No Huddle Offense

"Individual commitment to a group effort-that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work."

Chicago skyline panorama

November 10th, 2009 • Comments Off on Chicago skyline panorama

Panorama picture form Chicago – put together from 4 pictures. Just ordered it in size of 120cm x 30cm – going to look decorative on my wall.

chicago_panorama_small

Chicago Architecture Boat Tour

November 10th, 2009 • Comments Off on Chicago Architecture Boat Tour

Beatiful colors during the Chicago architecture boat tour:

chicago_2009

My slides for OGF27 about OCCI, the Cloud and HPCcloud

October 14th, 2009 • Comments Off on My slides for OGF27 about OCCI, the Cloud and HPCcloud

Remote Component Environment

September 19th, 2009 • Comments Off on Remote Component Environment

rce_logoWhile I worked for the German Aerospace Center (DLR) I was in the lead of a project team working on the SESIS project. Definitely one of the most interesting projects I ever head. During this time I was in charge of the development of the Reconfigurable Computing Environment (RCE). Since then I moved on and started to work for Sun. But the project has moved on – And I am so happy to see it grow more mature! RCE has now been released under a open source license and been renamed to Remote Component Environment! Great stuff – Two days ago it hit version 1.4.0 – My congratulations!

Keep your OpenSolaris installation slim/clean

September 18th, 2009 • 3 Comments

OpenSolarisLogo2I really like OpenSolaris. If you haven’t tried it yet you should give it a try. Still there are some things where I choose other operating system over OpenSolaris. Missing ports for some of the application I use is one point…

But never the less OpenSolaris has some killer features which makes is worth a try. For example ZFS, Zones or DTrace.

One tool I absolutely like when using Linux is the packaging system and the ability to clean up orphaned (e.g. with help of deborphan) packages. After some googleing it seemed that there is nothing in OpenSolaris yet to do so. But here are some tips and tricks to keep your installation clean as long as the feature is not available…

  1. On a laptop use ZFS compression:
    zfs set compression=on rpool
  2. Turn of the caching in pkg. (This will save you a lot disc space!)
    pkg set-property flush-content-cache-on-success True
    Downloaded packages are then no longer kept on your harddrive in /var/pkg/download
  3. deactivate unneeded services / uninstall software. This is a personal one – Decide what tools you wanna have and which ones not (Presumably you can uninstall a lot of the languages packs). Some service which you could deactivate are:
    svc:/application/desktop-cache/input-method-cache:default
    svc:/application/desktop-cache/mime-types-cache:default
    svc:/application/desktop-cache/icon-cache:default
    svc:/application/desktop-cache/desktop-mime-cache:default
    svc:/application/print/ppd-cache-update:default

    Use the following command to do so
    svcadm disable ${svc}
    svccfg delete ${svc}
  4. Find leaf/orphaned packages – This is more complicated but also a very important part. Especially some libs which you do not need any longer tend to stay. What you can do is the following – Find all the dependencies using
    /bin/pkg search -l \'depend::\'
    And then find all installed packages:
    pkg list
    All items which are installed but nobody depends on – are therefore leafs/orphaned. But be carefully – this will also list eclipse etc. But this is a way to find the orphaned libs. Personally I did some parsing with python to parse the two list of dependencies and installed packages to find the unique ones.

Overall these actions saved me 4Gb of space. Next thing to play with is tuning ZFS 🙂 Installing it on hybrid system. Have a look here: http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/test