CJ Fearnley

I recently finished Stanford’s excellent free on-line course Introduction to Databases with Jennifer Widom. The course is a broad survey of database technology including XML, Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) from many angles (SQL forms the centerpiece of the course), OLAP (OnLine Analytical Processing) and NoSQL. I was very impressed with the breadth of Widom’s approach to the subject: it was a major reason I decided to spend time on the course. Another strength is its nuts-n-bolts approach: some theoretical topics are covered but for the most part this is a course for practitioners. Finally, I particularly appreciated the extensive use of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) in the course. Why study databases? I will merely say that data is a core tool pervading the information resources of modern civilization. Databases are where data is housed. Fo... (more)

Cluster Services Built With FOSS

Built on the Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) model for cluster deployments, LinuxForce staff has been hard at work over the past months developing and deploying LinuxForce Cluster Services built upon exclusively FOSS technologies and on December 15th we put out a press release: Announcing LinuxForce Cluster Services In September Laird Hariu wrote the article “File Servers - The Business Case for High Availability” where, in addition to building a case to use clusters, he also briefly outlined how Debian and other FOSS could be used to create a cluster for a file server. File ser... (more)

Introducing RemoteResponder.Net

If you know the history of LinuxForce, you know that we’ve been doing remote systems administration using FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) since our founding in 1995. And we’ve called our remote systems administration service Remote Responder℠ for a long time too. But the website RemoteResponder.Net is new. The new site is part of our educational initiative to explain the issues involved in administering FOSS-based IT infrastructures to achieve the promise of greater reliability and ever-improving functionality while keeping costs low and meeting an organizations’ ever-evolv... (more)

Beyond the Cloud

Last week I read a good article on cloud computing, Cloud ROI: A Grounded View.  It seems that even with all the hype (or because of it?) most are not “running blindly” to adopt “the cloud”.  I must admit the cloud metaphor has a powerful poetic charm to it.  That is probably why it has grabbed the attention of so many over the past few years. Everything in our world is ephemeral, so there is an aptness to the concept of a “cloud”. Moreover, I too like and use cloud analogies. But I am now looking for clearer skies!  Here is a short list of my gripes about "the cloud": What does “... (more)

One way to migrate Xen virtual machines to KVM in Debian

There are dozens of virtualization products on the market. When we launched our first high-availability cluster in early 2008 we chose Xen due to it’s ability to run on non-virtualized hardware, support in Debian 4.0 (Etch) and general flexibility. We’ve learned a lot about the upstream of Xen, including the challenges that Debian maintainers face, and we were increasingly drawn to another free and open source virtualization technology, Kernel Based Virtual Machine (KVM). The primary downside to KVM is that it requires special CPU hardware support to run, but this hardware suppor... (more)