Do yourself a favour and check out the linux action show at http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/
Bryan and Chris talk about all things Linux and I religiously watch every episode. It’s definitely worth your time 
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As the title states, you don’t realise how important something is until it’s gone.
What am I talking about? Who or what has disappeared from my life?
It sounds far more sinister than it actually is, however it affects a large chunk of my everyday life.
Air Conditioning…..
The concept of heating or cooling an environment making it more comfortable to live in.
We as humans love our air conditioned houses and offices, however we can survive without it.
IT equipment such as servers, disk storage, networking gear, tend to frown upon the lack of cooling and eventually commit suicide or in some instances shutdown to save themselves from impending doom.
I recently lost most of my A/C capacity in one of my larger server rooms and it has effectively crippled most of the services I look after.
Focusing on your IT infrastructure as much as I do, you may fall into the trap of ignoring your UPS humming away in the corner, or your two large redundant A/C units. Even with maintenance contracts and outside contractors to service the equipment, you may choose uptime over repair time.
My main message, remember that the infrastructure around your gear is just as important as the gear itself. Without electricity and cooling, you may as well pack up and go home.
I’m working on automating and upgrading the Corvus High Performance Computer at my employer eRSA / Uni of Adelaide.
It’s currently running Novell SLES 10, so I’m working on getting it up to SLES 11, which is coming along quite nicely. Part of my upgrade plan is to implement a better installation method along with automating the configuration of the compute nodes in the cluster.
Corvus has 75 compute nodes and a single head node. The compute nodes are SGI Altix XE310′s which are largely a generic supermicro chassis with and intel server thrown inside. The trick is that a single 1U chassis has two physical nodes in it, making it an ultra dense solution. Each node has a standard intel BMC which supports IMPISH.
The existing automated installation system for installing the nodes is the Scali Cluster Manager. Scali has been gobbled up by Platform Computing. This seems to mean big bucks to upgrade our Scali license. As a result I’ve replaced the existing Scali Cluster Manager with the opensource solution from IBM called xCAT.
xCAT is really good and handles the scaling up of the cluster really well. The include post install scripts cover most requirements and writing my own has been fairly straight forward. So now I have a standardised way to install the nodes, I need a way to automate the configuration.
To automate the configuration I’m going to be using Puppet. I created a small test system using some virtualbox guests and it worked great out the box. I’ve bought this book from Apress, which has only recently been released. It’s really good and I’d highly recommend it. http://apress.com/book/view/1590599780
In the end I should have an excellent and scalable way to install and manage the nodes.
My place of employ, eResearch SA has appointed an new Director and I’ve been helping setup the new equipment that was purchased for her. The new MacBook Pro is very shiny with all it’s aluminium bits and has a nice quality feel to it. The magic mouse, which looked a bit weird and was bit confusing to setup at first is a really clever piece of tech. I loved being able to assign virtual buttons to different parts of the mouse. Very clever. Although, my personal opinion is it wouldn’t work that well for gaming without a better sensor when compared to my Razor Boomslang or Diamondback for example.
I also configured my bosses iPhone to sync up with her MacBook. To be honest, my experience with the iTunes / syncing setup with the iPhone has always been via Windows. The integration with the Mac is so easy and smooth with regards to contacts and so.
I also had a look at her iPhone 3Gs and realised just how slow and clunky iOS 4 is on the old 3G. The 3Gs is much smoother.
Makes me almost want to go out and buy a new Mac
I’ve had a mobile me account with Apple for over a year now. I signed up to it shortly after getting my iPhone. I love using the service, even though it may have had a bit of a rocky start when it was launched. My me.com email address is solid, I also love the way they have implemented the gallery, beats the living heck out of the php based gallery2 I was living with (plus I don’t have to manage it and update the code :p). The calendar works great and syncs up with my iPhone.
All in all it covers everything I need to live online. However I was partly annoyed that the only way I could access my me.com iDisk was via a web interface, where I would rather like to be able to mount it as a disk. Not being able to mount my iDisk prompted me to signup for a jungle disk account from Rackspace which has great support for Linux, Windows etc. Turns out that much has changed in the land of the iDisk and with the release of Mac OS X 10.6, iDisk support was bundled into the OS. The mobile me widget / applet for Windows also does the same thing (although how the heck you configure it is beyond me) and allows you to mount the iDisk. What about Linux….!
However after digging around the net, I’ve found a blog post from Chris Danielson here http://tinyurl.com/2anfbpk about mounting an iDisk using the fuse davfs2 module.
I could give this man a carton of beers for the post
So I feel a bit silly not doing more research before jumping onto Jungle Disk, as my iDisk is accessible the way I want it, after all. It’s only costing me about $2.50 a month for the Jungle Disk account, but my me.com disk is already paid for and I’m not using it….
I also had a look at dropbox, which seems like a great service, but appears to be overkill for my needs at the moment.
I really only use my online storage as a backup and an easy way to get to my documents etc when I’m out and about on my iPhone.
So while I have a Jungle Disk, I think I may drop it and stick to my me.com iDisk and save a whole $2 :p