Initialization problems

[Sxooter]

Heavy parallel load just means LOTS of folks using it at the same time. I.e. typical OLTP type stuff.

[csn]

Sxooter - Have you ever thought of joining the ever-growing hordes who have switched to Mac OSX? (I haven't myself, and don't plan to in the near future, but if somebody gave me a free Apple system I probably wouldn't mind 😉. )

[Sxooter]

I think OSX is a pretty good workstation OS, but as a server OS it's light years behind Linux or regular BSD. After all, I can run Linux or BSD on 4 way dual core Opterons, mainframes, powerPC, hand helds, etc..., and it's free.

Then again, I'm not a big fan of GUIs actually, remember my previous post where I mentioned I was a dedicated shell user on the Amiga... 🙂

I think that if Apple sold a GUI layer that I could compile on my own to run on top of a compliant Unix / Linux distro, I might be interested, but to me, OSX is to other OSes what the iPod is to other MP3 players, over priced, but dumbed down for the average user.

I bought my Creative Zen 30 gig player for $240 when a 20 gig iPod was going for almost $400 or so. It works well, runs 10 hours on a charge, and I can change the battery myself. Which allows me to have a charged spare for long camping trips etc... For me, the ease of use of the iPod meant nothing to me, as long as they both just worked, which they did.

The thing that I don't like about OSX is that it's so heavily slanted towards making the gui experience trouble free for a workstation user, that it often makes the command line life of an administrator rather frustrating. An example was an introduction of a change in something around 10.2 or 10.3, whereby the method for setting kernel limits changed. Now, you can only set a kernel limit once, at boot up, and the upgrade introduced a file that set it that got run before the old file to set it, and suddenly, your OSX / postgresql server won't start the postgresql service, and you spend a couple days figuring out what the problem is.

That kind of non-standard behaviour, from the normal unix way of doing things, is what turns me off to OSX, plus the fact that it's just plain slow compared to Linux or BSD on similarly priced hardware.

As for the postgresqlfs, there was one before, someone made it. It was interesting. Not sure it was more than a simple proof of concept toy though.

[csn]

Underneath Mac OSX is pretty much FreeBSD, if I'm not mistaken. I agree with you - probably a really good OS for workstations, but not servers. I think I'd prefer it to either desktop Linux or Windows. I was checking out a Mac osx desktop yesterday and it seemed really slick, and I could fire up a terminal for a unix shell. And it seems that Mac osx has a lot more really slick apps than desktop Linux does. One thing I hear time and again about Mac osx is "it just works", whereas on desktop Linux it can still be a real challenge to get things like sound cards, WIFI, etc. working.

But I don't think I want to buy into Apple - it seems that a lot of their stuff is proprietary, overpriced, and overhyped. I got a free Ipod (from a promotion) and wasn't too impressed with it - ITunes won't even recognize it anymore, the headphones have disintegrated, it holds a charge for only about 2 hours in its unreplacable battery, and all its accessories are overpriced.

[Sxooter]

I'm not totally anti apple or anything, I just don't feel a need to pay an apple tax 🙂 For me, desktop Linux is more than good enough. I installed linux (FC3 to be exact) on my IBM T42, and other than a mild bit of hoop jumping for the wireless networking, requiring me to download a set of files and toss them into my kernel modules directory, everthing was auto configured, and just worked.

I own an iPod shuffle that my company gave to everyone, and it's a pretty decent little player, but I've never used iTunes, as they don't, as far as I know, support Linux. Plus I'm not paying someone else to encode mp3s for me, when I can pay less to buy the CD and burn it myself, and have it in both CD and mp3 format. Have you ever used Grip? it's very nice. Put in a CD, tell it to rip and encode, and 5 or 10 minutes later you've got mp3s ready to install on your mp3 player.

I guess if I was a graphic artist, I'd likely have a Mac, but I'm not, so the Gimp is good enough for me, I guess. 🙂

[csn]

No, never used (or heard of) Grip. I use CDEx - not sure if it's available for Linux (Sourceforge is currently down, so I can't check).

I guess if I was a graphic artist, I'd likely have a Mac

Yeah. The store had this HUGE Cinema display - guess it was the 24" - and it looked great. Pictures were slow to load (about 5-10 seconds) though. But, Dell has displays nearly identical to Cinemas, that can probably be had for far less. I think Apple's Cinemas use proprietary connections too 🙁.

[Sxooter]

Actually, I think that's just the newest weird connector for such screens. We have flat screens with such strange connectors here at work (20 to 21" diags or so) and they have it.

Main reason for the MAC for graphic artists is the software they have, and the stablity while running it. Nothing sucks as much as trying to edit video on a windows box, with the crashing and stalling and all that. Mac has always been better at graphics and video than windows in terms of stability, and it has way more software for it than linux, in that realm. I mean, I love the Gimp, but it's not in the same realm as photoshop.

BCast 2000, or whatever it's called now is pretty good on linux, but again, the stuff for the mac provides both a wider range of software, and, generally, a better experience.

[csn]

Hey Sxooter - do you know of a good program (that can run in Windows, DOS, or via boot) that can checkout hard disks (and maybe other hardware like disk controllers) for bad blocks, errors, etc. and perhaps even fix them? All I know of is MS's chkdsk (I've run that several times - it appeared to find and fix errors, but I'm still getting 'hard disk error' messages and crashes). I think I might poke around Western Digital's site.

[Sxooter]

Generally the manufacturer makes diagnostics available for their drives. A quick google search will turn most of them up. The interesting thing is that a lot of diagnostics will run on other manufacturer's drives. Most include the ability to do a true low level format on the drive and map out bad sectors. I used to use the old maxtor low level format utility on all my drives, not just maxtors (maxllf was the name of it) and it was quite nice. This was back in the day of 1.2 Gig hard drives...

[csn]

Do you have any RAID experience, Sxooter? One of these 1TB RAID NASs looks cool:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16833329005

But at $1100 - not including drives - I figure I can build my own RAID box for cheaper, and have it much more expandable. I've read up some, and a lot of people seem to like Linux's software RAID - they split the drives up into 40GB partitions, and use tools like mdadm, smarttools, LVM, etc.

[Sxooter]

I have a bit of experience. Mostly with HBA raid cards, not external solutions as much.

I prefer the LSI or Arcea cards to adaptecs, which have cause me problems in the past.

If you're gonna build a RAID for a database, look into RAID 10 with a large battery back cache.

I think LVD SCSI is still the king, but SATA seems to be gaining speed as it gets deployed and tested more and more.

Of course, if you're going for broken, then a SAN is the way to go. But they ain't cheap, and few people / applications really need that kind of performance.

For home use and what not, look at the 8 port LSI DATA megaraid that's just coming out. Comes with 512 Meg of cache, and the battery packs are usually around $50.00 or so. Not an optional item, they are, for a database, required.

What's cool about the LSI is that the cache / battery are a separate, self contained module that you can move to a new card should your old one blowout.

I've used linux software RAID, and it is quite good. Note that for heavily written databases linux software raid can be fast, or safe, but generally not both, due to a lack of battery backed caching.

[csn]

I hadn't seen mention of LVI, Arcea, or LVD. I've seen a lot of positive remarks about 3Ware's cards (about $250-350), and a lot of negative about Promise and Highstep(?) - both of which apparently aren't true RAID hardware cards (the CPU still does the parity calculations). A lot of people seem to like software RAID better because it doesn't lock you into particular hardware - I guess you're stuck with the same RAID card, and can be SOL if it breaks and a replacement can't be found. And people didn't seem to have any performance problems with software RAID, which doesn't appear to require much processing power.

And, yep, this is just for home use 😉. I had never heard of a SAN until the other day.

[csn]

Hey, just curious, since you worked for Qwest, what do you think of Joe Nacchio?

[Sxooter]

I agree on the using software RAID keeping you independent of particular hardware. For serious production systems, you always have one spare machine with all the same kit checked out and ready to go so you always can get back to your data.

Same with tape drives. nothing like needing old data and finding out you don't own a tape drive that can read it anymore.

Never worked for qwest, but I was a customer once. In fact, I was the, they told me at the time, the very first DSL customer in the southside of Denver. I have fond memories of calling customer support every week or two for the first three months as they learned how to actually make it work. 🙂

[csn]

Have you ever used Samba, Sxooter? Check out NASLite+ - pretty cool. I guess there's a 4GB file size limit with Samba 🙁. I'd be surprised if there wasn't a Knoppix-like distro like NASLite+.

[csn]

All the rich kids are upgrading again!

MacBook Pro - $2000-2500

30" Cinema - $2500

[Sxooter]

I've used Samba quite a bit. I think the 4 gig file limit you speak of is / was in whatever OS that NASLite is built on.

[vattila]

find my.ini in your mysql directory
it looks smthing like this

#------------------------ IMPORTANT ! ----------------------

This file is GENERATED by EasyPHP when needed so edit the

file C:\PROGRA~1\EASYPH~1\conf_files\my.ini if you want to do

modifications in this file

#-----------------------------------------------------------

; IMPORTANT
; C:/PROGRA~1/EASYPH~1 is used to specify EasyPHP installation path

[mysqld]
datadir=C:/PROGRA~1/EASYPH~1/mysql/data
basedir=C:/PROGRA~1/EASYPH~1/mysql
bind-address=127.0.0.1
; Uncomment for use on USB key
; skip-innodb

change the locakhost bind address to the appropriate ip what apache listens for

[csn]

Sxooter wrote:

RedHat 9 is pretty ancient. I've had no real problem with dependencies since switching to FC2 and FC3 on my home machines / laptop. Yum is so freaking cool. yum install packagename handles all the dependencies for you. All you gotta do is say yes or no.

Yo, Sxooter - do you use Yum to update software like PostgreSQL, PHP, httpd, etc.? I've compiled those from source for so long and have so many modifications and compiled-in things, so I don't know if Yum would do the same.

[Sxooter]

On my laptop and my homeworkstation, yes.

However, at work, my workstation has to talk to an oracle database, and at the time I set it up there were no rpms for it, and no simple way to get php to connect to it, so I had to compile php from source. Also, since I test the postgresql releases as soon as they come out to make sure there's no problem, I always build that from source for my machine so I don't have to wait. Everything else on that box is pretty much updated via yum.

The only software that's given me any real troubles lately is MySQL 5.0.x where x is 16 or greater.

Seems some OS doesn't have a new enough version of zlib, so rather than have that os update zlib, they sent along their own. When you try to ./configure php it fails because of this. MySQL has been sitting on this problem for a couple of months now. I think I've just about given up on them. We're busily changing over everything at work that works with both mysql and pgsql to pgsql because of it.