peripheral while reading. Or, I just install an ad-blocker, then I don’t have to worry about it.

So, it’s no surprise to me when I read Techdirt’s article regarding the problem with online advertising. They hit the subject right in the head. While you would think online advertisers would appreciate this sort of feedback (users installing ad-blocking software), instead, they are complaining that if ads aren’t online, we’ll see less and less content being published.

The simple fact is, the current state of online advertising is bad advertising. They just aren’t reaching the average web surfer. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that ads haven’t been a youthful spring of wealth for content publishers, there seems to be little data supporting the growth and profit of products purchased from online ads, yet a wealth of data showing the amount of revenue spent on online ads. Sorry, but the captive audience is dead.

Yet, the Washington Post, as Techdirt points out, seems to have missed the memo. “Rick752″, his handle online, is being targeted in that article as the man that could “threaten the financial underpinnings of much of the Web”. Maybe I missed the memo, but I fail to notice where “the Web” is built on the financial gains of any one company. If content publishers go out of business because of Rick752, they failed to learn how to reach their audience, and thus, failed to sell their product. All they were selling, were ads.

Take Daily Kos, for example, as the Washington Post points out. If you’re running an ad-blocking software, such as AdBlock Plus, you’ll notice a nag at the top of the page pleading, nay, begging you to either disable the blocker, or subscribe to what is normally a free site. If they get visits without the ad revenue from clicks, then their content will go under, and Daily Kos will be forced to go offline. It’s rather unfortunate that they haven’t learned the principle of Content is Advertising. So, if they go offline due to a lack of ad revenue, they have no one to blame but themselves.

In a nutshell, I’m not offended by ads. Again, I like to watch the major sporting events on television just because of the ads. I know many people who are the same. I’m just not a fan of the current state of affairs. I’ve had AdBlock Plus installed practically from the day it was installed. Since then, not only have I not been annoyed, but I haven’t received any malware or spyware from the ads. My pages load faster, and my browser is more stable.

Keep rockin’ AdBlock!

2008 06 26 General Comments (7) Permalink

Cocytus

If you have read my blog in the past, you might have learned a little about my network, and the hostnames of the computers that reside therein. The idea is simple, yet sadistic:

I put on an elaborate play, in which I play the main character Zeus, and the computers in my network are Greek and Roman gods. My network is guarded by Hades, leader and god of the Underworld. In the Underworld, these “gods” are thrown into the river Cocytus, which is one of the 5 rivers flowing through Hades. Cocytus, as Greek mythology has it, is the River of Lamentation. As such, my gods are suffering an endless torment with weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth, until the hardware breaks, and the computer is replaced. As it currently sits, I have thrown the following gods into the river Cocytus:

Achilles, Athena, Hades, Helios, Janus (a Roman God) and Kratos. A former member, who finally gave up the ghost after much lamentation, was Heracles, a good HP laptop.

Where Cocytus comes into play, is it has been chosen as the domain for my network. Fully qualified domains follow the syntax of GOD.LOCATION, where in this case, LOCATION is the purchased cocyt.us domain, and it is the fundamental domain for my sadistic play. So, achilles.cocyt.us, hades.cocyt.us, helios.cocyt.us, and so forth. Of course, this domain is only for internal DNS queries, and won’t provide anything useful to the external network.

What’s next that I can add to this play?

2008 06 13 General Comments (4) Permalink

Das Keyboard III

Little did I know, that on my birthday just 3 days ago, the Das Keyboard crew released version 3 of their fabulous tactile keyboard. Major highlights? 2 USB 2.0 ports on the right side of the keyboard, blue LEDs, glossy finish, and the ability to purchase a Das Keyboard with inscriptions on the keys (using a stylish font, I must say).

It keeps all the aspects of version 2 that I love. The clickity-clack of the key snap, the mechanical switches, and no inscriptions. The Das Keyboard is by far the most enjoyable keyboard I have ever typed on. I can only imagine that version 3 is just as enjoyable.

Sign me up. I want one!

2008 06 12 General Comments (5) Permalink

Chalk Up Another Year

cat /dev/zero | tr '\0' '\377' | dd of=aaron bs=1 count=31
2008 06 09 General Comments (3) Permalink

What About Interoperability?

Tomorrow is my birthday, so yesterday, my wife and I went to a local electronics store, and purchased a 1 TB hard drive to store family photos, videos and other data. The only requirement, is that the drive’s filesystem be compatible with both Mac OS X, and Ubuntu 8.04. I figured this was a non-issue, as it’s 2008, and computing has come leaps and bounds over just the last 5 years. We purchase the drive and come home.

First thing I do, after unpacking it of course, is pull up Wikipedia to see what my options are as far as compatibility between the two operating systems. As far as legitimate native filesystem support, here’s the page I found: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems#OS_support. Comparing Mac to Linux, my only options are crap:

  • FAT12/16/32/NTFS- Suffers from BAD block fragmentation. While I don’t plan on deleting data a lot from the drive, should I ever need to, I don’t want to have to sit there and defrag my drive everytime I turn around. Further, the FAT-family of filesystems have disk limits that keep me from taking advantage of a full terabyte anyway.
  • HFS- Three main problems with this filesystem: 1) it suffers from a write queue where only one application is allowed to write at a time. In other words, not a multi-tasked filesystem. 2) I’m limited to 65,535 maximum files on disk. With a 1TB drive, I’m not too terribly excited about that. 3) With large disk space, HFS suffers badly from wasted disk space, as files must occupy the entire allocation block size. With a 1GB disk, this is 16KB. If a file size isn’t a multiple of 16KB, then you have wasted disk space.
  • HFS+- This would be a fine solution, if in Linux, I wasn’t required to make the partition a multiple of 4K. Every time I try a “mkfs.hfsplus /dev/sdb1″, I get an error. I don’t want to make the partition smaller, thus eliminating disk space, just so I can make HFS+ happy.
  • ext2- With a 3rd party tool, Mac OS X can read and write ext2 filesystems. This is good news, as ext2 has proven to be reliable, stable and robust. However, the tool for OS X has not been updated since 2006, and it seems the developer has abandoned the project. With outstanding bugs, this doesn’t inspire confidence in the tool.

    • Now, let me make one thing clear. I do not have a computer with USB 2.0 or Firewire 400 that I could plug this into for NFS. Otherwise, NFS would be my option, as I could put any filesystem on it I wanted to, and we’d be done with it.

    Needless to say, this is 2008, and I’m not too terribly excited with the lack of operating system interoperability right now. Are we still playing games of “My OS is better than your OS”? Please.

2008 06 08 Linux Comments (16) Permalink

What Goes Out Can Come Back In

Remember the old saying “What goes up must come down”, referring to the gravitational pull? Well, I have a similar saying for firewalls: What goes out can come back in. This is a cool SSH trick that will stump even the most seasoned network administrators.

The trick is port forwarding. The idea is that a box will be listening for connections on a port that you specify. If a connection is made, the packets are then transferred through the SSH connection to the box at the other end on a different port that you have specified. So, the obvious is, you need access to an SSH server to make this possible. Let’s take a specific example.

I’m at work. The company mail server is not accessible from the Internet, so when I get home, I can’t read my corporate mail. One specific day during the week, however, I need access. I try to convince the network administrator to punch a hole in the firewall, or at least give me VPN access, but nothing. No ports open for tightest security is his approach. So, seeing as though I have access to an SSH server at home, I open an outbound port that will allow me to connect back in. In otherwords, piggy-backing off of the SSH connection to my home SSH server. I issue the following command from work, just before I leave:

ssh -R 22225:mail.company.com:25 -fN ssh.home.com

What is this saying exactly? It’s saying that the SSH server on ssh.home.com will be listening for mail traffic on port 22225. When a connection is made, the packets will be forwarded through the SSH connection to mail.company.com in the corporate office on port 25. As far as the connection is concerned, mail.company.com received a port 25 packet as if it came from the box internally on the corporate LAN. All I need to do, is launch my favorite email client that supports TCP proxies, and connect to ssh.home.com on port 22225 to make the connection. Simple as pie.

Let’s look at another example:

ssh -R 22222:foo.example.com:22 -fN ssh.home.com

This example is saying that the SSH server on ssh.home.com will be listening for SSH traffic on port 22222. If a connection is made, the packets will be forwarded through the SSH connection to foo.example.com in the corporate office on port 22. This is a great way to get SSH access to machines in the office that are not accessible to the Internet.

Cool, eh? Who would’ve thought that the developers of the most secure-by-default Unix, OpenBSD, would be providing me with simple tools to bypass firewalls?

Now, the question remains, what about the firewall? My only response- what about it? If you have an outbound Internet connection, your only task may be to find out what port is open for the outbound connections. If you have access to an SSH server that you can configure, then change the port on the SSH box to match your corporate outbound port, and you’ve effectively bypassed any and all firewalls that may be in place, both out an in. The only way, the ONLY way you can keep me from bypassing your firewall is to completely cut outbound connections to the Inertnet. Completely, and totally isolate the corporate network. Then, you have a impenetrable firewall.

So, as I mentioned earlier, “What goes out can come back in”.

2008 06 05 Linux
Security Comments (11) Permalink

Firewire Networking In Linux

Today, I had the need to transfer a great deal of data from my wifes old iBook to my T61. As I sat down, I plugged in my USB 2.0 hard drive, and begin transferring the data. 3 minutes later, it’s finished. Now, to plug it in to my T61 and repeat the process. This is taking too long. There has to be a faster solution. First, I thought about wireless. Both of our laptops have 802.11g, but that’s only 54 Mbps, vs 480 Mbps with USB 2.0. That would take substantially longer. We both have 10/100 NIC cards, so 100 Mbps is better, but no where near USB 2.0. Then I recognize the Firewire ports, and remember reading years ago that you could network Firewire devices. At 400 Mbps, this seems to be a good solution if I can ad hoc the laptops.

After a Bit O’ Google, I find the answer. First I needed to load the eth1394 driver into the kernel (and ieee1394 if not already):

aaron@kratos:~ 6673 % sudo modprobe eth1394
aaron@kratos:~ 6674 % lsmod | grep 1394
eth1394                22024  0
ohci1394               36532  0
ieee1394              106968  3 eth1394,sbp2,ohci1394

Now, I have a new eth1 device, of which I can set an address to.

aaron@kratos:~ 6675 % ip addr show eth1
6: eth1:  mtu 1500 qdisc noop qlen 1000
    link/ieee1394 00:06:1b:03:2a:11:22:51 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
aaron@kratos:~ 6676 % sudo ifconfig eth1 10.19.84.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
aaron@kratos:~ 6677 % ip addr show eth1
6: eth1:  mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast qlen 1000
    link/ieee1394 00:06:1b:03:2a:11:22:51 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 10.19.84.1/24 brd 10.19.84.255 scope global eth1

Now, to do the same on my wife’s iBook. Because she’s running Mac OS X, I’m not too terribly familiar with the tools on the command line, so, I’ll pop into the GUI. First, I need to open up System Preferences and click on Network. Then listed is Firewire Networking. I’ll click that and setup my connection manually, giving it the IP address of 10.19.84.2 with the same netmask of 255.255.255.0. Now to test the connection from my T61:

aaron@kratos:~ 6678 % ping -c 2 10.19.84.2
PING 10.19.84.2 (10.19.84.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 10.19.84.2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.492 ms
64 bytes from 10.19.84.2: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.476 ms

--- 10.19.84.2 ping statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 2 received, 0% packet loss, time 1001ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.476/0.484/0.492/0.008 ms

Success! Now, to transfer my file. I setup an SSH server on my T61 listening on all interfaces, so, from the terminal on the iBook, I could issue the following command:

athena:~ aaron$ scp ubuntu-8.04-dvd-i386.iso 10.19.84.1:~
-snip-
aaron@10.19.84.1's password:
ubuntu-8.04-dvd-i386.iso                      100% 3795MB  25.5MB/s   02:29

While definitely better than copying it from iBook to external hard drive, than external hard drive to T61, I was disappointed in the performance. Only 25.5MBps? I thought ieee1394a had 400Mbps, or 50MBps theoretical max. And I’m only getting half? I hope it’s compression that’s slowing it down. I may spend some time digging deeper to see if I can get a faster speed.

At any event, the file was transferred only once, and I was able to take advantage of the fastest speed I had available- networking with Firewire.

2008 06 01 Linux Comments (13) Permalink

Automating Debian/Ubuntu Installs With Preseed

As a Linux instructor for Guru Labs, I get the opportunity to do a great deal of system administration. One of those responsibilities as an admin is performing installations of RHEL, Fedora, SLES, OpenSUSE and OEL. Soon, hopefully, we’ll be adding Debian and Ubuntu to the mix of courses and courseware. As such, along with Christer Edwards who also teaches at Guru Labs, I’ve taken it upon myself to find the necessary admin tools to bring to the table for our future courses. One such tool that has bothered me as of late, is automating an Ubuntu or Debian install.

With Red Hat and Fedora, the Anaconda installer automatically creates a /root/anaconda-ks-cfg file. This file is a Kickstart file necessary for automating installs if I want to build machines exactly like the one I just installed. In other words, this file is all the answers to the questions that I just entered for that installation. This is a handy feature. Why doesn’t Debian and Ubuntu do this? Actually, they do. Kind of.

When asked the necessary questions in the Debian text-based installer, a database is created keeping track of each of those answers. When the system is finished installing, that database is stored under /var/log/installer/questions.dat. Unfortunately, if you installed your system via the GUI installer, this file is not created. Further, you will need a utility to extract the answers to those questions, as the questions.dat file is a binary database.

So, we need to install debconf-utils for access to a couple of binaries necessary to build this preeseed config file for automating the rest of the installations that I wish to perform.

sudo aptitude install debconf-utils

After installed, I now have access to the debconf-get-selections tool for helping be exctract the answers out of the questions.dat database. So…

sudo debconf-get-selections --installer > preseed.cfg
sudo debconf-get-selections >> preseed.cfg

I now have a preseed config file necessary for my automated installs. However, that config file may have a bunch of unnecessary stuff that I may not want for the install. So, I should open up that config file, and edit it as necessary, removing a lot of the bloat. It is best, rather, to build a preseed.cfg file from scratch, or using an example template, and building from there. This approach is superior for a couple of reasons. First, I will learn the internals of preseed itself. Second, I will become intimately familiar with the Debian installer questions, and the power that I probably take for granted. After building my own preseed file from scratch, I can then customize it to fit my needs, or my network needs, as necessary.

To build one such file, the Debian documentation team has some decent docs for helping me get started. However, the docs are hardly exhaustive, so you may find yourself spending a bit of time on Google, before getting the hang of it. At the documentation site, I have “Creating a preconfiguration file” and “Contents of the preconfiguration file” documents available. Spending some time there, learning preseed is time well spent. After the file is created, there is a syntax checker to make sure the contents of the preseed file are sound:

sudo debconf-get-selections -c preseed.cfg

Now that I have my built preseed file, it’s time to boot my boxes using the file. Obviously, I will need to make the file accessible somehow. I can make this preseed file accessible via HTTP, FTP, NFS, locally on a hard drive or partition, CDROM or even built into the initial RAM disk itself. Once I have that access, at the boot prompt, I enter the following (adjusting as necessary for the location of the preseed file):

linux preseed/url=http://foo.com/bar/preseedcfg

And, based on the contents of the preseed file located at that web address, the installer starts, and off we run with installing the new Debian or Ubuntu system, completely hands-off (again, based on the file contents).

As an ending thought, preseed can read Anaconda Kickstart files, but there is still a bit to yet be implemented. If you prefer using Kickstart as a method for automating your installs, you should probably build a hybrid file for the missing Kickstart features with preseed. There is also a GUI tool for building Kickstart files available in the Debian and Ubuntu repositories:

sudo aptitude install system-config-kickstart

However, using Kickstart files to build your Debian or Ubuntu box isn’t as flexible or powerful as preseed, and further, you really won’t learn the internals of the Debian installer. Kickstart is heavily documented, unlike the sparse documentation that exists for preseed, so you’ll likely find more answers if building a Kickstart file.

2008 05 20 Linux
Ubuntu Comments (1) Permalink

Open Discussion Day - Belated

Well, wouldn’t you know it? Comcast decided to cut my Internet connection late Sunday night, leaving me with no Internet at all Monday– the day of Open Discussion Day. Of course, this is no excuse for not blogging it earier, and I have no excuse for not blogging in almost a month! However, http://opendiscussionday.org is open for business, although, there isn’t a lot of content there… yet. My plans are to have that site as a great resource for anyone wishing to get information on switching from proprietary legacy IM protocols to open ones. Further, hopefully, next year’s Open Discussion Day will be a bit more of a party then it was this year. :) If interested, we do have #opendiscussion registered as the official channel for the project. If you want to learn more about us, that would be the first place I turn to.

See you online!

2008 05 20 Jabber Comments (0) Permalink

More Filesystem Foo

Well, not exactly “benchmarking” in the strictest sense, but interesting data I find nonetheless. Setting out on my voyage to learn more about filesystems that the Linux kernel supports, I went looking for which filesystem does the best job at managing space. No speed tests. No data integrity. No feature comparisons. Just space conservation. Of course, I plan on investigating these filesystems further on those notes, and will report my findings, but suffice it for now to compare space utilization.

First, I have 6 2GB USB thumb drives for this test. Unfortunately, 2 of them are slightly smaller than the other 4. As such, I felt that LVM would be a good solution for making sure each filesystem was put on the exact same storage container.

The result? 6 logical volumes exactly the same size, each with 486 PEs with 4MB per PE. Each filesystem was mounted to it’s own directory under /mnt:

aaron@kratos:~ 4149 % df -h /dev/mapper/test-*
Filesystem              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/test-ext2   1.9G  2.9M  1.8G   1% /mnt/ext2
/dev/mapper/test-ext3   1.9G   35M  1.8G   2% /mnt/ext3
/dev/mapper/test-jfs    1.9G  376K  1.9G   1% /mnt/jfs
/dev/mapper/test-reiser 1.9G   33M  1.9G   2% /mnt/reiser
/dev/mapper/test-vfat   1.9G  4.0K  1.9G   1% /mnt/vfat
/dev/mapper/test-xfs    1.9G  288K  1.9G   1% /mnt/xfs

Next, I needed to populate these filesystems with some data. I ran the following for-loop:

for i in ext2 ext3 vfat xfs jfs reiser; do
    dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/$i/foo.img bs=1024 count=500000
done

Let’s see how they fared:

aaron@kratos:~ 4166 % df -h /dev/mapper/test-*
Filesystem              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/test-ext2   1.9G  492M  1.3G  28% /mnt/ext2
/dev/mapper/test-ext3   1.9G  524M  1.3G  29% /mnt/ext3
/dev/mapper/test-jfs    1.9G  489M  1.5G  26% /mnt/jfs
/dev/mapper/test-reiser 1.9G  521M  1.4G  27% /mnt/reiser
/dev/mapper/test-vfat   1.9G  489M  1.5G  26% /mnt/vfat
/dev/mapper/test-xfs    1.9G  489M  1.5G  26% /mnt/xfs

VFAT, XFS and JFS all seem to do fairly well on data conservation. Knowing that the FAT filesystem isn’t very robust, or feature-packed, looking at just this data, I would be willing to spend some time further with JFS and XFS. However, to be fair, I’ll give FAT a good look in respect to features.

It is a pity however, that Sun Microsystem’s ZFS is licensed under the CDDL. I would rather enjoy working with that filesystem, I think, as it supports a great set of features. Unfortunately, unless ZFS is ported to the GPL, it’s unlikely that we’ll see it in kernel space, and I’m not really interested in an implementation of it under FUSE.

2008 04 23 Linux Comments (5) Permalink

XFS vs Reiser

Last night, Christer and I were playing with the Ubuntu 8.04 installer, trying to break it, and get any last bugs reported before final is released tomorrow.

What I noticed last night, during the install really surprised me. ReiserFS is a screaming filesystem compared to XFS. After doing the install 3 times on 2 identical machines (Dell Precision 490), in every case, ReiserFS was nearly twice as fast completing the install. Didn’t matter how the disk was partitioned either. It is a screaming speed machine. Further, launching applications, and playing with KVM, it was also noticeably faster than it’s XFS competition.

However, XFS did have much better storage management in the way of sqeezing out every last byte on the drive. In fact, on bare bones installs, XFS gave me 10% more storage space than ReiserFS.

Conclusion? If you’re after speed, from what I gathered last night, ReiserFS screams. If you’re looking for maximized disk space, XFS is the clear winner there. Was the disk space gain worth the wait of the install? Yeah, probably. But man, post-install, launching applications with ReiserFS was still noticeably faster than XFS.

I’m curious about these, and will be benchmarking some more in the future. Expect follow-up posts on this topic.

2008 04 23 Linux
Ubuntu Comments (18) Permalink

More Man Page Goodness

As I’m sitting in the San Jose Airport, I’m reading the sfdisk man page to get a better handle on the command. I want to script setting up partitions, rather than the interactive fdisk. As I’m reading along, I got a chuckle out of the -f or –force switch:

       -f or –force
              Do what I say, even if it is stupid.

I don’t know why I found that funny, but I thought to myself that more man pages need to be written in this fashion. It sure does brighten up the whole system-administration thing.

2008 04 18 Linux Comments (8) Permalink