Saturday, November 21, 2009
NetBSD and NFS v4
One area in the larger BSD world where I am disappointed is the lack of NFSv4 support. Redhat has had it for a while, solaris (of course) has it, etc. Anyway, I found this link: My BSD/Mac OS X NFS Version 4 and I was wondering what makes nfsv4 support so difficult? I know that 100% compliance is probably quite a hurdle as it promises many things (full acl support, kerberos, sctp, world peace) but partial support would be a huge win.
I know a lot of people "don't like nfs" for whatever weird reasons, but it's impact on the enterprise is massive and it's still really the best and most portable way to share storage. In my experience it's also much more stable and safe than SAN with clustered filesystems.
I know a lot of people "don't like nfs" for whatever weird reasons, but it's impact on the enterprise is massive and it's still really the best and most portable way to share storage. In my experience it's also much more stable and safe than SAN with clustered filesystems.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
programming jrobin on the command line
So at work we recently upgraded our OpenNMS system and noticed that it switched from normal RRDtool (which is awesome software) to the pure java alternative jrobin. This makes sense because opennms is java software and it's generally easier to keep things in the family. They even took over the development of jrobin! However, we run a few custom reports requiring custom graphs.
So, now we're working with traditional rrdtool files and jrobin files, which are not compatible. For one-time generation, you can convert between the two (at least, jrobin claims to do that) but for on-the-fly use it's handy to have a command-line interface to produce these graphs.
Okay, jrobin comes with a class called the RrdCommander, which is supposed to offer an rrdtool-compatible interface to jrobin files. RrdCommander's info, create, etc all seem to work as advertised, except of course the GRAPH function!!! Now, I'm not expert java programmer, but the NullPointerExceptions in org.jrobin.cmd.RrdGraphCmd are so prevalent that trying to create a patch is pointless. The only sane advice is "try again".
Now that our five-line java program is out of the question we must try the next interface- the XML Template. Luckily, I have found that this basically works, but it has some quirks. The method to tell you if it's reading your template variables (hasVariables()) simply does not work. Using a '-' for the filename creates an "in memory graph", but then doesn't leave you a way to get at the graph data and, say, dump it to stdout like using - would imply. (luckily, I figured out how to implement this myself despite being told it was impossible in freenode's ##java) The second quirk is that it uses your height and width for the actual graph, but then pads on the legends, leaving you with a somewhat random image size. Anyway, I now mostly have what I need so I hope to move forward with my life.
So, now we're working with traditional rrdtool files and jrobin files, which are not compatible. For one-time generation, you can convert between the two (at least, jrobin claims to do that) but for on-the-fly use it's handy to have a command-line interface to produce these graphs.
Okay, jrobin comes with a class called the RrdCommander, which is supposed to offer an rrdtool-compatible interface to jrobin files. RrdCommander's info, create, etc all seem to work as advertised, except of course the GRAPH function!!! Now, I'm not expert java programmer, but the NullPointerExceptions in org.jrobin.cmd.RrdGraphCmd are so prevalent that trying to create a patch is pointless. The only sane advice is "try again".
Now that our five-line java program is out of the question we must try the next interface- the XML Template. Luckily, I have found that this basically works, but it has some quirks. The method to tell you if it's reading your template variables (hasVariables()) simply does not work. Using a '-' for the filename creates an "in memory graph", but then doesn't leave you a way to get at the graph data and, say, dump it to stdout like using - would imply. (luckily, I figured out how to implement this myself despite being told it was impossible in freenode's ##java) The second quirk is that it uses your height and width for the actual graph, but then pads on the legends, leaving you with a somewhat random image size. Anyway, I now mostly have what I need so I hope to move forward with my life.
Labels: java programming
NetBSD defaulting to more security, then the normal amount, then back again!
HEADS-UP: Stack Smash Protection enabled by default for amd64 and i386
Later on in the thread, however, it's revoked because of performance concerns.
UPDATE! Re-enabled!
Later on in the thread, however, it's revoked because of performance concerns.
UPDATE! Re-enabled!
Labels: NetBSD
Monday, November 9, 2009
NetBSD over git- call for collaboration
my git testing shows that the git server needs to be fast!
If anyone would like to retry what I did, please read the above-mentioned email and look at the commands after you checkout netbsd's src from git:
git clone http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/repositories/git/src
The NetBSD src tree is roughly four-times larger than the linux kernel and dragonflybsd, so it's definitely one of the larger projects to take on git. Let us know your findings.
If anyone would like to retry what I did, please read the above-mentioned email and look at the commands after you checkout netbsd's src from git:
git clone http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/repositories/git/src
The NetBSD src tree is roughly four-times larger than the linux kernel and dragonflybsd, so it's definitely one of the larger projects to take on git. Let us know your findings.
Labels: NetBSD
