Codestrom - The Wandering Programmer

IRC guide for professionals

Connecting to an irc network

Many people have a lot of preferences and opinions about what makes a "good" irc client.  All personal preferences aside I'll step by step describe how to setup an irc account using pidgin [1].  Pidgin offers a number of advantages including being portable across multiple OS and combining multiple messenger protocols into one convenient place.  Pidgin does lack a lot of the useful functions that many other irc clients provide, but for those getting started provides an intuitive interface to help get started.

Note: If you mention to others you're using pidgin they will almost certainly comment it's a bad irc client.

• From the main buddy list window in pidgin click > Accounts > Manage accounts
  • Select > add
    • From the protocols choose > irc
    • Username > (something unique.. a moniker, nickname or even parts of your name.  Your choice..)
    • Server > (for pidgin it should default to irc.freenode.net)
    • Password > (won't matter unless you register)

After saving pidgin should automatically attempt to connect you.

Note: I assume you've successfully connected and if not I'll add a troubleshooting section

• From the main buddy list window in pidgin click > Buddies > Join a Chat
  • Account - select the irc network you just created
  • Channel - #osunix (Depending on the network there can be dozens to thousands to choose from) *Small selfish plug for a channel I manage
    

Useful commands you need to know and should remember

• /help - gives a list of commands you can send to the server
• /nick newnickname - change your nickname
• /join #channelname - Many channel names start with # or ##.  You can join up to 20 channels by default, but I would recommend you start small.
• /query somenick - opens a private chat window where you can talk privately with that person.
• /list - Will open a new window with a list of channels you can join
  

IRC tips, best practices and etiquette

• Be polite
• Ignore idiots - Mostly commonly called "trolls"  They are professionals at trying to get attention and being stupid.
  
• If you enter a new channel and have a question.  Just ask the question.  It may break normal politeness, but on irc it's not rude. Not following this will get you ignored or instantly marked as someone without a lot of irc experience.  (Thus a possible target for trolls)
• It's ok to ignore the channel and just work.  Anyone with years of experience will develop this skill quickly.  For those connecting while at their day job this can be especially important.  No need to apologize.. Once again it's not rude.
• Try to google first and failing that then ask.  Encourage others to do the same
• There's no rule that says you have to participate.  It's ok to "lurk" and just read or ignore
• Normally you can tab complete a person's nick by just typing a few characters

Setting up auto-join

• From the main conversation window > Conversation > add
  • Account and channel should be correct if you were already in #osunix
  • Tick the box "Autojoin when account becomes online"
    

Registering your nickname (freenode specific) [2] 

Note: Remember to update your account if you didn't add a password when you originally created it.

Channel managed by me will be

• Relatively noise free
• Positive atmosphere
  
• Currently no idiots and will stay that way for the foreseeable future

Reasons why to use irc

• most efficient and best tool for a large or small group of professionals to collaborate
• friendly atmosphere
• informal place for new users to ask questions
• allows a natural pooling of knowledge as the channel grows (the more people who join.. the better the channel gets)
• good tool to recruit and keep new users interested
• sometimes more efficient than email to debug and identify problems
  

[1] http://www.pidgin.im/
[2] http://freenode.net/faq.shtml#registering

Favorite quotes

"When you innovate, you've got to be prepared for everyone telling you you're nuts."

Larry Ellison

"When I take on a new problem is that I'm not interested in how it's been done before. I only want to know, of all the constraints people tend to assume, which ones are actually fundamental and which ones are just habit?"

Jeff Bonwick

(I'll update this as I find more.. Feel free to drop your favorite quote in a comment)

Why the risk is too much for IBM to buy Sun

The blunt truth about what Sun Microsystems really has to offer to IBM

In advance please note this is from the perspective of an individual and community developer.  When Redhat bought JBOSS Larry Ellison (need reference) made some very logical comments about making sure that there's value when purchasing an open source company.  The bottom line really comes down to profitability and the tradeoff of build vs buy.  >From an IBM perspective they've had a competing OS against Sun for decades.  One of the actual successes in the server market has been Linux.  Which initially wasn't commercially supported at all.  Almost entirely by viral growth has it started to occupy everything from super computers to embedded devices.  So the big secret here is that Sun's business unit doesn't really care about open source.  When it came to a licensing choice they intentionally picked one that made legal, financial and customer lock-in sense.  It was the most conservative way to "adopt" open source and try to leverage the same viral growth that Linux had with their products.  The result after three years in my very humble opinion is that of complete failure.  The value they add to open source is very generous in one way and completely useless in another.

• Sun open sourced projects lack a leader
• Sun open sourced projects still have significant conflicts with the community
• Developers outside Sun still have a difficult time fixing bugs and contributing
• Most of the development communication is internal to Sun
• Their open source strategy is not afaik profitable (Which if you consider the above explains why)

Every time the word zfs + linux kernel is mentioned I see the true heart of every Solaris admin and developer.  It's that deep fear that the one them justifying their overpaid salary is going to go away fast.  How would the landscape change if Sun did internally decide to dual license zfs and secretly made the RedHat killer Linux..  RedHat aims to make billions of of support for Linux all without the aid of ZFS at all.  So what if Sun did make this killer Linux alongside a Killer OpenSolaris... Could they keep their existing customer base and nearly overnight gain new market.  Or would their corporate image and negative community kill the whole plan with RedHat just merging the ZFS patches and saying thanks.  I'm of course giving a comparison for only RedHat and not even mentioning Novel's SuSE or Canonical's Ubuntu.  So to get back to the point of what Sun really has to offer.  OpenSolaris technology is great, but to currently profit or support it you would have to build a team or a buy a team.  However, what's the point?  Is the Solaris/SXCE/OpenSolaris projects collectively profitable?  Are they getting more revenue and great marketshare and if not why not?  I see the reasons as a complete lack of marketing talent by Sun and also some of the reasons I mentioned above.  The emperical evidence to this is that dozens of people every day on irc need help and countless others silently test and throw away the OpenSolaris iso.  They capture only the most determined individuals or those who possibly see some long term commercial gain.  Most talented individuals even a bit impatient will be completely turned off by the lack of technical polish and if not by that.. By the most ignorant and paranoid community of admin/developers I never expected or really want to deal with.

So lets be pragmatic.  Even if you did identify all points of failure.. Would the technical and corporate Sun  allow them to be fixed.  Could it happen in time?  There is sure to be customer churn if IBM buys Sun.. Would that imbalance cause any possibly profitable devision to then turn red.  How patient would IBM be to any devision that slowly started to leak water from the start or after a year?

Sun has 3B in the bank and the rumor was for a buy of around 6.5B.. That's a possible net loss of 3.5B during what could be the edge of a very hard economic period for the entire globe.  Why risk it?  If IBM wanted to make SolarIAX they have the source to both products.  CDDL allows them to only open source any changes they make to the existing code.

So from there it looks like they are risking 3.5B on:

1. a support network for OpenSolaris technology
2. New customer base to sell to
   
3. hostile worthless community
4. Copyright to various cool things already open source
5. One less competitor

If we compare the annual revenue of Sun and how much it actually competes with AIX and IBM we can see worst case how buying the competition to just kill it would possibly make sense.  The conspiracy theorist may not have a foot in reality, but "liars can figure, but figures can't lie".  The argument this is of course that Sun is going to slowly die on it's own.  Any new competition possibly more capable would only surface faster as a result of a buy.  From there it means that if they do buy Sun they'll either quietly let it die fast and layoff the possibly cash draining support network or really try to push the great adoption of OpenSolaris technology and solve the problems Sun can't solve.  Wait.. let me repeat that again another way.. Sun investors are trying not to sell Sun, but to sell their problems to someone else capable of fixing it and making more money off it than them.  So deeper into the rabbit hole we see more conspiracy about does IBM really grok and understand how to lead an open source community.  *BUZZ*   The short answer is that they seem to do a lot of great research that works around open source or uses it where the can make money, but being a community leader and evangelist is something I don't see them having an experience with.  People may point to the eclipse project, but technically I see it as a major failure against commercial products and it's certainly of no real value.  If Netbeans had been open sourced first I would most likely be saying the same thing about it.  However, Sun was late to catch on to vet it's worthless open source projects and dump them into the community.

The bottom line is that Sun's problems can't be solved by any current large company with the possible exception of Apple.  From there the buying of the support organization and technology to offset any possible loss as a result of competition comes into play.  To risk that for something which is already filled with virii and going to die simply isn't worth it.  So to any IBM executive that's suckered into vote aye to buy Sun.. good luck to you and I look forward to a positive future of helping to solve the problems.. (fingers crossed)

zfs root

ZFS root the bottom line

So to clear any doubt about it.  zfs root is *rock solid*.  zfs root not only allows multiple BE (boot environments), but other advantages.  You can't currently use compression or raidz(2) with zfs root, but those are being planned currently.. With any luck they'll be accepted as google summer of code projects :)

zfs vs btrfs comparison

To be completely honest this is a high level best effort feature comparison between zfs and btrfs.  (I'm trying to be as unbiased as possible)  While zfs has years of being used in production I think btrfs is quickly adding a large comparable feature set.  Nothing is perfect or instant so corrections and updates are *most* welcome. (This includes how I've worded things)  Check my about page for contact details.  As I have time I'll try to publish more detailed descriptions of each file system.  (Selfish note: I'm also interested to porting btrfs or zfs under a more liberal license if anyone wants to sponsor the effort or needs details.)

Feature	ZFS	BTRFS
COW (copy on write)	yes	yes
Snapshots	yes	yes
Performance degradation at near 98-100% disk usage	yes	Currently does kernel oopse, but being worked on and honestly will probably have similar issue. (Someone ping me when this is fixed)
Block level compression	yes	yes. Currenly only available as a mount option.  *Maintenance nightmare*
Full on disk encryption (file, attributes, name.. etc)	Being worked on, but not production ready.  Sun recently revised their release schedule from May to probably some time in 2009.  (I'm just guessing on this timeline)  Using solaris lofi encryption is possible in the mean-time.	Planned, but no certain schedule.  Is limited to file bodies, but ecryptfs may also offer additional options
Spindle write balances	yes	Planned - no schedule
Online resizing	no (being worked on)	yes
Online defragmentation	no (ties into the same code as pool resizing so being worked on)	yes
shared library interface	libzfs	none.. no plans, but may be possible?
Alternative compression capability	yes, but would need to link into the kernel	yes, but would need to link into the kernel
Aggressive file caching	yes	various kernel options.. (Unclear to the author what these options are or exactly do.. check /proc/sys/vm for whatever hackery)
Ditto block	yes (multiple copies of metadata and files logically distributed across all spindles.  Number of copies of the default is tunable.)	metadata only
write checksums	yes	yes
Built-in raid (More notes below)	0,1,10, 5 with fixes write hole (raidz), and some variant of 6 called raidz2	0,1 and 10
Automatically turns off write cache when not controlling full disk	yes	no
Easy way to transport pools/volumes between hosts	yes (zfs send/recieve)	Mirroring will be available, but I don't think this is the same as zfs send/receive
Primary sponsoring company	Sun™ (I think Sun™ should encourage the community to be more involved?)	Oracle™, RedHat™, HP™, IBM™, Intel™, Novell™and Linux community
License	CDDL	GPL2
ACL	yes (pure ACL.. all files have ACL) with userland support	yes, but can be turned off? (but..  the gnu utils chmod and others may not have full support acl yet.)
ACL model	NFSv4 ACL	Posix
Endian independent	Yes.. swap a drive been sparc or intel as you wish	No
separate zil	Yes	No
separate l2arc	Yes	No
zfs supports case-insensitive filesystems for Windows compatibility	Yes	No
enforce utf-8-only filenames	Yes	No
direct io support	Yes	Writes yes. Reads No - Planned
POSIX compliant concurrent writes (single writer locks)	Yes	No
Extended attributes	Yes	Yes
Quotas	Yes	Yes
Favorite Quote from lead developer	"When I take on a new problem is that I'm not interested in how it's been done before. I only want to know, of all the constraints people tend to assume, which ones are actually fundamental and which ones are just habit?" Jeff Bonwick	"something lame that gets us 85% of the way there is fine" Chris Mason
**Warning some opinion** RAID/volume management	Inside ZFS	Managed outside the filesystem Is lvm really good at managing raid? Does it make the /problem/ more simple or add layers to the administration which are a pita

Christopher Bergström © 2009 - Please don't reproduce without asking first.

9 reasons to port btrfs *now*

This is meant to be a half serious and half comical list of reasons why someone (probably not in their right mind) would want to start a porting effort *now* of btrfs (pronounced butter fs) to their favorite platform of choice.  Long term once it's finalized I sense the great divide in enterprise filesystem features.  Firstly, zfs will go more towards storage and add stronger storage and reliability.  btrfs will push more for performance and have automatic marketshare via being included in the Linux kernel. Decisions are rarely done based on true technical merit and the benefits/disadvantages of migrating away from Linux would be less.. (I mean.. for all the great things in OpenSolaris how many does the average developer/admin know?)

So here it is..

0) An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure to shut up the eventual fud from Linux zealots
1) There's already a mostly complete gpl implementation
2) It's (afaik) not a patent minefield
3) You'd be happy to see Chris Mason using Mercurial again
4) Your company runs Oracle or possibly even PostgreSQL not on Linux
5) Your platform still depends on old sucky filesystems
6) You are or know someone who likes hacking on unfinished filesystems
7) I can't believe it's not butter (tm)
8) Can't think of something.. skipping ahead..
9) Last, but not least important.. it's going to be a good filesystem

If you'd like to help or I missed anything please let me know