2012: A year in review. So.. 2012.. What can I say.. Quite a lot, actually. When I last wrote an annual retrospective, it was 2011 going into 2012, and I’d just started at Baseblack, one of many Soho-based VFX studios. I had a good 12-odd months there, before the credit crunch hit the entire London VFX industry, and I was made redundant in October. Over my time there I wrote a lot of puppet manifests, built a render farm based on Dell Blade servers, undertook a Hitachi HNAS administrator course, learned how to use Maya, Realflow, Nuke, Shake, PFTrack, Silhouette, and a whole bunch of other VFX packages too numerous to mention....

“John, I can’t get Jurassic Park back on line without Dennis Nedry.” Words you never want to hear uttered. Unless you work for InGen, it’s highly unlikely. Although there is the remaining problem of the Human Single Point of Failure (HSPOF). After you’ve spent the last year or two eliminating the single points of failure from your computational infrastructure, you realise that you’re the only one who knows which cronjobs run when, and on which servers....

So.. it transpires that I have a friend who studied Physics at Imperial College, and as a part of that, was taught how to use C++ “As a tool to help with computational physics”. - His words, not mine. As a result, he has no explicit knowledge of some of the finer points of C++ programming, no idea how a binary search algorithm works, why you’d use a Deque and when you’d use a Vector....

I get easily tired of doing the same thing over and over again, and will, wherever possible, script or automate it to make life easier for myself. This could be in the form of a lightweight webapp/REST api for stuff, or in this case, I used Jenkins. So on one server, we sometimes need to reload apache. As we don’t like developers randomly executing shells on live servers, it’s better to just allow access to a few specific commands, in this case, a wrapper script on the target server’s /usr/local/bin that just wraps “/etc/init....

Interesting thing of the day: Milo, Ron, et al. “Network motifs: simple building blocks of complex networks.” Science Signalling 298.5594 (2002): 824. Fulltext available from Google Scholar: - http://bit.ly/YAstgD It occurs to me that in scalable systems engineering (the sort of thing I do for a living), you only tend to see Bi-fan networks and Bi-parallel ones. Bi-fan is rougly equivalent to a cross-connected core switch whereas Bi-parallel is a good representation of a Virtual IP with Load balancer....

I think this seems like an appropriate time to say a few words in favour of the great United States of America. There’s some things they just do excellently. Customer service springs to mind as one of the best I’ve ever encountered. I’m not exactly sure why this is, but people do seem to be far more willing to be kind, courteous and helpful. There’s other things too, the weather is, generally better (and if not better, then certainly more predictable)....

I’ve heard quite a bit about the “G-WAN Application Server” over the past few weeks. Initially it was a Serverfault question that left me thinking “WTF” (http://serverfault.com/questions/445835/virtual-host-on-g-wan) I took a look at their website and thought: “Those are pretty insane claims”. They’re also the kind of crap you tend to see where the intended audience is somebody who has absolutely no clue about scalability, or production-readiness. Y’know, Managers. Quite well summarised by this comment: GWAN isn’t designed to be a robust webserver, it’s designed to perform exceptionally well in contrived and outlandish benchmarks, so PHBs will demand the IT team use it and buy support… – Chris S♦ 19 hours ago Interestingly enough, the only person who answered that question was a fellow called Gil who apparently works for G-WAN....

I’m looking to setup a site with 49 edge switches connected by fiber to a central switch. 3 VLANs will be setup to handle data, telephony, and streaming media. each edge switch should have provision for 2 SFP modules for failover, and the core switch needs to have the provision to handle this failover. i’m getting lost on the Cisco site with their specs and recommendations. if anyone could suggest a suitable model number for the core switch and the edge switch, it would be really appreciated....

This is a bit long-winded, and wordy. If you’ve come here looking for tips on improving commvault backup performance and/or throughput, then you should click here for the good stuff. It’s been a long time since I blogged. It’s been a really long time since I blogged about anything we’ve been doing at $Dayjob. I’ve spent the better part of the year working on sorting out the backup solution here....

Lessons learnt from the Unlock London Hackathon. I had an email on May 16th, asking for some assistance in setting up the wifi network for another hackathon. After my impromptu assistance at LondonRealtime went down so well, and “saved the network”; apparently I was a natural choice for the next one. At least I knew (sorta) the network layout at White Bear Yard. The main difference between this one and the last, was a bit more warning on the side of “We’re gonna need wifi”, but there was still a clause that it’s gotta be “flawless” - Their words, not mine....