A nice video of the new Ranger cluster at Texas ACC. Uses the same APC cooling system as the new Cardiff machine. Hopefully in the not too distant future I’ll be able to post some pretty pics of our new cluster.

Incidentally, Bristol just announced start of service on their new machine. It also uses the APC cooling system. Can you see a pattern developing?


[huw@w1199 ~]$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
223 ./condor_accounting.py
101 rm
81 ls
73 ssh
61 ./condor_usage.py
58 python
42 cd
40 pylint
38 sudo
28 ./condor_status_logger.py


My desktop at work. No prizes for guessing what I’ve been working on recently.

Notable bug-fixes include improved syncing with ipods and some clean-up of the verbose output so that it makes more sense.

For those of you who don’t know: peapod is a command-line podcast downloader written in python.

Fortunately someone in the community has already fixed it. All the magic you need is contained in vmware-any-any-116.tar.gz

This is a very good thing.

• Decent workbench
• Steps (to work on the machines at the tops of racks)
• Lots of storage bins and shelves
• technical vacuum cleaner
• work lights/torches
• toolkits
• lifting gear (possibly a scissor lift of some kind?) Are there affordable lifts that will get heavy machines up to the top of a normal rack?
• a trolley or truck

Any advice on items I’m missing or good suppliers for this stuff in the UK is gratefully received.

Anyone mentioning backups will be met with a rant about broken SyncML implementations.

I wish FIC would hurry up and release their consumer phone.

To quote one of Neal Stephenson’s characters:

“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Columbian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted myself to being bad.”

At 30 the fact that I’m excited about a new vacuum cleaner proves that this is no longer, if it ever was, true for me.

On the plus side. My new vacuum cleaner totally rocks.

However I have to share with you Alan Cox’s song about memory management to the tune of the Beatles Eleanor Rigby.

Ah look at all the laundered pages
Ah look at all the laundered pages

Handling Pages
Pick up the list and the link where kswap has been
A paging scheme
Runs down the I/O
Watching the queues that now keep me a list of the store
Who is it for

All the laundered pages
Where do they all come from
All the laundered pages
Where do they all belong

Meeting bdflush
Writing the pages of a disk file that no one will clear
No task comes near
Look at it working
Sleeping a lot in the night when there’s no pressure there
What does it care

All the laundered pages
Where do they all come from
All the laundered pages
Where do they all belong

Ah look at all the laundered pages
Ah look at all the laundered pages

Oracle DB
Died under load and was freed along with its name
No admin came
Good old bdflush
Wiping the dirt from the pages as it walks down the chain
Nothing was aged

All the laundered pages
(Ah look at all the laundered pages)
Where do they all come from
All the laundered pages
(Ah look at all the laundered pages)
Where do they all belong