An ambient display is a business status display that is usually on 24 hours a day and at a glance shows useful status and alerts for CRM, sales and IT staff from 10′ away.

Usually it’s a carefully formatted web link that is shown on a large flat-panel display.

A major advantage of an ambient display web app is that multiple locations can use the same link, for example both hq and offshore locations, unlike a control room.

The HTML meta refresh tag or AJAX can be used to periodically update the display page.

One way to write the meta tag:

<meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache" />
<meta http-equiv="expires" content="Mon, 19 Apr 1999 08:21:57 GMT" />
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="900" />


An easy way to embed other web pages in your formatted link without programming is to use iframes, typically like this:

<iframe src ="/cgi-bin/status.cgi" width="500" height="270" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" align="top" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" name="status">

</iframe>


A green solution is a Mac Mini (85 to 120 watts) paired with a large LED flat-panel display (20 to 30 watts) with a resolution of 1920×1200 pixels or higher.

I currently use a Mac Mini and a classic Dell 2405FPW 24″ monitor to show nagios on the left-hand side and a custom webpage of iframes and Keynote’s Internet Health Report on the right-hand side.

The iframes use SOAP to fetch pingdom alerts and POST to fetch ISP bandwidth graphs.

Geckoboard and Leftronic also sell software to help create displays.

iLike’s Wonderful Facebook Problem
slashdot.org: Ideas For a Great Control Room?
villainsource.com: Lairs and Bases
techcrunch.com: Leftronic Dashboards Optimize Your Data Displays
The Panic Status Board
wikipedia: Ambient Display

ZFS is the holy grail of filesystems. Many Database Administrators have switched from Linux to Solaris because ZFS has much better snapshot support than LLVM, as well as good SSD support.

phoronix.com: Native ZFS Is Coming To Linux Next Month (Aug. 27, 2010)
phoronix.com: Btrfs, EXT4 & ZFS On A Solid-State Drive (Aug. 9, 2010)
phoronix.com: Benchmarking ZFS On FreeBSD vs. EXT4 & Btrfs On Linux (July 27, 2010)
phoronix.com: Running ZFS With CAM-based ATA On FreeBSD 8.1 (July 26, 2010)
github: Native ZFS for Linux
FreeBSD Wiki: ZFS

Now a Free account holder is required to “log into your account or update your hostname monthly” or their account gets expired, resulting in the hassle of having to setup their dynamic address again.

Previously 5 free domains were allowed, now reduced to 2.

After 3 weeks signup finally worked … yay!

However, the first account confirmation email never arrived (verified by looking at my MTA log), so I had to request it again.

Twitter.com engineers, here’s 2 tips for reliably sending email programmatically:

1. Have your program inject the message to an MTA relay that is located inside your data center (www.twitter.com and mx006.twitter.com seem to be on same network segment, so that looks ok)
2. Do program error checking and retry email message injection if it fails, and log the application error so ops can figure out why. (The resend_confirmation_email link could be instrumented with query-string parameters to help diagnose problems.)

I guess part of the charm of Twitter is its unreliability, though that needs to change as it targets paying business clients.

@ActionMessage
pingdom: twitter/home

(youtube.com domain name registered Feb. 15, 2005.)

blog.forret.com: Youtube bandwidth: terabytes per day (2006)
slate.com: Do You Think Bandwidth Grows on Trees? (2009)
Arbor Networks, the University of Michigan and Merit Network To Present Two-Year Study of Global Internet Traffic At NANOG47 (2009)
YouTube myth busting (2009)
mashable.com: Viacom Loses $1 Billion Lawsuit Against YouTube (2010)
socialtimes.com: Google CFO Reveals Viacom’s Lawsuit Cost YouTube $100 Million
youtube-global.blogspot.com: YouTube wins case against Viacom (2010)
wired.com: YouTube’s Bandwidth Bill Is Zero. Welcome to the New Net (2009)
Cringely: A Net Game for Google? (2010)
slashdot.org: What Are Google and Verizon Up To? (2010)

John is a technology manager and co-author of The Official Samba-3 HOWTO and Reference Guide (Bruce Perens’ Open Source Series).

He has previously worked as a VP at TurboLinux and Caldera on Linux clustering products. (I vaguely remember those products from way back around 2000.)

Some of the Samba tips he gave were:

• trim your samba configuration file down to essential settings
• Samba’s ActiveDirectory capabilities enable large networks to scale beyond Microsoft’s implementation
• network bandwidth consumption can be reduced by proper configuration of WINS and broadcast vs. anycast

John also mentioned that Microsoft is contributing to Samba through their effort to make various protocols available to all POSIX operating systems and also interop testing meetings.

He gave an interesting overview of a document discovery project that required an elaborate storage system. He was able to setup a working test environment with RHEL, LVM, GFS2 and DRBD and various filesystems before switching to Glusterfs on top of Solaris ZFS for more efficient handling of directory metadata with deep directory paths containing 800,000 files per directory. (There were approx. 3 volumes containing 14 TB each.)

Thanks to Symantec for hosting the meeeting once again.

Axceleon acquires Turbolinux’s EnFuzion Clustering Solution (2002)

There were a handful of talks on the subjects of DNS and IPv6.

The hacker Jeopardy session was a lot of fun. I think the audience got more correct answers than the panel. I was impressed with the software somebody wrote to show the game categories – very convincing. Afterward, the EFF had an interesting fundraiser (your photo beside a “model”.)

The weather was hot but clear. The McDonald’s across the street is open 24 hours and has free WiFi.

I walked over to the Fashion Show Mall (about 1 mile.) It has a variety of restaurants on different levels, including a Maggiano’s, the Capital Grille, and a gourmet burger stand.

theregister.co.uk: Defcon speaker calls IPv6 a ’security nightmare’

It was a good conference, and we had beautiful weather all week long.

Executive Summary

The themes promoted by the conference organizers were Cloud Computing, NoSQL, Emerging Languages (Scala, Erlang, Parrot, Go) and Android phone development.

The @oscon twitter channel was heavily used to coordinate amongst organizers and attendees. I used the TwiXtreme twitter client program on my BlackBerry.

Plug Computers were very popular in the Expo area. They are 5 watt ARM-based computers running Debian Linux that fit into a power brick-sized case and cost $99 to $129 depending on features. The Marvell booth had a few models on display, from GlobalScale (GuruPlug) and Ionics. High-end models have dual gigabit NICs, multiple USB ports, a WiFi access point and other expansion ports.

There was also continuing buzz regarding Facebook’s Flashcache SSD module (GPL v2) for linux, and also ZFS snapshots.

Tutorials

I went to the Gearman Cookbook tutorial, the first half of the Chef tutorial and some of the Cloud Summit talks.

The Gearman Cookbook tutorial was excellent. After a detailed overview of the Gearman architecture and implementations in Perl and C, a number of use cases were explored in detail, including before and after code samples. The talk was both easy to listen to as an overall survey, as well as providing immediately useful info for those wanting to deploy it.

The Chef tutorial was very detailed – too much so perhaps. I went to the first half only, since I am not planning to implement Chef soon (I use PXE and anaconda/kickstart with CentOS), and did not need that level of detail at this time. cfengine, puppet and chef are ops tools for configuring servers. Chef uses Ruby data structures for its configuration files, and has include files and other useful syntax. Basically, users can “code” server configuration, as if they were traditional apps.

I went to some of the Cloud Summit talks and BOFs, but found that anybody who has done a simple project using EC2 knew as much or more than the speakers, some I would call blowhards.

Marten Mickos, president of Eucalyptus, is refreshing in that he is always clear about being in it for the money, while also promoting Open Source.

Sessions

Some of the most memorable sessions to me were:

Introduction to MongoDB, Kristina Chodorow (MongoDB)

Kristina is the maintainer of the Perl and PHP drivers for MongoDB. She gave an overview of MongoDB, a NoSQL document store, and its command-line interface, which uses JavaScript.

Some day she will release a sharding tool for MongoDB.

Scaling SourceForge with MongoDB, Nosh Petigara (10gen), Rick Copeland (SourceForge.net / GeekNet)

Nosh and Rick gave an excellent review of incorporating MongoDB into the SourceForge site.

- SF query load is mostly read-only
- ops team benchmarked a few NoSQL candidates, and MongoDB won on performance
- original MySQL servers had 64 GB RAM. After migration to MongoDB, same server machines but only 8 GB RAM
- backup dumps are verified to be bitwise the same as masters
- have to be careful not to dump all documents in your database to the network or it will max out switches
- SF relies on first-class data centers and replication slaves, less worried about MongoDB mmap (not crash-safe)
- I personally looked at their performance numbers and site graphs (on an iPad), and the end result was impressive.

Perl Lightning Talks

As always, the Perl Lightning Talks are a highpoint of the conference.

The “cartoon” of Vincent Pit’s remarkable CPAN module(VPIT) contributions was both informative and hilarious. Vincent is a French Ph.D. candidate in advanced geometry.

Cloud BOF (3 Hours)

The Cloud BOF was disorganized, starting 30 minutes late and for some reason was subdivided into 4 audience groups. Startups and vendors trying to make a cloud sales push led the BOF, including cloud and DNS service providers.

The Health Regulations subgroup came up with a couple ways to make the Cloud palatable to regulators by using encryption on all data due to the multi-tenancy issues with sharing public VMs.

I was in the NoSQL group, which discussed general issues and particular successes. Memcached was the clearest winner, while some people also had success with MongoDB and Redis.

My neighbor was an engineer at Postrank.com. He said that they were happy with HAProxy, but much less happy with the unpredictable IO available when running MySQL on EC2. He also said to carefully look at storage volumes available to your instance, as one is a useful tmpfs. They use AuthSMTP to get around EC2 being generally blacklisted for outbound email.

Database BOFs

MySQL BOF

The MySQL AB engineering staff has left Oracle. Monty Program AB (21 staff) has the core developers, and Percona Inc. (32 staff) has the consultants. Oracle still has some of the InnoDB programmers.

The business plan for Monty Program AB is 60% commercially-sponsored MySQL development, and 40% community-request development. Monty would like commercial users of MySQL to sponsor patches that would benefit them.

Mark mentioned that using Nehalem instructions for CRC were much faster, and that Facebook was using partitions for truncating tables instead of doing multi-record deletes. (See his blog for more details.)

One person mentioned using a commercial backup tool, R1Soft, that inserts a linux kernel module to allow filesystem snapshots. He said to carefully test backup and restore in your environment, especially for filesystems greater than 1 TB which may exceed certain block counter limits. Peter said that some of his clients had used it with varying success.

It worked for him in his environment, and the file browser allows selective file restore (he uses it to restore by priority where a system runs multiple applications.) It starts at $299 for the Standard Edition, and also has MySQL Add-on and Enterprise Editions.

PostgreSQL BOF

The PostgreSQL BOF talked about 30 or so changes that went into version 9.

One of the most exciting new features is a native replication feature, called streaming replication (block-based.) The advantage over Slony-I replication is that Slony-I is trigger-based, so has a variety of issues included inability to replicate DDL commands.

Some of the developers mimed replication events, which was rather amusing to watch. Yes, it was taped.

PostgreSQL is released under the PostgreSQL Licence, which is BSDish.

Peter Zaitsev, co-founder of Percona, organized 3 BOFs, including XtraDB, XtraBackup, Maatkit, Percona Server, Sphinx Search and Running Databases on Flash Storage.

Sphinx Search BOF

Andrew Aksyonoff, the original programmer of Sphinx Search (GPL v2), couldn’t make it to OSCON (the good excuse was that he was busy coding), so Richard Kelm (Sphinx sales/customer support honcho) and Peter filled in (Percona is a business partner with Sphinx, and many of Percona’s clients use it.)

Some of the attendees were existing users, like myself, and some from HP and other companies were looking for a large-scale search solution or alternative to Lucene.

Monty mentioned that the latest MySQL 5.1 should be used, as there have been a number of performance and reliability improvements. Full-text search is supposed to be 10x faster than 5.0, and replication is nearly bug-free by now.

Sphinx Search now has real-time index updates in version 1.1.0 beta. Another very nice feature is SQL+FS indexing.

Here is the full Sphinx 1.1.0 changelog.

Running Databases on Flash Storage BOF

The Running Databases on Flash Storage BOF had a combination of MySQL and Postgres users who have tested or used most of the SSD products: FusionIO, violin, Intel, OCZ, etc. Everybody was happy with SSD IOPS performance, but less so with cost and metadata RAM requirements with the add-in boards (FusionIO may require 4 GB RAM for metadata.)

Peter said that 20% to 30% of his clients are already using SSD – across the spectrum of vendors and models. Some are also trying “massive RAM” solutions, like Cisco servers with 384 GB RAM.

Some users had 1+ TB Postgres databases with very thorny backup and mgmt. issues. One solution was to start a snapshot, but not do the copy operation.

Expo Notes

I had an enjoyable talk with Austin Hook, who has operated the OpenBSD Store for many years. He lives near Calgary, the center of OpenBSD/OpenSSH/PF development. He mentioned that some perennial financial contributors had stopped because of the recession, so here’s the donations link.

I also talked to some reps from a Brazilian outsourcing firm, ActMinds. They currently have 400 employees across Brazil and a sales office in Philadelphia. Brazil is only 2 hours ahead of EST. They said the minimum project size is 2 developers and developer turnover a low 5%/annum. Their pricing is $35 to $45/hour.

And I had fun handling the plug computers on display at the Marvell booth. The Ionics boards are amazingly densely populated.

Discussions

I had the opportunity to talk to a long-time Portland resident who works as a computer consultant. He said that the Portland economy is not doing great, and really hasn’t done well since old-growth logging was stopped after 90% of the forests were cleared. And although hundreds of miles of fiber optic has been laid downtown, it’s not available for residential use. However, the Beaverton area does have ubiquitous FTTH.

I also talked to somebody who attended the Emerging Languages talks. He’s working on his M.Sc. in Computer Science, so found those talks fascinating.

Twitter Humor

There were some humorous tweets:

- “my MongoDB and CouchDB mugs are fighting each other.”
- “I got one MongoDB mug, but need two to safely store coffee.”

Notes

Note to self: skip the nightly parties unless you have a date. The bars are too loud to talk to anybody.

Note to the O’Reilly conference organizers: use meetup.com for the BOFs like ApacheCon does. The average audience was about 10 people, and with meetup it would be 4x that.

OSCON 2010 Slides
Tim Bray: Desperate Perl Hacker
Youtube: OSCON 2010 videos
blip.tv: OSCON2010 videos
wikipedia: Plug Computer
Jeremy Zawodny: MongoDB Early Impressions

He talked about his career as a programmer, college lecturer at UC Riverside, computer book author and developer of nuclear reactor control software.

It was interesting to hear first-hand that CS students during the dot com boom actually did enroll “just for the money”, regardless of interest in science or ability.

Originally his book on HAL was a download-only book, but No Starch Press was looking for content and actually contacted him for permission to publish it. It proved to be a popular book and another version is planned.

He said it takes about 2 years to learn the domain-specific knowledge about nuclear reactors, plus whatever time it takes to learn the programming languages or tools used for the project.

Using a debugger on nuclear reactor control software results in a scram, so planning ahead is a good idea.

Thanks again to Symantec for hosting the meeting.