jmarki's blog
2 mins of wireless left!
Submitted by jmarki on 18 December 2008 - 7:49pmI survived desert, ocean kayaking. Going back to Melbourne tomorrow! 2 mins of wireless left! wireless is so expensive, at 6/hr! Cya!
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Waiting to board plane for melbourne
Submitted by jmarki on 13 December 2008 - 7:26pmAt long last, I'm going for a holiday!
Melbourne, here I come!
They are opening the gates. Tata everyone! If I never blog during this trip, most probably had fell into a hole in Grampians. Whahahahahha 
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Phew! I'm back!
Submitted by jmarki on 11 December 2008 - 8:32amAfter a long hiatus from blogging, I''m back! The past few months was terrible, rushing from project to project, nary a break in between.
Let's see,
April: implement jumpstart system
May: implement storage system
June: implement backup system
July: data categorisation
Aug: architect new high performance computing cluster and high performance NAS
Sep: meet vendors left-right-centre for market survey for HPCC project
Oct: finalising details of HPCC project
Nov: submit proposal for HPCC project
Dec: data recovery exercise for existing infrastructure
.... and it brings us to today, 11th December 2008.
Phew!
Oh yah, in 2 days time, I'm going to Melbourne! Wee~ 
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Solaris 10 Update 5 (05/08) is out!
Submitted by jmarki on 21 April 2008 - 11:28pmSolaris 10 update 5 is out! Check out the "what's new". Strangely, nothing on ZFS. Oh well...
All the same, download it at the usual place.
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PAINT BOMBS!!! Weeeee~~
Submitted by jmarki on 16 April 2008 - 1:51amI really can't believe this. Spectacular!!!
This is the making of the advert:
And Sony has their write up.
Brilliant!
And a spoof:
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Now for the Sony Play Doh Advertisement. WOW!!!!
Submitted by jmarki on 16 April 2008 - 1:31amHere's the making of:
Now, to find the paint advert
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Time to relax. More videos please
Submitted by jmarki on 15 April 2008 - 1:37amWorld's Longest Slam Dunk
Randy Pausch Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams
Flying Penguins!
You don't believe? It's on BBC!!
1 Hour from basketball court to ice rink. Wow!
720 degree Slam Dunk!/h3>
Paintball Tank!
COOL~
Giant Waves battling lighthouses
Apparently, these footages are real... Omg...
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What is the IT field all about?
Submitted by jmarki on 13 April 2008 - 1:24pmQuestion: What is an IT career all about?
Answer: To be paid to make other people's problem your problem, so that their life will (supposedly) e better. So who fixes the plumber's pipes?
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RAID-Z + JBOD or RAID-5?
Submitted by jmarki on 29 March 2008 - 12:55pmI was at the SUN-NUS Opensource Day on Friday, and after the event, we all adjourned for dinner. You know, when geeks gather, we inevitably will start discussing the hacks we are deploying for one reason or the other. Or thorny problems. And hence, I brought up my "huge dataset" problem.
Now, the traditional way of doing storage carving is to do RAID-5 on the SAN, cut each RAID-5 set into smaller luns to map to the operating system. If need be, some of the luns will be RAID-1/striped together in the OS. Why? RAID-5 for redundancy, smaller luns as the RAID-5 set is too big, and striped luns to expand storage when required.
So, what's the big problem? Wee Yeh (http://prstat.blogspot.com) pointed out that lun carving is done ACROSS the RAID-5 disk set. It simply follows the way RAID-5 parity is done.
"ACROSS"!!!! Wait a moment... Doesn't this mean if a disk fails, performance is impacted across all the luns in the disk set? And if 2 disks fails, ALL the luns in the disk set are dead! So, if one lun is for applications, another is for data storage, and the third is for user directories, the entire computing stack is down. Unrecoverably dead. Geebes!!!!! <head rolls>
Of course, being a nice guy, Wee Yeh suggests using JBOD disk sets + RAID-Z using ZFS. Since ZFS will do the parity checks, there is still redundancy. If a hard disk fails, the ZFS pool continues to work. If 2 disks fail, at least the damage is contained to this ZFS pool. Added advantage is that both the SAN storage and ZFS will scream when the first hard disk dies, as opposed to only the SAN storage screaming, while the OS remains oblivious. And ZFS has parity checks during disk read/write, nicely overcoming the lack of parity read/write checks on SATA disks.
Okay, time to do some hard thinking
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