scalability.org

Ok, this came about from many hours … HOURS … of not being able to get rescue CD images to boot correctly on my laptop, or in VMs. Things were broken on them, that I could not fix. That’s when the thought occurred to me … hey … I’d developed this great project nyble (pronounced … Read moreNyble FTW! Installing my rambooted environment on linux laptop for rescue with grub

I’ve got a pair of Samsung 28 inch 4k monitors that I use for my daily environment. I have 3 (actually 4) machines to share them between, 2(3) linux boxen and 1 Mac laptop. In my original design, pre-KVM switch, I had one monitor dedicated to the Mac, and one switched with the annoying little … Read moredisplayport KVMs for sharing monitors and keyboards

Quick post … I’m excited to note that I’ll be joining Cray, the preeminent HPC company, to help develop solutions for HPC customers to consume supercomputing resources in the cloud. I start the week of the 22-April. More soon, but I gotta say, I’m quite excited about this!

So I saw this , and yes, it is quite funny. There’s a discussion of this at HackerNews, which seems to follow a number of conventional pathways. Most of them missing the obvious implied humor.

A short note – today was my last day with Joyent. They are a wonderful company, building great things. Excellent technology, and technologists. I wish them nothing but success. For the immediate future, I’ll be working on consulting projects, as well as looking for the next great opportunity within high performance computing, storage, cloud. I’m … Read moreOnward and upward in #HPC

Yeah … this was a fun one. Because I only recently started using a holistic VM management/control plane for my home machines, I didn’t notice that I had 2 VMs of the blog running. I was doing some surgery to fix something, then tailed the logs … and didn’t see the traffic. Took me a … Read moreNote to self: have only one blog VM running

So this happened on the 3rd, on one of my systems Feb 3 03:02:39 calculon kernel: [195271.041118] INFO: task kworker/20:2:757 blocked for more than 120 seconds. Feb 3 03:02:39 calculon kernel: [195271.048116] Not tainted 4.20.6.nlytiq #1 Feb 3 03:02:39 calculon kernel: [195271.052678] “echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs” disables this message. Feb 3 03:02:39 calculon kernel: [195271.060626] … Read moreData loss, thanks to buggy driver or hardware

The systemd article is on LWN, and discusses the “tragedy” of it. The ZFS post was linked from HackerNews and discusses risk to ZFS’s future from the perspective of FreeBSD leveraging ZFS on Linux as its upstream. Ok, first onto systemd. For those who don’t know systemd, think of it as the borg that ate … Read moreInteresting articles on systemd and ZFS

Looking back on past reviews from 2013 and a few other posts, and what has changed since then up to 2019 (its early, I know), I am struck by a particular thought I’ve expressed for decades now. In 2009 I wrote HPC has been moving relentlessly downmarket. Each wave of its motion has a destructive … Read moreReflections on where we’ve been in HPC, and thoughts on where we are going

I’ve been saying this for mumble decades.  What I mean by “designed  to fail” isn’t specifically that someone wants a system to fail.  Rather, by various interactions, wishful thinking, drinking of one’s own kool-aid, a system is placed on an inexorable path to failure.  Without something to divert it in time, failure is the most … Read moreSystems that are designed to fail, often do