New iLife 09 Training Links

Apple has posted some nice videos tutorials for the new ILife 09 and iWork 09, here’s the links:

iLife 09 – http://www.apple.com/ilife/tutorials/

iWork 09 – http://www.apple.com/iwork/tutorials/

The Machine is Us/ing Us

This is an interesting video from an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University.

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RedHat Clustering

This is going to be a fairly geeky post so put on your nerd glasses and brace yourself, it’s going to get thick.

I’ve been spending a fair amount of free time reading about clustering in Linux and how I can use in the district to provide improved services. Some of the benefits of clustering are high availability, no down time, load balancing and failover.

Currently we run our file services in an active/passive Windows cluster with an EMC Clarion SAN backend. I am impressed at the raw numbers on the hardware throughput but I have been thoroughly disappointed with the performance on Windows server 2003. It simply doesn’t scale well. On an average day our “active” file server, which has 8 XEON processors, will run between 60% and 85% utilization. Basically, one active file server is not enough to handle the load.

Prior to implementing the Windows clustered SAN we ran Linux with NFS across 3 servers and I can tell you that the performance was much better than now, albeit we had other issues(NFS locks, POSIX non-compliance,etc.) but at least the user experience was only dinged once in a while and not daily.

This summer I am looking to change over our Windows Cluster to a 4 server – active/active/active/active scenario running Samba 3 CTDB and RedHat Linux.We currently run most of our services on RedHat/CentOS enterprise now so it won’t be a big stretch for myself or my staff.

One question I often get is just how secure or robust is Linux so here’s a few links to places that use Linux for their datacenter:

http://www.google.com/linuxrepositories/
http://www.nsa.gov/research/selinux/
http://www.linux.org/info/linux_govt.html

Oh one last thing I forgot to mention…Linux is completely free, it will cost Saline $0 in software costs to run Linux.

Until next time,
Ken