CleverBlogName

So yum stopped working on a couple of servers that were registered to servers with what appeared to be a login problem:

A yum clean all, the usual remedy to this one... achieves nothing. The server is checking in with the Satellite server, as far as Satellite is concerned, but yum fails on pretty much any operation. Here’s the weird solution: queueing an update in the Satellite server for that box, and then running

…pulls down the update, and then yum starts working again.

One of the best things about attending the Linuxconf is the renewed sense of enthusiam for my field (lightly dampened yesterday by battling with @#@^#%$!^% PulseAudio, which is the worst thing to be inflicted on desktop Linux in a long time, and today on arriving home to discover a household box had literally cooked itself, likely beyond repair).

A lot of the last near-decade has, for me, seen my interest in what I do wane, damn near finished off by two years of release management. I had become, well, barely a tradesman, practically an assemblyline worker; interested in doing my job properly, but largely devooid of a vast care factor beyond that.

The last while working on zLinux has helped considerably with that, and LCA has piqued my interest mightily; I want to get back into hand-rolling Postgres releases to play with the new features, I want to play with new technologies and tools and follow their development, not just because I want to be better as a craftsman of my job, but because I can glimpse my former interest in the art of what I do; of doing a thing for itself and that alone, rather than merely because it turns a crust. On that front, LCA is a huge personal success as well as providing me with a bunch of professional value, and that’s (hopefully) a genuine improvement in the whatsit of my life.

Paul Mackerras

perf superceeds operfmon and similar tools for understanding.

• perf_event; initial proposal in Dec 2008; developerd through 2009 in the tip tree.
• In mainline in 2.6.31.
• Initially supported recent x86 processors and 64-bit POWER.
• Now have hardware support for SH and sparc64.
• Most have at least basic support, as long as you have high-res timers.

Dan Magenheimer

(This is a bit incomplete, I’ll update it Soon.)

• Avoid Traditional system designs
• single server bottlenacks
• Avoid symmetric shared disk (cumbersome, hard to scale)

ceph is one of those things that fills one with the kind of “gimmegimmegimme” enthusiasm.

Bharata B Rao Srivatsa Vaddagrir Vaidyanathan Srinivasan

Schedular optimisations for multicore systems. This is relatively recent work, so some of it is still pretty rough. Well, that’s Bharata’s opinion. Personally I found it like my trip to see IBM in Brisbane; really really smart people talking about something they have a deep understanding of in a very accessible way. A++ would listen to again.

A Case Study Using ext4

Theodore Ts’o

Not really about the features of ext4 per se; a talk about bugs and error and problem handling and what’s required to get production-ready status, and what the challenges are.

aka The Kernel Report LCA2010

Jonathan Corbet from LWN

Organised in terms of challenges, because this will help spell out where we’ll have to do.

That is all.

Actually, that is not all. What a painful, over-engineered non-solution to a variety of, for the most part, non-problems. And those responsible for the religious crusade of texinfo can go to hell.

That is all.

…what would you think would be a good, sensible default for double-clicking on an OpenOffice spreadsheet file?

Well, if you’re a Nautilus developer, apparently the answer is not, “use OpenOffice Calc to open it”, but rather, “open a clever XML browsing shell you wrote.”

Although the way Gnome has been going I suppose I’m lucky that the option to open it in OO was there as a secondary option, rather than removed entirely.

(Although I should add, in all fairness, that this may actually be a quaint decision by the Ubuntu package maintainers, rather than the devlopers themselves.)