We are working on the text of this, but it is for organizations within the state of Michigan. We like our state, and we are going to give an extra discount for credit card/cash purchases over the next few months. Details to emerge.
If there is interest outside of the state of Michigan, please reply below. The day job has some of the highest performing, and most reasonably priced storage available in the market today.
[update] Link fixed … my bad, pre-coffee
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Going this morning to a customer who had a set of systems compromised. It appears that a windows trojan did some keylogging, and someone logged in, as root, from the compromised machine.
Whoops.
Folks, stay safe. Don’t use passwords for ssh. Use keys.
And, bluntly, seriously reconsider running any windows machine anywhere near a server/HPC resource.
Our efforts to help fix their problem are going to cost this customer thousands of dollars and lots of our time. This isn’t what they want or anyone else needs.
If you must run windows, run it in a VM atop a heavily firewalled Linux/Mac machine. You can isolate the VM so that it can never see the outside world apart from very specific ports.
It looks like this customer let their bot infect other machines, and eventually take control over their server, compute nodes, and backup system.
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We had been considered sending in an RFP response to a customer for a system. Long past history with this customer suggests that they are basically interested in validation and consulting from us, never really interested in purchasing from us.
This is unfortunate, as we are Michigan’s only local HPC company, and they are a university in the state of Michigan purchasing HPC gear. It makes it look good for them with their higher ups to include us, even if they never award us any business.
Last go around, we were told our offer was somehow “unfair” to our competitors, and that they wanted us to help our competitors better compete with us. Thats just ridiculous. Instead of buying the best solution, they wanted us to show others how to build it. Oh, and do this for free.
Looking through their site, I can see lots of our terminology, lots of our ideas that we brought up during these processes … they were implemented.
Nice of them to do this. Have an RFP, get free consulting.
So we opted out. We asked for assurances that our RFP response would get full and fair consideration. We were not given this. Actually we were effectively told to STFU, in not so many words, but that was the net response from purchasing.
So I agonized over this. Should we submit? Would our submission be considered? What struck me, looking over their site yesterday before I made my decision, was that we have had an impact upon the way they do their computing. Our ideas are prominent in their design. But we had never been paid for this. Either in terms of hardware, or consulting.
So the decision was obvious. They would continue this approach for the foreseeable future, inviting us when they want more free consulting, not when they want us to provide something they may have to purchase, if we were the low bidder.
Which is what prompted the call they made to me last time, asking me to help our competitors better compete with us in order to be “fair” to our competitors.
No, I won’t name names. We don’t do any business with them now. I mean, literally zero business. I don’t see this ever changing.
If they want our advice, they are welcome to pay for it. Yes I know a number of their staff read this blog, and this information will likely be disseminated. Such is life.
I don’t expect this situation to change. It saddens me. But its a business decision. I have to cut off efforts into guaranteed failures, as they drain time/resources from possible/probable successes. Once they show that they are no longer a guaranteed failure for us, and convince us that they will actually consider our responses on the merits of the response alone … maybe we can do business. We don’t need the faux-drama of an RFP response, an interview to plum our ideas, and then use them with a competitors gear.
Until then, I don’t expect to do business with them.
And yes, they are one of my alma mater.
We are going to announce a sales shortly for state of Michigan entities (companies, universities, schools, etc) They are welcome to participate.
I am saddened by this, but business isn’t about emotion. Its about probabilities. You expend effort on non-zero probabilities, and cut off zero probabilities. Which is what I did.
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see here. It looks like they largely ignored my edits, so some of the numbers which I fixed several times aren’t fixed in the final.
Also, I don’t have the slightest clue who that person is on the document. Not a clue. Has no relation to Scalable Informatics.
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Autoyast, kickstart, …
All of them suffer from the “hey lets do it all for you”. Don’t get lured into this. Assume they are singing a siren’s song. I’ll argue that autoyast is lightyears ahead of anaconda by virtue of it not *^*&$^*&) forcing you to reboot the machine in the event of a control file error, you can recover.
But the point I need to stress, despite (likely) vehement protests to the contrary … One should spend as little time as possible inside distro configurators, and push as much of this work to outside tools as possible.
I am so happy I developed our finishing scripts. They are enabling me to do things that are, basically, impossible to do in these environments.
They aren’t perfect, not trying to be all things to all people. But they get the job done, cleanly, efficiently, and most importantly, they give you a real mechanism to debug/retry them. Unlike anaconda (one should never EVER under any circumstances, volunteer to drop into a python debugger in the middle of an install … never ever).
These tools are quite useful in cloud creation/setups, as well as our storage clusters, and compute clusters. Work on all distros. If we pushed it a little, we could get them to work in windows HPC (but we just don’t see demand for that).
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Coming from the Register …
The IOP says the enquiry should be broadened to examine possible “departure from objective scientific practice, for example, manipulation of the publication and peer review system or allowing pre-formed conclusions to override scientific objectivity.”
It deplores the climate scientists??? “intolerance to challenge” and the “suppression of proxy results for recent decades that do not agree with contemporary instrumental temperature measurements.”
Yeah … leave it to folks in the UK to say it with far more eloquence than I can.
But there is more. Oh … much more …
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A tactic used by advocates of a particular viewpoint on anthropogenic global warming (e.g. we humans caused warming on our planet) is to make the claim that the science is “settled”. I covered this before.
Specifically I pointed out that science is never … ever “settled”. In fact, the very fundamental aspect of what makes science a profoundly useful to humanity, is that it questions and is free to question everything. All that is really required to do this are transparency, intellectual rigor, and the ability to accept the outcome of the analysis.
Moreover, I somewhat humorously pointed out that “Relativists” were “Newtonian-deniers”, as I purposefully used the language in this … er … debate … to point out that people are letting far too much heat, and far too little light into the discussion. Labeling skeptics as “deniers”, and making fundamentally false claims about a supposedly “settled” science simply denigrates the real researchers, and casts additional doubt upon the results of existing research … why would researchers need to cast aspersions onto their critics, unless their arguments or data was weak?
This said, I found a comic this morning that made me chuckle. I hope you enjoy it as well. More after the break.
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At the day job. Ok, not a complete blow up … but it lost all of its config for 2 hours. Its an appliance router, and about 4 years old. Starting to show its age.
I have a “spare” (as in unused) motherboard/RAM combo, with 4x Intel GbE ports (2x PCI-x cards) that looks like its going to take its place. Just deciding upon the distro to do this. Looking at endian, clearos, and a few others.
Why not another appliance? As much as I like their drop in capabilities, they tend to be based on very slow chips, and can’t really handle even moderate IO rates. We are looking forward to the day (in the near future) when we can get gigabit speeds to the site. DOCIS3 with 50M/10M should be available in the next few months at our site, and the existing unit can’t really handle the 16M/2M load, never mind the faster load. Its time for a better platform.
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I’ve been chasing down a problem for a few days on a SLES 11 load. I’ve tried basic mdadm as well as the “Intel RAID”. Modified some of the mkinitrd scripts so that it doesn’t error out, and actually builds the initrd.
But it never includes the mdadm or the /etc/mdadm.conf files. So the boot with the new initrd can’t assemble the raid correctly, and can’t do a correct switchroot to the raid device.
This is annoying.
I pointed out here before that sometimes what distros do to differentiate themselves eventually winds up making things really bad. Be this poor choices of utilities and tools, or bad configuration options. Ubuntu has suffered from this disease as of late. 9.10 isn’t good.
SLES11 has its upsides. Some of it is good. But not allowing software RAID1 on OS drives?
Read the rest of this entry »
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… sadly this appears to be true.
Specifications were given, and we met the requirements, which entailed a demonstration of a particular level of performance over NFS.
In case you aren’t sure, we demonstrated a sustained 1GB/s over NFS between 2 boxes over 10GbE last year. There aren’t too many companies that can do this. Our results were with RAID6 storage target, and an NFS client with small RAM size. Total read and write size each was much larger than either system memory. This wasn’t a cache test, data was going to and coming from disk.
This stage set, a very high data rate over NFS was required for the RFP, which we met, quite easily. Our competitors … not so much. They never performed the measurement we did.
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