July, 13rd: new (final) scheduled release date

Do you need more information? :-)

Perfect!. That's our business.

Transformers (So, am I freak enough? part II)

"Many millions of years ago, on the planet Cybertron, life existed, but not life as we know it today. Intelligent robots that could think and feel inhabited the cities. They were called Autobots and Decepticons. But the brutal Decepticons were driven by a single goal: Total Domination. They set out to destroy the peace loving Autobots and the war between the forces of good and evil raged across Cybertron, devastating all in its path and draining the planet's once rich resources of energy."

And then, they moved on to planet Earth... as a TV show of my childhood!.

Now they are back as a movie whose premier was being programmed near my work place (a lot of premieres are indeed) so we started once more to talk about those shows we saw when we were "young" :-)

So finally I was told about another one freaky video related:

Yeah, that is, people disguised like Transformers... transforming!

IPMI

IPMI stands for "Intelligent Platform Management Interface", an interesting feature deployed on nowadays servers. I can't forget that question I made some months ago about an extra ethernet port on the IBM server machines we were working with on those days. The answer was quite simple: it is almost of no use at all; at most you can get some stats and diagnostics but it is mainly intended for hardware technicians.

Liars (or ignorants)! Anyway, it is quite useful. It is the IPMI port which can be used for several managements actions (even from the running system) such as power cycle the machine, get some stats, establish a watchdog interface and the like.

Uses?, are they need to be told?. As a first glance you can get reports about the machine from the operating system itself without the need of physical access to the datacenter. You can also restart a machine which is failing to reboot by itself in case you can login one more time in the system. But... even more, you can do all that (and more) from a remote system (don't exhitate, it is password protected, at least, in case you configure it so). So the next obvious uses are for cluster fencing and stonith (shot the other node in the head) without the need of power control hardware.

It is a pity we didn't knew that when we configured the SAP cluster in my previous job despite the serial cable almost did it work. Sure Mr Navas will be interested in knowing about this technology :-)

Oh, a simple example:

# ipmitool -I open chassis status
System Power : on
Power Overload : false
Power Interlock : inactive
Main Power Fault : false
Power Control Fault : false
Power Restore Policy : always-off
Last Power Event :
Chassis Intrusion : inactive
Front-Panel Lockout : inactive
Drive Fault : false
Cooling/Fan Fault : false
Sleep Button Disable : not allowed
Diag Button Disable : allowed
Reset Button Disable : not allowed
Power Button Disable : allowed
Sleep Button Disabled: false
Diag Button Disabled : true
Reset Button Disabled: false
Power Button Disabled: true

Another one:

ipmitool -I open chassis power reset

Ooooooops. Next post after crash :-)

New home

Marriage is like a "love contract". Time of your live to say to everybody you are in love (and the person you are with). So my fiancee and me decided to sign it next October to demonstrate and celebrate something we already know (and for the trip, wow :-)).

But a more obvious and true compromise is the time of your life of buying a new house together with somebody. A point of our lifes we have already reached but that we haven't planned doing so soon until we saw a new building which is being built and we thought it was perfect so "if you see something that fulfill all the requirements you asked for, why don't do it?". And that's the reason we bought that house that we will get in two years. Because it is in a place we like, with good transportation links, a price maybe expensive but in the range we can afford and dimensions and number of beedrooms we wanted to. Indeed, maybe when we get it, it will be the time to get pregnant and use those extra beedrooms we were looking for in a new house.

Despite all that, the real thruth is we are looking forward to use both swimming pools the outdoor and the indoor one we will also have on the building (just another "stupid" requirement). Great!

For those interested in, this is the plan. The only thing we have by now (in addition to some new debts).

Just a simple map on a piece of paper that makes us quite happy and we will enjoy for the rest of our lifes.

Bye, Tahur

Tahur is no longer with us. He passed away this morning once the veterinarian who attended him a month ago considered he was really sick (old indeed), without any hope, and just suffering pain so the better for him was euthanasia. In prevision of that posibility we were dinning at my parents home yesterday night to at least be able to say him goodbye. Yesterday he seemed so sad I really believe he knew what was going to happen. At least, he finally have rest after a plenty life loving us and being loved in return.

Along with him, for me another door closes, another stage ends. It is not only I'm near my thirties, that he was with us through all my twenties or the fact I'm getting married on October. The truth is we hoped he would last at least for that day, to be part of that important date, and to be seen by my brother one more time on his next visit. None of that will occur. Just mourn and remembers are now held, and also some pictures I took just some months ago in case this day was nearer than we desired (but as it finally was). I'm happy we made them.

For me death is really another stage, the final one, of life. Time to remember, look backwards and enjoy all the situations passed with the deceased which I feel grateful, lucky and happy for. I don't usually look at future at that time looking for moments I know will never occur. At most I feel melancholy for the lost and thankful, so much thankful for the time he gave us.

Thanks Tahur, I miss you.

Published photo

Two days ago I sent this photograph of our little cat to two free newspapers and today without any previous notice, it appeared published in one of them in the 'reader photo' section. This is my very first photograph published on paper which makes me think maybe I'm better than I believe (but for sure, worse than some people thinks I am).

Anyway, today many people will see our little kitty Val on their way to work. And some others, on the web readers photo collection.

This is one of those little things which can make you smile early in the morning. Today will be a great day!

Update: pdf version available.

GFS choice

We are designing at work a clustered architecture for the site we are developing. For that purpose we needed a clustered/distributed filesystem such as NFS, GFS, OCFS, and the like. We all have already had bad experiences using NFS as it usually hangs a client if server goes down. In addition, on that design we have a SPOF (single point of failure) we were trying to avoid. So we give up with it.

The following candidates were GFS and OCFS. Despite there are some other suitable filesystems they are not so widely supported in the linux kernel and distributions so we couldn't fit with our hosting service level agreements bringing them out of question. And before you ask, linux itself was indeed a requirement. On a housing situation, things would have been different.

Back on FS, at first glance on our tests OCFS results wasn't as good as GFS ones. In addition, no all distribution supported online resizing in the packaged version of ocfs tools so we finally decided to use GFS as the clustered filesystem. But once we have almost all infrastructure ready, later tests showed it wasn't as good as we thought, and not so documented neither supported by RedHat itself as we expected. In fact, performance was an issue which was worrying us as it would slow down the whole site. Fortunately, after several dark options tests the solution was much simpler than that: GFS is a distributed FS which relies on network performance. Switching to giga ethernet made the trick. It boosted performance enough to make us more confident about our design and inversion.

Now we can focus on another of all that matters remaining before our product launching soon, quite soon, frightening soon.

So, am I freak enough?

I don't think so.

• Kamehame contest (for spanish people, "concurso de ondas vitales")
• Anime parody

But some friends of mine almost are. Which position leave me that on?

Gym day

Another 'first time' achieved.

A couple of days ago some people from my job registered at the gym in front of our office and thursday, after a tiring day at work, I decided to give it the first chance to change mental exhaustion with physical tiredness. I went alone without any of my partners. As it was my very first day at a Gym the monitor told me what to do. I thought it would be harder and I would feel worse on friday but I really feel great. I think this was what I was needing to overcame work stress and reactivate myself.

It was another example of how much human body is amazing. Much better than any mechanical machine which usually broke with use. In the other hand, muscles and human body in general (brain is another usually forgotten example) works better with training and activity (despite the weekend pain, of course). In fact, almost nobody hardly uses full of his potential (I will risk even half of his potential; and yes, that includes me).

But talking about Gym is remembering Pons. He is an ex-work-partner too much involved with diets, gyms, exercise, and the like. He gave us a lot of master classes on the matter during lunch (is there any better time to talk about it?). And now I'm acting a little like him: going to gym, taking turkey for breakfast. Will I be soon taking protein alse?. We will see, hop, hop.