Interesting links (2011-04-26)

You know I’m usually publishing the interesting links posts on Sundays, but I was simply too busy searching for Easter eggs (unfortunately not the ones pictured on the right) ... and I also found a few gems for you.

Starting with special thanks to Joe Onisick for reminding me what blogging is all about. Following his lead, I stumbled across this web site which also nicely explains the architectural vision of various cloud products. In the same category, here’s a nice flowchart that will help you fix your computer, regardless of the OS you’re using.

Data Centers and Cloudy Skies

Greg Ferro did the homework I was planning to do (thanks, Greg) – figuring out how many 10GE ports you might actually need in a data center (direct consequence: do you really care about the petabit-promising fabric architectures?).

Packet Pushers had a fantastic podcast with Mrs. Y (absolutely worth listening to) where they also discussed building low-cost data center. The High Scalability blog has a nice summary of that discussion.

6 ways not to scale that will make you popular & loved is an excellent description of some of the stupidities one can do when building a supposedly large-scale service. Oh, just in case you’re not sure whether your design is broken enough, throw in Microsoft’s SQL server, Network Load Balancing and Windows Server Failover Clustering.

Sorting out cloud security – a great discussion of various aspects of cloud-related security challenges.

Two years ago Dave Graham was writing about the upcoming failures in public clouds (and recommended building a private cloud for less money using what you already have). As always, many people preferred to believe in miracles of shiny new technology.

IPv6

Stretch continues the IPv6 series, this time with high-availability aspects of IPv6 neighbor discovery.

Mobitel (the biggest Slovenian mobile operator) has enabled (free-of-charge) IPv6 support in its production environment; two out of three major Slovenian mobile operators now have IPv6 in production. Congratulations, Mobitel and Tuš Mobil; you guys rock. To all the foot-draggers out there: Don’t tell me it can’t be done.

RFC 6164 - Using 127-Bit IPv6 Prefixes on Inter-Router Links. Finally someone has taken steps to get away from the “we need a whole IPv4 Internet ... squared ... on every point-to-point link” stupidity that has been haunting us.

The Patticon blog has a nice set of LISP-related articles.

Other bits & pieces

Four stages of expertise – a must read for anyone entering a new field (including yours truly).

Ethan Banks @ PacketAttack has published a fantastic “Crisis Calls: Stereotyping Useless Participants” article. A must-read prior to every conference call you take.

I started my IT career on ancient boxes like IBM 360 and PDP-11 (running RSX-11M, the great-granddaddy of Windows NT). When Andrew Yourtchenko published a link to a PDP-11 emulator, I was immediately intrigued. The thing emulates the PDP-11 CPU in (emulated) Java Script (within a browser window) and runs an ancient version of Unix almost as fast as the original. We truly live in crazy times.

3 comments:

  1. > PDP11

    Ha, same here! Did you use the actual DEC-made machines, or were they Russian-made SM-4s?
  2. DEC-made hardware (boards), locally assembled into a "locally produced minicomputer"

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iskra_Delta
  3. Nice! We had to do with clones (with associated quality issues). SM-4 was a clone of 11/40, according to http://www.village.org/pdp-11/faq.pages/Soviet11s.html
Add comment
Sidebar