TheBonsai’s Blog

At work, we have Oracle and -related systems on top of SLES10. When you need them to work in a shared environment (e.g. shared NFS disk), the user oracle and the group oinstall need the same user ID on all systems (naturally).

Unfortunately, the IDs of these entities depend on the point in the installation process where you install the SUSE orarun packet, since the UID is generated on the fly. This leads to trouble here and then (nothing serious, but it’s a bit of work to fix such an issue afterwards). Of course I think the installation procedure of the SLES orarun package should use a fixed ID here, but that’s something SUSE decides, not me (it tastes like a bug).
Read the rest of this entry »

The Scheherazade release - 1001 nights of coding

Damien Sandras has released the Version 3.0 of his Ekiga software phone.

This is a major release, most of the code has been rewritten. Many changes are not visible because they are in internal code. See the feature list (major new features are in bold-italic font):
Read the rest of this entry »

m00!

Due to a new toy we got at work, I was searching how to massively speed up BZIP2 processing on GNU/Linux systems. It sucks when you have 16 cores but only one process/thread.

I finally found PBZIP2, which basically is just a new controll wrapper around the underlying library (the code has around 60 Kilobytes - with comments and all). It builds in about the half of a second.

Just to imagine a bit:

Test file was a 5.6 Gigabyte file with random binary data (/dev/urandom). A normal BZIP2 took 30 Minutes to finish, a parallelized PBZIP2 made the same in 3 Minutes and 30 seconds.

In case you need to speedup BZIP2 processing on your SMP-servers, consider to use PBZIP2 - it rocks!