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I started at my new employer today, eResearch SA.

http://www.eresearchsa.edu.au

The first day went very well. It’s a great work environment, the people I work with are very friendly and approachable and all in all everything is going well so far. I’m catching the bus into work at the moment to see how that works. It saves quite a bit, as parking in the centre of Adelaide is expensive. Average price is about $400 a month. A bus ticket comes in at $27 a week, so bit of a no brainer.

I’ve been introduced to the kit I’m looking after and man what kit it is.
The clusters / computing grids are called Corvus, Aquila and Hydra.

http://www.eresearchsa.edu.au/for_researchers/hpc_services/supercomputers/corvus
http://www.eresearchsa.edu.au/for_researchers/hpc_services/supercomputers/aquila
http://www.eresearchsa.edu.au/for_researchers/hpc_services/supercomputers/hydra

Aquila is just awesome. It’s a large number of SGI boxes strung together into one big Supercomputer. When you login it appears as a single machine with 160 CPUs and 160GB Ram. Amazing. I wish I had some of that fire power at my previous employer.

I purchased a new workstation at work for a new developer. It’s an Intel Core 2 based system, with the express purpose of running VMware for virtualization. All the systems we use are x86_64.

My current recipe for desktops is Fedora 10 x86_64 with Vmware server. The guest that runs under VMware is Centos 5.2 x86_64. I learned to my peril yesterday that the Intel processor I purchased didn’t have Intel-VT support. At first I thought I was going mad, but turns out according to the Intel processor finder web site, that the 2.66 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo E7300 doesn’t have Intel-VT.

Why is this a problem?
Well, almost all Virtualization software today seems to make use of Intel-VT or AMD Virtualization in order to virtualize x86_64 guests. Even though you have a x86_64 host (In my case Fedora 10 x86_64), without Intel-VT or AMD Virtualization you can’t run and x86_64 guest.

So I’m up a creek without a paddle. I tried VMware, Virtual Box, kvm and qemu. Qemu seems to support x86_64 guests without Intel-VT but the documentation I have read says it is slower. If only Xen were currently available on Fedora 10.
Ah well, I’ll have to swap the processor for one with Intel-VT support.

I started using Linux many years ago, in the good old days of Redhat 7.2. When mounting floppy disks was complicated for new users and linux definately was really only for servers.

At the time I don’t even know if Debian existed (I’m sure it did, but I hadn’t been exposed to it). As a result I’ve always been a Redhat man. That has made me pretty biased towards the big Red behemoth.
I have however have had my beliefs swayed by the likes of Ubuntu and even OpenSolaris. Is the Big Red the best?

Don’t get me wrong Redhat Enterprise is great, although I’ve only made use of the RedHat clone CentOS, but in my mind you can’t beat it for stability and enterprise grade services. The major down fall of Redhat is in their quest to be “enterprise” grade, they can be a bit strange when it comes to hardware support. I’ve had a number of instances with CentOS where I’ve had to hack in my own drivers and kernel modules to get things running properly. I understand that you want your Enterprise OS to be as stabile as a rock and as a result you have to be very strict on what support you put in the Kernel, basically only throughly tested and certified drivers. But I frown a bit when they put a driver into the Kernel that doesn’t function properly or has serious flaws in the name of “not being to cutting edge cause we are and Enterprise OS after all”.
You’d expect when you run CentOS or Redhat Enterprise on normal consumer hardware, that you may have issues. Biggest things tend to be Chipset, Disk Controller and Network Card compatibility. I always battle to find hardware that supports Centos 5.2. It’s out there though.

Actually as a side note, when it comes to CentOS, here are some hardware tips I’ve gained from my experiences.
Steer clear of cutting edge boards. G35, P35 Intel chipsets work great. Nvidia seems to be the best for AMD boards. I’ve had serious issues with VIA and ATI (Which is now AMD I guess).
Stear clear of boards with Jmicron storage controllers, Intel and Nvidia is still the best here.
In terms of network cards, Realtek support was very good, but they have been bring out new gigabit cards that are just a pain to get working. The 8111b and 8169 are evil. Broadcom are ok, but the drivers aren’t amazing but they work fine. I recommend Intel cards, they just work.

Anyway, getting back on track, I’ve recently been looking at Ubuntu server and I really like what I see.
The hardware support in Ubuntu 8.04 server just kicks the daylights out of Centos / Redhat Enterprise. The kernel is much newer, but in my opinion still has the stability. I’ve just setup a NAS at work using an old AMD 4800+, 4GB RAM, 4 x 750GB drives running in Software Raid 5. It’s sharing it’s storage via NFS.
I attempted to install Centos 5 on the box, but it just wasn’t stabile enough. Drive access was also very slow. Network cards (which were Realtek 8168 cards) were just flaky. After that I though hell lets just try the latest Fedora 10 for the hell of it. I couldn’t even get it to install properly. The hardware I was using was an ASUS M2N motherboard, not exactly cutting edge. After that I tried Ubuntu 8.04 server, and it’s just magic. All the hardware works perfectly, disk access is fast, NFS works great (Don’t get me started on the crappy NFS kernel server redhat is using…). So Ubuntu won out this time. It’s currently running as a NAS and serving files really well.

Ubuntu did however force me to change the way I think about Linux. I know much more nowadays about the Debian way of doing things as a result of tinkering with Ubuntu. When I first started it was a painful experience. Things are just different enough to give you headaches. But it’s good cause I’m getting my Debian based linux skills to about the same level as my Redhat skills

So, I’m leaning towards Debian nowadays I’m afraid

While it has cooled down a little bit here in Adelaide, it is still insanely hot. Fortunately a large Tropical Cyclone is moving through the Pacific bringing some cooler winds in the evening. But today it is going to be 40, and the next three days the temperature won’t drop below 38. However the temperature has been dropping to the upper 20s in the evenings, which at least gives everything a chance to cool down.

Last week friday you could have put an egg in a pan and left it on the concrete outside and it would have started cooking.

Well I’m at work and if it gets unbearably hot I’m going home. Not slogging it out in the heat. I can’t think properly when I’m too hot and it isn’t all that healthy.

It’s really discouraging nowadays to search Google with a search phrase that has a part number in it. There are just so many shopping portals spamming the search engines nowadays. I specifically was searching for a hardware review on a Linksys SLM2048 to see if they were any good. Google just returned shopping portal spam for the first page, not even the manufacturers site. Yahoo was pretty much identical in crappiness.

At this point I tried the same search in Live and to my amazement, I got some really good results back.
Microsoft seem to have some a long way with the quality of the search results.

Maybe I’m just fickle, but If I put the word “review” in a search phrase, I don’t particularly want a million shopping portals in my results.