The arrow of time

FreeBSD 6.x EOL

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 17:37:00 +0200

A Security Officer bulletin has been issued recently to announce the end-of-line for FreeBSD 6.x - which is an opportunity to discuss how FreeBSD release cycle generally works (for those not familiar with it).

HP "LeftHand"

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 01:17:00 +0200

I've seen a HP "LeftHand" / StorageWorkd P4000 SAN device recently and got quite good impressions off of it. One thing that occured to me is - why didn't anyone try this before? Certainly both Linux (to lesser extent) and FreeBSD (to a somewhat greater) contain the pieces for it, and have contained for some years now. In fact, several people did such setups privately or internally for their companies but there was apparently never a concentrated effort to sell it.

Two ZFS performance patches' calls for testers

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 15:13:00 +0200

Martin Matuska has issued two calls for testers with patches that improve various aspects of ZFS performance.

The patches are basically ports of OpenSolaris' code and should improve write performance and stat() syscall performance. The patches are available for testing on 9-CURRENT and 8-STABLE.

Have an WD EARS drive or other 4k sector drive? Try this.

Sun, 08 Aug 2010 20:45:00 +0200

The industry is moving toward 4k-sectored hard disk drives - a bit late though but better late then newer. However, in the interim period where compatibility for 4k sector drives is not widespread, drives such as WD's EARS series are using internal translation to present themselves as 512-byte sector drives, leading to unexpectedly horrible write performance. As a band-aid I'm proposing an almost trivial patch to glabel which allows it to have a "forced sector size" specified and as a result can present 4k sectors to the file system even if the physical drive doesn't. See also: glabel.

Encrypted notepad

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 14:58:00 +0200

A small personal project I've occasionally been working on is "Encrypted notepad" - a simple (really simple!) Notepad-like text editor whose only distinguishing attribute is that it saves and loads strongly encrypted files. Now, I have an Android version too :)

Cheated on e-bay - microSD card by "Team Group Inc."

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 00:16:00 +0200

I've bought small electronics on e-bay before and had reasonably good experience - no especially bad products, but also no surprisingly good ones - which is ok, it is as expected and I was happy with it - until today. A new microSD card arrived (for my phone) which was branded - and priced - as class 6 (SD "classes" are basically performance indicators in MB/s), but behaves worse than a class 2 card. The packaging (which looks good and solid, but who knows...) says "Team Group Inc." and the e-bay seller is "pc_galaxy".

FreeBSD 8.1 and status report

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 00:32:00 +0200

FreeBSD 8.1 has been released! This is mostly an maintainance release with few major changes:

zfsloader added
zpool version of ZFS subsystem updated to version 14
NFSv4 ACL support in UFS and ZFS; support added to cp(1), find(1), getfacl(1), mv(1), and setfacl(1) utilities
UltraSPARC IV/IV+, SPARC64 V support
SMP support in PowerPC G5

Some of the other interesting new features are: the ability to use VLAN tags with TSO, HAST high availability storage (disk replication) and new CAM-integrated SATA subsystem (not the default in 8.x to avoid breaking ABI).

At around the same time, a new FreeBSD status report was published.

PostgreSQL on tmpfs

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 19:44:00 +0200

Running a database on a memory file system serves a dual (and unfortunately not easy to deintertwine) purpose: testing database scalability and testing operatin system scalability. On the other hand, I did it just to see what the results could look like given an almost infinitely fast storage device :)

Good first impressions on Werkzeug

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 02:38:00 +0200

I haven't changed my opinion on Python's performance but it still is a great platform for doing small projects quickly. I've chosen Werkzeug for my project and so far I like it. It has just the right mix of low-level and high-level funcionalities for what I'm doing. Here are a few notes about it:

What to use for log compression?

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 14:46:00 +0200

I've made a patch for newsyslog to use xz compression since I just assumed xz would be better because of its structure. After all, at least it doesn't process files in individual 900 kB chunks. But I think I've found a case where xz may be worse then bzip2.