Long live the “Community Edition”! Pentaho Data Integration (lovingly known as PDI) is arguably one of the best ETL tools available in a Community Edition variant. I’m often involved in projects where at a high level, the goal is produce “something” that takes data from a source, manipulates it, then […]

A few months ago, while “window” shopping at Ebay, I came across something that I thought to be an unbelievable deal. I found a Fusion-IO ioDrive Duo 640GB MLC PCI-E SSD for the crazy low price of.. well on second thought, maybe disclosing the price isn’t such a good idea. […]

There are two “things” that I often have to give some credit to for helping me out over the years. One is Google, where I’ll unashamedly say that 1/4 of my brain is stored. The other is the Open Source software community. The OSS community deserves a shout out because […]

Can you believe that in the post virtualization era that some people are still deploying application servers on physical systems? Anyways, here is my p2v method for moving Win2008 R2 systems to XenServer/XCP using all free software Requirements This P2V method I think is one of the most flexible I’ve […]

A few weeks ago, I posted a how-to that details what it takes to get OCFS2 and Pacemaker to work together on CentOS 6.x. In this how-to, I want to show you how you can leverage that platform to deploy a scalable and performant NAS filer. This filer will be […]

In an earlier post here, I shared my frustrations about how it doesn’t seem possible to get a Pacemaker cluster going with OCFS2 as the cluster fs on CentOS 6. But I wouldn’t be a “guru” if I couldn’t get it work now would I?? <evil laugh> hahahaha </evil laugh>. […]

One aspect of using Linux that often boggles my mind is how the difficultly of some tasks will vary from distribution to distribution. For example, a package or absolute dependency needed to compile an application or build a library may be present on OpenSUSE or SLES but be completely missing […]

As many of you already know, fencing is an important component of maintaining the health of your cluster. When cluster nodes experience issues, behave improperly or overall, just aren’t playing nice with the remainder of the nodes, it’s important to bring down that node as fast as possible, otherwise you […]

Update 2013-03-11: A reader was kind enough to inform me that sharing wasn’t working for him. I looked into it and indeed it was no longer working. I opened an issue with the xapi developers over at github and it seems that some changes went into xapi between releases and […]

A couple of months ago, I finally made time to sit down and play with one of the most powerful features of Samba: clustering and high availability through CTDB. CTDB stands for Clustered Trivial DataBase. The TDB is a lightweight database used by Samba to store different types of persistent […]