You may already well know “Linux” and may also use the “operating system based on the Linux kernel” directly or indirectly (you are indirectly using it now as this site is hosted on Linux). But how should we name the OS based on Linux? You may know there is GNU/Linux naming controversy. Different people have…
SSD is common for VPS and PaaS virtual machines for higher I/O performance. Now, it is coming to shared hosting too. DreamHost states that “Now with solid state drives (SSDs), our standard web hosting loads pages 200% faster”. We ourselves are happy to know this performance improvement with the price kept the same. Good work,…
Having to go the the server room to reset servers is the most headache thing for admins managing a cluster of Linux servers in a remote site. Either you can ping the server but can not ssh to it, or you even can not ping it. There are various reasons that may cause a Linux…
In Extending a Mounted Ext4 File System on LVM in Linux, we introduced how to extend a mounted ext4 filesystem on LVM Logical volume by adding a new physical volume. It is also common to shrink an ext4 file system as to spare some disk space. In this post, I will discuss how to shrink…
My best favorite disk partition table manipulation tools are cfdisk/fdisk on Linux. However, for large disks, cfdisk/fdisk (of the versions by this post is written) will just give up with a message suggesting GPT partition table format and using GNU parted like WARNING: The size of this disk is 6.0 TB (6001042391040 bytes). DOS partition…
The posix_spawn() and posix_spawnp() functions create a new child process from the specified process image constructed from a regular executable file. It can be used to replace the relative complex “fork-exec-wait” methods with fork() and exec(). However, compared to fork() and exec(), posix_spawn() is less introduced if you search on the Web. The posix_spawn() manual…
Hadoop 2 or YARN is the new version of Hadoop. It adds the yarn resource manager in addition to the HDFS and MapReduce components. Hadoop MapReduce is a programming model and software framework for writing applications, which is an open-source variant of MapReduce designed and implemented by Google initially for processing and generating large data…
LVM is a great tool to manage hard disks on Linux—you can abstract the hard drives away and manage logical volumes from volume groups, you can dynamically add or remove hard drives while the file systems on the logical volumes need not to backed up and recovered, and you may create many snapshots of the…
In this post, creating a file-backed virtual block device (VBD) and installing Fedora 20 in the Xen DomU via internet will be introduced. This domain is created on a Fedora 20 Dom0 as introduced in https://www.systutorials.com/installing-xen-on-fedora-20-as-domain-0/. For better performance, you may consider using LVM backed VM. Create file-backed VBD The actual space of VBD will…
I ever introduced [[installing-xen-domain-0-on-fedora-17]] as the first try to use the xen package delivered from Fedora and get away from manually compiling Xen and patching the kernel. In this post, I introduce installing Xen Dom0 on Fedora 20. Installing Xen First, install the xen pacakges: # yum install xen The Linux kernel is already ready…
It is continuously discussed that some Fedora users do not like the font rendering in Fedora Linux and there are solutions to improve the font rendering with potentially non-free or non-licensed software/fonts. However, with only the open source fonts and software and little tricks, the font rendering on Fedora can be quite good. In this…
Programs may want to catch the kill signals sent by the kill command in C programs on Linux so that it can gracefully shutdown itself before it is killed. For example, I have a daemon progd running, and it may be killed by pkill progd. The progd may want to save some in-memory state to…
Benchmarks are important to understand the performance and quantitative and qualitative comparison of different systems. Many analytic frameworks, such as Hive, Impala and Shark, are designed and implemented these years and become fundamental software for processing big data. How to benchmark these big data analytic systems is an interesting problem. The Big Data Benchmark The…
The public cloud storage services like Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage and Windows Azure Storage replicate the data to ensure high availability. On the other hand, with data being replicated, the storage services exhibits certain data consistency models. Different cloud service providers employ different data consistency models nowadays. In this post, we survey the data…
The built-in indenting in Vim for OCaml seems not very good. How to set up auto indenting for OCaml code in Vim? ocp-indent works very well for me. This posts introduces how to configure Vim to use ocp-indent to automatically indent/format OCaml code. First, install ocp-indent after installing opam: $ opam install ocp-indent Second, configure…
Port forwarding (or tunnelling) is a method to forward one network traffic to another. We will introduce how to forward ports using SSH tunnel in this post. A simple example Let’s start with a simple and useful example: we want to forward local port 8080 to server:port. We can easily do this by using ssh…
The performance of Xen’s Dom0 is important for the overall system. The disk and network drivers are running on Dom0. I/O intensive guests’ workloads may consume lots Dom0′s CPU cycles. The Linux kernel calculates various network related parameters based on the amount of memory at boot time. The kernel also allocate memory for storing memory…
In this post, how to unified Linux login and home directory using OpenLDAP and NFS/automount will be introduced. 0. System environment This solution is tested on Fedora 12 systems and CentOS 5. LDAP and NFS server: IP: 10.0.0.2 OS: Fedora 12 x86_64 ldap base dn: “dc=lgcpu1″ Clients: IP: 10.0.0.1/24 OS: Fedora 12 x86_64 1. LDAP…
It is quite common to measure the time in programs using APIs like clock() and gettimeofday(). We may also want to measure the time “accurately” for certain purposes, such as measuring a small piece of code’s execution time for performance analysis, or measuring the time in time-sensitive game software. It is hard to measure the…
John Ousterhout is a professor of Deparment of Computer Science from Stanford University. One recent project he is working on is the RAMCloud, a “new class of storage, based entirely in DRAM, that is 2-3 orders of magnitude faster than existing storage systems”. He posts his “Favorite Sayings” on his homepage. These sayings are precious…