Quick tip: If you need to add files that are not currently in the repository to SVN, just run the following command from the directory:
$ svn st | grep ^? | cut -b7- | xargs svn add
Of course, you’ll need to commit the files:
$ svn commit
-Chris
Hard drives are getting too big. In a recent article I read, Sci-Tech Today.com reported that Hitachi will soon be releasing drives that have over 1TB of storage density PER SQUARE INCH. That is insane!
Imagine a hard drive that has 4TB of storage in one single drive. First, that amount of storage is just huge for a single drive. Second, if you put that in a network environment the density of the drive would be such that with sufficient services accessing the data, you would quickly max out the throughput and wouldn’t even get half the benefit of such a large drive.
Second, with such high density the susceptibility of the drive to corruption from outside forces (i.e. — electromagnetic interference) would increase exponentially.
I still think making current drives more efficient and faster is a far better return on technological advancement than trying to cram more and more data into a single drive. If you need more than 500GB of storage, you should be using an array not a single drive.
-Chris
I recently needed to count the number of files, not including directories, within a given directory. Additionally, I wanted to count recursively.
On FreeBSD or Linux, you can do this with the following commands:
$ find /path/to/dir -type f | wc -l
Pretty handy!
-Chris
So I have two Macs: My Macbook that I take to class and various wifi hotspots (read: Panera Bread) with me, and my PowerMac G5 desktop. Currently I connect my 23″ Apple Cinema to my Macbook when I’m home and sit here and work. I would like to be able to fire up the Macbook at home and “sync” it up with my desktop so that I can revert to using my desktop for the major work I do here — web development and business operations.
Honestly, I haven’t used my PowerMac in about two months and I intend to soon spend some time updating all the applications and bringing it up to speed with what I use on my Macbook today. So, that aside; how can I sync the various data elements I use on each system with each other? Here is what I use:
What I do not want to do is purchase a .Mac account because I don’t think it’ll do anywhere near what I need. Additionally, I have nearly 1GB of mail within Apple Mail, and I’m not happy using IMAP. Not only does it slow the updates down from the server, in my experience, but it eats up server space.
If anyone has any suggestions on how I can smoothly sync these, let me know! Syncing mail is the most important to me. I want to be able to view my mail on both systems, and if I read a message on system A show it as read on system B. Thinking about this more and more, perhaps IMAP is the way I’ll have to go. I’m just concerned that with the massive amount of mail I have that accessing mail will be very slow and will cause a great deal of overhead on the server.
I am beginning this entry as I sit down to watch the re-airing of the GOP Presidential Candidates debate on MSNBC at 8PM CST on 10/09/07. I intend to review section by section the debate as it unfolds and voice my opinion and stance on issues throughout.
Recently we have been using the VMware server we have more and more. Lately we have been seeing performance issues and I’m trying to track down exactly what is causing this.
In this article, we’ll take a look at some disk performance testing I’m doing on various servers of different configuration. We’ll compare the results against the VMware server to see how it stacks up.
Jake has been testing our Zimbra 4.6.7 setup using the beta version of the Zimbra Connector for Outlook. We contacted Zimbra directly and were able to get access to the beta. In our tests, the functionality of the connector is good, but the stability is not. Jake is running Vista and Outlook 2007 and is reporting almost unusable stability of Outlook when using the Zimbra client. Hopefully these issues will be resolved soon and I think we’ll be set to use it in production.
Additionally, he tested the mobility features and found that they work well on his Windows Mobile smart-phone.
Zimbra the Release Candidate of Zimbra 5.0 (Network Edition) should be out soon — like, next week — so I look forward to seeing what changes have been implemented there.
Additionally, Jake is in discussions with Scalix about pricing, features and such so if the price is right we’ll be looking at that soon too. I also want to take a look at Open Exchange and will be doing so soon.
Today I installed Zimbra for the first time. Zimbra is an open-source, Linux-/UNIX-based collaboration and mail server suite, similar in features to Microsoft Exchange. It has native support for MAPI and is supposed to work great with Outlook. It also has advanced mobility features that put it on par with Exchange.
I spun up a Virtual Machine on our VMware server and loaded Ubuntu 6.06 Server. Once the base install was done, I removed the CD-ROM source from /etc/sources.list and ran:
# apt-get update
This made the package manager know it was to use FTP or HTTP to download packages. Next, I ran the following:
# wget http://files.zimbra.com/downloads/4.5.7_GA/zcs-NETWORK-4.5.7_GA_1319.UBUNTU6.tgz # tar zxf zcs-NETWORK-4.5.7_GA_1319.UBUNTU6.tgz # cd zcs # sudo ./install.sh
This ran through the initial process and listed several packages that needed to be installed, so I installed them next and re-ran the installer:
# sudo apt-get install libidn11 curl fetchmail libpcre3 libgmp3c2 libxml2 libstdc++6 openssl perl libexpat1 libstdc++5 # sudo ./install.sh
This went through several very obvious questions as part of installation, including the administrator password. At one point near the end, it asked for my license file. I signed up for a free trial on Zimbra’s website, and that was emailed to me in the form of a XML file. I simply used SCP to move that up to the server, typed in the path to the file and it worked great.
I made one big mistake though: The password I provided for the admin account had a special character that must have thrown the setup program off. Although it reported the admin user was created, post-installation user account listings showed that other default users had been created but the admin user was nowhere to be found. Additionally, I couldn’t login to the admin using the admin username and password I provided. Bummer…
So, I spent the next two hours trying to figure out how to add a new admin. It wound up being a very simple command:
# zmprov ca testadmin@domain.com test123 zimbraIsAdminAccount TRUE
The key here is the “zimbraIsAdminAccount TRUE” attribute. Once I did that, I was able to login to the admin panel and everything worked out of the box as far as I can tell. I was able to point my domain’s MX record to the public IP of the server (I placed it behind a NAT) and before long I had setup another domain with a few user accounts and had mail flowing.
Had the admin password not screwed up, it would have been working about 20 minutes — which is amazing.
It seems to use a local LDAP server by default, but I did have the option to specify an LDAP server during the installation as well as clustering options that I didn’t touch, since this was a VM. Apparently it stores user account data in LDAP and mail schema information in a MySQL 5.0 database which was also installed. I’m not sure yet where it stores the data (email, etc.) but I think it’s on the raw file system as it should be.
The web interface is pretty cool with lots of AJAX. That said, it doesn’t work in Safari 3.x beta yet; I read they’re working on that. Since that is my primary browser, I was using Camino 1.5 instead.
Jake is going to be testing the MAPI connector and the mobility features and I’m sure he’ll report on that soon.
I’m going to move on to setting up a Scalix server next I believe. We’re looking for a good open-source, Outlook-supporting collaboration server that’s on par with Exchange server.
I’m installing Zimbra to test it out, so I spun up a Ubuntu virtual machine on our VMware server. Much to my surprise, the base install of Ubuntu 6.04 doesn’t have an SSH server turned on or even installed. Since Ubuntu uses the Debian package manager, it’s very easy to install; just annoying that you have to do it at all:
# sudo apt-get install openssh-server
This comes in handy. You can take an “image” of a VPS, and just not start it up (ever). Then later, when you need to spawn a new instance of it, just clone it again.
# vzmlocal -C old_VEID:new_VEID