Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Day 2
It has been a full day already. I got up at 6:15 body time, and bleered my way into breakfast. Ate. Then spent a good session learning about NSS on linux and what it can and can't do.
NSS on Linux
It does a lot. The core NSS modules is a direct port from Netware. Unfortunately, the linux kernel doesn't handle the extra bits that NSS provides (*cough* posix *cough*), so it required some creative engineering to allow the extra non-posix bits to be used. NSS allows you to create rich rights assignments, something that is lacking on standard POSIX.
In fact, the code for NSS has been submitted to Open Source and either will be included in the Kernel source, or is available other places. One thing to note, though. Since there is a significant non-posix layer in there, just loading nss.o into kernel won't give you the full NSS experience.
Performance-wise, NSS-on-linux is slower than NSS-on-Netware. Which only stands to reason. NetWare has spent coming on 20 years being fine tuned as a file-server, where Linux is an application server with general purpose OS aspirations. The presenter at this meeting noted the NSS team's surprise when the performance lab reported that NSS was only 12% slower than ReiserFS; they were expecting much slower then that since NSS is a port and Rieser was built from scratch for Linux. Also, they were rather clear that NSS is great for file-serving and such, but not the best choice for things like database serving or data warehousing.
Deploying OES on HP Blades
It was all about how to install OES-Linux onto blades using PXE, DHCP, and code hacking. Since our problem is how to get OES-NW installed onto blades, this did not apply to us. So I skipped it to take a nap.
NSS Tuning
Facinating seminar. And happy days, it WASN'T linux-centric! Yay! In this class we learned that the test-lab was able to get a system to do 10GB/Minute throughput on TSATEST, and got this performance by using software RAID0 on top of two hardware RAID5 arrays. Yep, software RAID0. Whoa....
My inner performance geek was very happy about this. I got some good ideas to test things out back home. Though I suspect our bottlenecks are more in memory/network land than storage I/O land.
Two more sessions to go, and then the Sponsor Party. Marti Gras theme, so I'll most assuredly have a couple of fist fulls of beads that I'll never want again by the time the day is done. *Sigh*
NSS on Linux
It does a lot. The core NSS modules is a direct port from Netware. Unfortunately, the linux kernel doesn't handle the extra bits that NSS provides (*cough* posix *cough*), so it required some creative engineering to allow the extra non-posix bits to be used. NSS allows you to create rich rights assignments, something that is lacking on standard POSIX.
In fact, the code for NSS has been submitted to Open Source and either will be included in the Kernel source, or is available other places. One thing to note, though. Since there is a significant non-posix layer in there, just loading nss.o into kernel won't give you the full NSS experience.
Performance-wise, NSS-on-linux is slower than NSS-on-Netware. Which only stands to reason. NetWare has spent coming on 20 years being fine tuned as a file-server, where Linux is an application server with general purpose OS aspirations. The presenter at this meeting noted the NSS team's surprise when the performance lab reported that NSS was only 12% slower than ReiserFS; they were expecting much slower then that since NSS is a port and Rieser was built from scratch for Linux. Also, they were rather clear that NSS is great for file-serving and such, but not the best choice for things like database serving or data warehousing.
Deploying OES on HP Blades
It was all about how to install OES-Linux onto blades using PXE, DHCP, and code hacking. Since our problem is how to get OES-NW installed onto blades, this did not apply to us. So I skipped it to take a nap.
NSS Tuning
Facinating seminar. And happy days, it WASN'T linux-centric! Yay! In this class we learned that the test-lab was able to get a system to do 10GB/Minute throughput on TSATEST, and got this performance by using software RAID0 on top of two hardware RAID5 arrays. Yep, software RAID0. Whoa....
My inner performance geek was very happy about this. I got some good ideas to test things out back home. Though I suspect our bottlenecks are more in memory/network land than storage I/O land.
Two more sessions to go, and then the Sponsor Party. Marti Gras theme, so I'll most assuredly have a couple of fist fulls of beads that I'll never want again by the time the day is done. *Sigh*
<permalink> posted by riedesg : 1:19 PM
