Monitoring and analyzing performance is an important task for any sysadmin. Disk I/O bottlenecks can bring applications to a crawl. What is an IOP? Should I use SATA, SAS, or FC? How many spindles do I need? What RAID level should I use? Is my system read or write heavy? These are common questions for anyone embarking on an disk I/O analysis quest. Obligatory disclaimer: I do not consider myself an expert in storage or anything for that mater. This is just how I have done I/O analysis in the past. I welcome additions and corrections. I believe it’s also important to note that this analysis is geared toward random operations than sequential read/write workloads.

Read the full thing at http://www.cmdln.org/2010/04/22/analyzing-io-performance-in-linux/

n the last couple of years I have tested many Linux distros. I was never a diehard fan of any of them, kept an open mind and was willing to simply use the one that best fit my needs. Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSuSE, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Debian and others have been put to the test at some point or another. PCLinuxOS was one of the few popular ones I had not tested. Being based off Mandriva, I was assuming it would be similar to the Linux Mint - Ubuntu case, so no surprises expected. After all, I had tested several Mandriva releases, so what could be that interesting about PCLinuxOS? Now, let me tell you... boy, was I wrong!

Read the full thing at http://cristalinux.blogspot.com/2010/04/pclinuxos-2010-review.html

The past few days we have been reporting on Valve's Steam client coming to Linux (and some of the Source Engine games too) soon as we had found Linux references within the Steam Mac OS X client and then other Linux references. We even ended up finding the unreleased Linux files on the Valve servers.

Read the full thing at http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODE3OA

After a long delay, eComStation 2.0 GA will finally become reality. It will be released in time to be presented at the Warpstock Europe 2010 event which is held in Trier, Germany, from May 14 to 16.

We consider eComStation 2.0 to be the biggest overhaul of OS/2 so far. Together with a team of both hired and volunteer developers, we have extended the functionality, removed limitations, updated hardware support as far as possible, and resolved close to 1000 issues that had been reported since the release of eComStation 1.2R. The new eComStation 2.0 GA is the result of several years of combined efforts and investments.

Read the full thing at the longest URL known to mankind....

am very happy to announce the new stable version 0.40 of the KDE office software Kraft. After eleven month of porting work, Kraft 0.40 is the first version which is based on the KDE 4 software platform. Huge changes on the codebase of Kraft happened to benefit from the new technology of KDE 4 and after long long hours of work, we’re there

Read the full thing at http://lizards.opensuse.org/2010/04/18/kraft-0-40-for-kde-4-released/

f you didn't already know, I am in the computer repair business. Normally, people come in with either PCs or Macs, and request repairs that are really rather simple. Occasionally, I'm called on to do large installations, or set up servers, but that's rare. What's even more rare is having a Linux client. I did just happen to get one though. The first I've ever had.

Read the full thing at http://elevenislouder.blogspot.com/2010/04/linux-client-at-work.html

Dive Into Python is one of the worst books for learning Python and it must die. I've had too many potential programmers find this book and get tripped up by its horrible design decisions that I'm declaring war. The book is weird, uses antiquated technology, has horrible examples, and Mark Pilgrim is too much of a neckbeard ass to listen to anyone about it:

Read the full thing at http://oppugn.us/posts/1272050135.html

"Yesterday we reported on Proof In Steam's Mac Client Of Linux Support as we received the bash launcher used by the closed-beta Steam on Mac OS X that showed support for Linux. Today there are yet more signs of Linux support when studying Valve's Mac OS X client. "

Read the full thing at www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODE3MQ

Intel is developing an edition of the Linux-based Meego OS that will work on mainstream laptops and desktops, a company executive said this week.

The chip maker released the first editions of Meego to developers in late March. One edition was for netbooks running on Intel's Atom chips, and another was for Nokia's N900 smartphone. Beyond netbooks and smartphones, the company is also focusing Meego development around entry-level desktops with Intel's Atom processors, said Doug Fisher, vice president of the software and services group at Intel, in an interview this week.

Read the full thing at www.goodgearguide.com.au/article/344008/intel_meego_os_reach_mainstream_laptops/

This tutorial shows how to combine four single storage servers (running Mandriva 2010.0) to a distributed replicated storage with GlusterFS. Nodes 1 and 2 (replication1) as well as 3 and 4 (replication2) will mirror each other, and replication1 and replication2 will be combined to one larger storage server (distribution). Basically, this is RAID10 over network. If you lose one server from replication1 and one from replication2, the distributed volume continues to work. The client system (Mandriva 2010.0 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

Read the full thing at http://www.howtoforge.com/distributed-replicated-storage-across-four-storage-nodes-with-glusterfs-on-mandriva-2010.0