jorkeo - hosting geek : linux

linux.conf.au

jorkeo — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 05:38:00 GMT

So i attended linux.conf.au (LCA) in Tassie this year, i reckon i was the only person walking around with Windows installed on my machine :) This year LCA was held at the University of Tasmania’s Sandy Bay Campus in Hobart, and you can see key media reports are here: http://www.itwire.com/component/option,com_tag/tag,linux.conf.au/tag_id,23107/

My Highlights

- some Perception change about ms evident

- Attendance by the guys at corp who are doing the hard hards in protocol documenation helped to bolster commitment – you know how much aussie tech audiences swoon at American accents..

- Great work in the community by the likes of Samba and OpenChange

- Managed to have a chat with Linus Torvalds on the way back to the Hotel (he looks much more fit than is wikipedia picture..)

- Experiencing a different community involvement and action.

- I gave out an inch of business cards, and have had many contacts back saying it was great to see us there.

My Lowlights

- Still a long way to go with being able to work cohesively, and i think with this community

- Lawrence took it on the chin to soften them up for us during the week

- History is still biting us in the ass – the amount of conversations that I had where people complained about buggy ie6 or win98...

Day -2 Monday 19^th Jan Miniconfs

Lawrence Crumpton (Platform Strategy Manger) delivered the infamous “Did hell freeze over?” talking about what Microsoft is doing in the Open Source community and our strategy moving forward. As is well documented in the press ... http://www.itwire.com/content/view/22752/1090/1/0/

Most issues that were raised were quite valid, however most were coming grips with the idea the Microsoft was in the room, and didn’t have some underhanded motive to it all which led to some suspicion and revisiting history. I can only commend Lawrence for his patience during this talk, as this was truly on the front line of the field, and helped us later during the week in further conversations.

Day -1 Tuesday 20^th Jan Miniconfs

I attended the “Free as in Freedom” track. Interesting things to look at IMHO;

- http://openaustralia.org - lots of respect for Matthew Launder – awesome job.

- Free culture presentation by Jessica Coates - http://linux.conf.au/wiki/index.php?n=Freedom.FreedomFighting-HowDoWeConvinceThePowersThatBeToRelaxTheirGrip

- A look at citizen journalism – Crikey.com.au – followed by a great presentation by Jeff Waugh - http://linux.conf.au/wiki/index.php?n=Freedom.WeAreTheTranslators – touched on how to make a case for technology, this was delivered fairly agnostically as well.

Day 0 Wednesday 21^st Jan Official Start

Keynote by Thomas Limoncelli was delivered quite well but not the right fit for this audience as it focused primarily on how to be successful as a sysadmin, but quite well received.

Standout presentation for the day from me was from Rasmus Lerdorf from yahoo, one of the creators of PHP on PHP architecture, Scalability and Security. Great content, and demos all demonstrated on linux but after some discussion with Rasmus there are windows ports of a lot of the debugging tools.

Penguin Dinner was on that night, where a photo was auctioned for almost $30K + the beard of Bdale Garbee (CTO for OSS at HP - http://apcmag.com/Content.aspx?id=3422

Day 1 Thursday 22^nd Jan

Standout presentation was “Displacing Active Directory – first Samba4 deployments” by Andrew Barlett. Main points where:

- Working with Microsoft has been extraordinarily helpful

- Documentation of the protocols is a huge step in the right direction ( resulting in a round of applause for MS - wow )

- A lot of the work on understanding what’s on the wire is no longer an issue, now the samba team is looking for Active Directory specialists to help them, as they’re not.

- A fair bit of disbelief from the audience that MS was being helpful, several times it had to be reinforced that we had voluntarily published the protocols without being required by court ruling.

The most disappointing talk Interesting/Terrible talk by OpenOffice.org (Louis Suarez-Potts) – “Where the future lies: OpenOffice.org and the ODF in the world” – A demo of the product or how odf works with it would have been nice, but apparently just playing a slideshow is demo enough... Feedback from other conference delegates was much the same in that they were very disappointed at this presentation. http://www.itwire.com/content/view/22826/1090/

Professional Networking that night was quite relaxed, and had some great conversations with many community people.

Day 2 Friday 23^rd Jan

Keynote by Simon Phipps (Sun) – interesting predictions for the future, a couple of digs at microsoft and his own company, without pushing any product. I thought the best part of the presentation was when he picked up a netbook and said “put a free OS on this that doesn’t become my hobby”. Question time during this presentation brought the wrath of the conference down on a redhat representative.

Next year

Linux Conf down under will be held in Wellington New Zealand.

- jorke

Technorati Tags: linux.conf.au,lca09,Open Source

Configuring NFS on Windows Server 2008 core

jorkeo — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 10:07:47 GMT

Hasn't really changed since 2003 R2, but its all over the command line. From the start:

Installation of the NFS components:

start /w ocsetup ServerForNFS-Base

Make a directory to store your content and ACL it appropriately for NFS - I don't recommend this as best practice, but I'm assuming we're in safe environment, i.e. a management / storage network. Oh and wack a file in to test with:

mkdir content
echo hello! > hello.txt
cacls content /t /e /g:"anonymous logon":C
cacls content /t /e /g:everyone:C

Now I just need to start the NFS server

nfsadmin server localhost start

Then just create the NFS share - I'm using the anonymous userid and groupid to 0 which is the root user and group:

nfsshare nfscontent=c:\content -o root rw anon=yes anonuid=0 anongid=0

And then over to our *nix machine to mount the share, first I'll just make sure I can see them, then mount and test to read the file.

[root@localhost /]# showmount -e servercore
Export list for servercore:
/nfscontent (everyone)
[root@localhost /]# mount -t nfs servercore:/nfscontent /mnt/content
[root@localhost /]# cat /mnt/content/hello.txt
Hello!
[root@localhost /]#

easy!

-jorke

Technorati Tags: NFS,SFU,nfsadmin,nfsshare

HUGE performance increases with PHP on Windows 2008

jorkeo — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 05:54:57 GMT

One of our local developers Dallas J Clark (Brisbane local) blogged about an article that shows PHP with a 130% performance increase on Windows Server 2008 - and of course there have been a few comments asking about the metrics of the comparison etc. So naturally I'm wading into to try and clear the water..

I have to agree that there are a lot of unknowns and its difficult to do a competitive comparison with such little comparative data. What needs to be understood as that the results are for a specific case that the customer experienced, see the case study right here.

The facts are that Microsoft has spent a lot of time working with Zend to ensure that PHP has been engineered to run well on Windows.

The key difference to understand here is that you need to understand the execution architecture differences between *nix vs Windows, respectively multi-process vs multi-threaded. As CGI is designed for multi-process execution this can give pretty ordinary performance on Windows due to the threads/cycles involved in spinning up processes every time a request is processed by the web server. Of course you could attempt multi-threading using the ISAPI filter but ask what the results were from anyone who has tried :) – especially when you are not using code you have written all yourself – thus the best way to ensure reliable performance on Windows is to run via CGI – which of course the performance is not optimal.

Now how has this changed; IIS 7 has a FastCGI module as part of its install which by its design will make anything CGI based run faster, the idea being that it allows you to process multiple requests in the one connection and once the script has been processed the FastCGI process will keep running, waiting for more requests until its spun down as part of the web server. So in this case using PHP, it eliminates the constant overhead of loading PHP into memory each time a request needs to be processed or course increasing the speed of the request.

Also there are the “NTS” non thread safe windows binaries of PHP that are available off the php.net site - These binaries allow you to execute your code without needing to wait for thread synchronisation, meaning a HUGE performance increase. Couple this with FastCGI then you are you going to experiencing PHP running at a speed never before possible.

To test this I ran a little test, for metrics sake this is Windows Server 2008 Enterprise running in Virtual PC 2007 - allocated 512MB of RAM. The host machine is a HP Compaq Laptop

nc8430 Core 2 Duo @ 2.16Ghz and 4GB RAM, with a 7200 rpm disk, running Vista of course. My methodology was to grab a simple PHP site, run PHP with the standard CGI Module run a performance test, then change handler mapping to run the FastCGI Module and run the same performance test. The site I tested was on Qdig and performance tests were using the Web Capacity Analysis Tool (WCAT). The metric measured was Get Requests / second, because this is an indication of how long the requests are taking before they need to be queued by the web server.

On the left - NTS PHP with CGIModule - maximum approx 30 rps

On the right - NTS PHP with FastCGIModule - maximum approx 870 rps

Of course your mileage will vary, but you will have a comparable or better experience than on other platforms.

Questions?

-jorke

Technorati Tags: PHP Performance,PHP,IIS 7,IIS,Windows Server 2008,FastCGI,CGI

Silverlight 1.0 released

jorkeo — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 03:56:14 GMT

Earlier today Scottgu posted Silverlight 1.0 has been released. I'm pretty excited about this especially about the cross-platform capability with "Moonlight", so silverlight now works on linux.

Hosting providers can easily host this now, with no change to their hosting environment - check out the Halo 3 video, this is silverlight 1.0, and Home Shopping Network

come get some!

-jorke

Tags: Silverlight, Linux, Halo, Hosting

jorkeo - hosting geek : linux

linux.conf.au

My Highlights

My Lowlights

Day -2 Monday 19th Jan Miniconfs

Day -1 Tuesday 20th Jan Miniconfs

Day 0 Wednesday 21st Jan Official Start

Day 1 Thursday 22nd Jan

Day 2 Friday 23rd Jan

Next year

Configuring NFS on Windows Server 2008 core

HUGE performance increases with PHP on Windows 2008

Silverlight 1.0 released

Day -2 Monday 19^th Jan Miniconfs

Day -1 Tuesday 20^th Jan Miniconfs

Day 0 Wednesday 21^st Jan Official Start

Day 1 Thursday 22^nd Jan

Day 2 Friday 23^rd Jan