Check out this graphic we've come across, this hopefully will put to rest some of the concerns people have had about the hardware business from Sun (we still got a big list of hardware we want to purchase in the future):
(this is an ad that'll hit the newspapers soon...)
Browsing LDAP contacts in an email client is a missing feature in almost all the mail clients out there, with the exception of the Evolution client.
We came across a Thunderbird extension, "Contacts Sidebar", that gives us just this nice feature! You can browse LDAP server within the main Thunderbird frame.
Hope you like it!
Recently there have been several reports about the new hardware from Sun + Oracle that'll beat out all competition, especially the likes of IBM. I am sure you guys have heard of them.
There have been reports at one of our favorite blogs about the new Sun F5100. This all makes sense now.
One can bet that this new record breaking system includes this yet to be released F5100 flash array. This flash array contains 80 flash modules (FMOD), plenty of backup energy storage modules (ESM). It is an array, so it has some HBA's in the back to be hooked up to host nodes for processing power. The ESM modules provide power to the "flash disks" in case AC power is lost or when a FMOD needs replacing.
So, what can one do with 80 flash drives backed by some heavy duty servers? You can get some nice snapshots of the hardware at docs.sun.com.
Nice!
(Oh, it's a 1U, a quick peek of it.)
Or not. This is just some, perhaps, thoughtless idea.
ZFS is a big deal. It's powerful and very easy to use. It's automated and hides all the complexities in a redundant storage system. We've all come across situations where a file system gets full and we then spend hours trying to fix the mess up. This happens in big and small companies.
It happens in servers that are well managed with "good" monitoring software too. Even setting quota's can result in this problem. So, what is a good solution for this problem? I was brainstorming an idea, and one way maybe is to get the ZFS kernel to make the system run slow when a file system (or zpool) is nearing capacity - perhaps some sleep() somewhere. Of course, this would happen on only critical file systems, such as rpool or a zfs file system with a special option set.
In addition, this intentional length of sleep() would be based on how busy a server is. If it is an mostly idle server, the sleep would be long. If it's a busy server, it'll be smaller, but long enough for the performance to be noticeable.
Users and customers would complain and get the attention of administrators. The end goal is to get IT working on the server, looking for problems. The "kernel" then could also add a note to the motd about the file system nearing capacity.
But having the file system do all this could be bad, when a some script or a small C program can do it, outside of the kernel! Getting it to slow down the OS could be the hard part, but I am sure there are some clever tricks for doing this, e.g. pounding the disk or using up all the available RAM.
Could this work? Please share your thoughts.
There are a few LDAP search attributes that are not used often, but good to know of. They come in handy when doing scripting too. Here's a quick summray of them. I don't believe this is part of the RFC, but instead it has been adopted by a few different LDAP servers out there, including OpenDS.
This + attribute will result in all operational attributes being returned with the result.
ldapsearch -h hostname -b dc=example,dc=com "(objectclass=*)" "+"
To get a full list of all attributes belonging to an entry, you just need to NOT specify the search attribute. But, if you want all the attributes plus the operational attributes, you can specify (the * attribute tells the server to return all attributes):
ldapsearch -h hostname -b dc=example,dc=com "(objectclass=*)" "*" "+"
This will get all entries, but no attributes are returned. This is like doing a search and telling it to give the "dn" attribute only.
ldapsearch -h hostname -b dc=example,dc=com "(objectclass=*)" "1.1"
Finally, an interesting one, ever wonder to what objectclass an attribute belongs to? There is no way to do that exactly, but something that can help is, using the "@objectclass" search attribute. This can get all attributes that belong to a specified objectclass.
ldapsearch -h hostname -b dc=example,dc=com "(objectclass=*)" "@person"
Like mentioned above, you can also combine these different "virtual" attributes to get a combined result, such as:
ldapsearch -h hostname -b dc=example,dc=com "(objectclass=*)" "+" "*"
Hope this helps someone!