I now have a second blog going on blogs.netapp.com. It will be where all work-related postings go. So, if you’re here looking for my random work related thoughts, please check out my new blog:
If you usually visit jbctech.com, you may have noticed that the site was redirected to an advertisement page for the last two days. That’s because I forgot to renew my domain name. I’ve owned jbctech.com for the last 11-12 years and have never let it expire like that. I believe the registrar only has me as the owner for the last 8 but I’ve changed domain registrars a number of times. At any rate, jbctech.com is back online….I can once again receive email. Still no new content here other than this post…been super busy at work lately.
I was browsing around the web the other day, and stumbled upon a blog entry from Jesse Ruderman. In this blog entry, he describes one of the reasons he likes the hosting provider DreamHost so much. You know what that is? Snapshots. Sweet! DreamHost uses NetApp! He mentions in there that he can access hourly, daily, and weekly snapshots by looking in his ‘.snapshot’ folder.
Working in engineering at a storage company, it’s not too often that you get to see someone use features that are in your products. This article is a couple years old - but it’s cool to see NetApp technology being used and appreciated. Jesse even did his homework and found the paper that the NetApp founders Dave Hitz, James Lau and Michael Malcolm wrote.
Technorati Tags: netapp, dreamhost, snapshots, storage, wafl
So, as most of you know…even though I work on the Windows platform - I’m an Apple fan. As such, I subscribe to one of our mac mailing list to listen in on what other Appleheads at NetApp are doing. The other day, Albert Y., a fellow engineer in RTP ported an iSCSI load generator to the iPhone. He says he “ported it to run on Mac OS X a while back, so it was a matter of cross compiling it to get a native iPhone binary.” He goes on to say it “implements enough of the iSCSI protocol so that it runs completely in user space.” He ran some performance tests on it (over the WiFi network, I assume), and it generated 100 ops/sec to a NetApp FAS940 while playing music. 
Very cool! Albert - you definitely get some nerd points for that.
Technorati Tags: netapp, iscsi, iphone, apple, mac, mac os x
I was born in the Texas panhandle and spent a majority of my life in West Texas/Southeastern New Mexico…where it was hot and dry. I never really experienced much humidity - but I’ve experienced extreme temperatures living in Arizona. Since I’ve lived here in North Carolina, the weather hasn’t really been that bad - the summers are actually bearable and the humidity hasn’t been so bad. The other day I was driving into work, and noticed an sign in front of the Cisco Systems building that said “Air Quality Action Day.” I asked about it at work, and apparently it’s a day (or series of days in this case) where they don’t let kids out for recess (or so I’m told) and recommend people stay indoors as much as possible. The North Carolina Division of Air Quality put out the following warning:
THE DIVISION OF AIR QUALITY AT THE NORTH CAROLINA DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL AND NATURAL RESOURCES HAS ISSUED A CODE ORANGE AIR QUALITY ACTION DAY FOR THE TRIANGLE AREA. AN AIR QUALITY ACTION DAY MEANS THAT GROUND LEVEL OZONE CONCENTRATIONS WITHIN THE REGION MAY APPROACH OR EXCEED UNHEALTHY STANDARDS. FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION…PLEASE VISIT THE NORTH CAROLINA DIVISION OF AIR QUALITY WEB SITE AT DAQ.STATE.NC.US/AIRAWARE/FORECAST/.
AN EXCESSIVE HEAT WARNING MEANS THAT A PROLONGED PERIOD OF DANGEROUSLY HOT TEMPERATURES WILL OCCUR. THE COMBINATION OF HOT TEMPERATURES AND HIGH HUMIDITY WILL COMBINE TO CREATE A DANGEROUS SITUATION IN WHICH HEAT ILLNESSES ARE LIKELY. DRINK PLENTY OF FLUIDS…STAY IN AN AIR-CONDITIONED ROOM…STAY OUT OF THE SUNSHINE…AND CHECK UP ON RELATIVES AND NEIGHBORS.
This is completely new to me!
Technorati Tags: air quality, ozone, heat, humidity
It’s funny — the other day at work, I was talking to another Apple fan and we were discussing how dumb it is that the AirPort Extreme supported 802.11a, b, g, and even n but lacked gigabit ethernet. I was really wanting to get one, because I’ve been looking for a decent wireless router that would support both 802.11a as well as 802.11g (and the 802.11n is a big bonus!) But I didn’t want to get one that only had 10/100Mbps on the wired ethernet - it just seems kinda sub-standard nowadays, even if I don’t need the full gigabit speed (Especially since at work, we’ve been talking a lot about 10Gbps ethernet…) My reasoning is that I stream content from my Media Center PC to the Xbox 360 over the wireless and have heard that 802.11a is better for that since it has less interference.
I’ve been somewhat satisfied with my current Netgear RangeMax WPN824, but had software issues with the newer v2.0.15 firmware — once I reverted to the older 2.0.11 firmware, it hasn’t been so bad. I’ve just had bad luck with wireless routers - I’ve owned a few Linksys and this Netgear - all have had issues locking up…to the point where all devices connected (wired or wireless) no longer have internet connectivity. Once you pull the power on the router and restart it, everything comes back again.
With today’s iMac announcement, it appears that they silently upgraded the AirPort Extreme to include gigabit ethernet. I have mine on order…
Technorati Tags: apple, airport, wireless, router, gigabit, ethernet, imac, netgear, wpn824, rangemax
This past weekend, Rebecca and I went to one of the malls in Durham, The Streets at Southpoint. While there, we went to BODIES: The Exhibition. What is it? Their website describes it as:
BODIES…The Exhibition
Celebrate the wonder of the human form in the World Premier
of BODIES … The Exhibition—a phenomenal look at the phenomena
we call the human body.With educational relevance for all ages, this exhibition
of real human specimens immerses visitors in the complexities
of the human body, telling us the amazing story of ourselves
with reverence and understanding.
Apparently they go all over the U.S. If you get an opportunity to check it out, I highly recommend it. I found the exhibits to be amazing! Prior to going, I thought it would be kind of disgusting, but they were just presented in such a perfect way. It was very educational!
Technorati Tags: bodies, exhibition, human body, human
Data ONTAP(R) DSM 3.1 for Windows(R) MPIO has been posted to the NetApp NOW website. Last week, we finalized the product and it is now available for download. This release includes the following new features:
- New load balance policies that offer multiple active paths to a LUN (also known as active/active policies). The new policies are: Round Robin, which uses all optimized paths, and Round Robin with Subset, which enables you to specify the combination of active and passive paths used.
The Round Robin and Round Robin with Subset load balance policies work only with storage systems running Data ONTAP 7.2.2 and higher that use the single_image cfmode setting. - Support for Microsoft clusters (also known as MSCS) on Windows 2000 Server. This configuration supports only the active/passive Auto Assigned load balance policy.
- Coexistence with the Microsoft iSCSI Initiator 2.03 and higher on the same Windows host. You cannot, however, access the same LUN using both iSCSI and FCP.
Download: NetApp on the Web (NOW, requires license key)
Technorati Tags: netapp, mpio, multipathing, dsm, fcp
Speaking of the blog, you may notice that there are a few oddities…for instance, even though this post is posted under the “Blog” category, it doesn’t show up under the title. I’m working on resolving that issue. The problem lies in that I always run the “bleeding edge” version of WordPress (currently 2.3-alpha) and it’s having compatibility issues with my current theme engine (k2). I haven’t had much time to devote to that - pretty low on my priority list, but it will get fixed…
Technorati Tags: wordpress, k2, categories
Yesterday, you may have noticed that the blog was down. I recently switched hosting providers and had to move the data over. As it turns out, everything appears to be fully functional again. The backup from the previous hosting provider was a bit over a gigabyte - that included my IMAP mail as well as the entire site. I was able to move my mail back over without losing anything and the MySQL databases also imported successfully. All in all - a very smooth move.
