Thoughts on systems safety, software operations, and sociotechnical systems.
It’s been wondered about why I chose not to include any real amount of material in my book about the mathematical topics related to capacity planning, like queueing theory. There are already many other excellent books that dig into the math behind Little’s Law, M/M/1 queues, and Poisson arrival processes. These concepts do indeed detail […]
(This is Part 1. Part 2 is here.) I don’t blog much, and when I do, they are pretty short and too the point. This post is different: feel free to put into the “ramble” category. I’m really just posting it here for myself as a thought exercise. Some years ago, while drawing a network […]
It’s hard to describe how tiring it is to hear someone quote Donald Knuth (or Tony Hoare) in the wrong context. I’m not the only one annoyed by this. In “Structured Programming with go to Statements”, Knuth says: We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root […]
Untitled Metric #1202345227, originally uploaded by straup. Our philosophy in Flickr Operations Engineering.
From this article on BusinesWeek: In addition, through its Data Center Solutions Group, Dell builds clouds, the large groups of computers whose collective power can be tapped remotely, via the Internet. Customers for DCS-built clouds include Yahoo! (YHOO), Facebook, and Akamai (AKAM) as well as big Chinese Internet companies like Baidu (BIDU), Tudou, Tencent Holdings, […]
Read more This just in: *anything* having to do with servers is a “cloud”! Yay!
She just referred to our largest suitcase (we’re packing for a weeklong trip) as a “single point of failure.”
I hate building packages, but it’s a necessary part of the job sometimes. I have loved checkinstall for years, which basically replaces “make install” with something more like “make an rpm package for me”. But of course, when you have a simple tarball, and there’s no make install step to replace, then what ? One […]
1 – I’m glad that tcpdump has been the standard for capturing network traffic, cause I’ve learned a lot over the past 12 years using it. 2 – tcpdump tools suck. But I’ve been using pktstat recently, and it’s pretty damn good. ‘top’ for network, without all that stuff that ntop comes with.
when you see this: (loaded box, lots of network, 2.6.9.x kernel, etc.) Dec 21 04:05:58 hostname kernel: ————[ cut here ]———— Dec 21 04:05:58 hostname kernel: kernel BUG at net/ipv4/tcp_output.c:927! Dec 21 04:05:58 hostname kernel: invalid operand: 0000 [#1] Dec 21 04:05:58 hostname kernel: SMP do this: Add to sysctl.conf: net.ipv4.tcp_retrans_collapse = 0
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