Scott Harney

K10

In the past we’ve been out of town for 8/29. Not this year. The coverage and discussions have been impossible to avoid. The memories and emotions of those dark days have risen up. I really don’t have much else I want to say beyond what I was saying 10 years ago. My first blog post after the storm - Sept 11, 2005. Picture Album - Pictures of our home and neighborhood from that time.

Link: All-flash storage stumbles on cost per gigabyte

A recent post on the notion of the All-Flash Data Center running up against customer realities. This echoes a previous post of mine. Just as the cost flash is decreasing so is the cost of spinning media. Just as flash benefits from dedupe/compression capabilities, so does spinning media driving down the cost of ‘effective capacity’ further. Flash will of course gain against spinning media for active data but we still appear to be a long way off from an all solid state data center without low-cost, high-density magnetic media.

Powershell Scripts for Backup of cDOT NFS Exports

Intro I was working with a customer recently on their new clustered Data OnTap environment. They upgraded from 7-mode and were working on their Disaster Recovery solution. In a 7-mode world, copying SMB shares and NFS exports from a source FAS into a DR target FAS is really just a file copy. The customer environment is relatively small and they like to keep it simple. So doing a simple file compare of /etc/exports works for them.

Document as You Go

Intro. the documentation challenge One habit I strongly recommend to tech practitioners is to document as you go. The usual habit is to try and document everything after you’ve done a new task or completed a troubleshooting item. This rarely works. Usually you’re tired. You’ve forgotten steps or the order things have happened. This is especially true if you’re troubleshooting an issue. You don’t remember exactly what you changed or when, you just know it’s fixed now.

When Rendering Your Laptop Unbootable Is a Learning Experience

Introduction. What happened? I was at a customer site assisting some performance testing of Linux hosts connected to NetApp via NFS. The customer was using sio_ntap which is a NetApp provided load generator and I was experimenting with the same on my laptop. I wasn’t paying close attention and instead of pointing the tool at a file I pointed it at /dev/sda2 which is /boot on my system. I did this dumb thing as root of course.

Link: No Reboot Patching Comes to Linux 4.0

At the Linux Plumbers Conference in October 2014, the two groups got together and started work on a way to patch Linux without rebooting that combines the best of both programs. Essentially, what they ended up doing was putting both kpatch and kGraft in the 4.0 Linux kernel. link

Link: SDN: software defined networking ... or small distributed namespaces

In the current model of SDN, not much has really been tidied up or integrated. We still rely on all those things to some extent. After all, doing away with, say, VLAN would be like doing away with global brands like ketchup, and coke. Rather, network virtualization has been approached by emulating the old software stack, designed principally for LAN, based on tunnels that encapsulate the existing view of the world.