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Linux Software

The Haps from LWCE: Samba Wins, RH w/XFS, BOF 63

Posted by Hemos from the all-the-news-that's-fit-to-print dept.
We've been at LinuxWorld for the last couple days, and some interesting stuff has been going on: The SAMBA folks won the $25,000 IDG/Linus Torvalds award, and SGI announced the availability of RH7-based distro using XFS [?] . In other news, our BOF went well with many questions about Slashcode - and the Perl Monks booth has been doing great in donations. Update: 02/01 05:18 PM by CT : The highlight for me so far was judging the "Coveted" Golden Penguin Awards w/ Don. Actually, I seriously did covet the award, beautiful hand blown glass penguin made me wish I was a contestant. We judged that Linus got the definition of BogoMIPS wrong. Fortunately his still won, but it was truly joyous seeing the surprise on his face.
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The Haps from LWCE: Samba Wins, RH w/XFS, BOF More

The Haps from LWCE: Samba Wins, RH w/XFS, BOF

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  • Are the RLCBSDG (Red Latex Clad BSD Girls)there?
    And where are the pix of said RLCBSDG?

    ---

  • Not a separate distro! (Score:4)

    by BlowCat ( 216402 ) on Thursday February 01, 2001 @06:54AM (#464505)
    SGI announced the availability of RH7-based distro

    In fact, it's just a modified installer for RedHat 7.0 that allows you to install it on XFS.

    There are similar installers that make it possible to install RedHat, Debian and even Slackware on ReiserFS. More details on freshmeat.net

    In short, it's not a separate Linux distribution from SGI.

  • I was at LinuxWorld Wednesday, and I've got a new view of trade shows.

    Trade shows are pointless.

    They're like big slow in-person websites without text. The only real good thing about them is that companies give you free trinkets, and from what I gathered, it wasn't all that much, although I did get a fuzzy little penguin guy from Penguin Computing.

    I did give perlmonks.org some donation money (which consisted of a pile of money on a table), though. So that was kind of good, but otherwise, the whole thing was pretty boring. Even the people involved seemed quite bored.


  • Your .sig, Sir, states that it is neither self-referential, nor true. It consists of two separate claims, one of which is blatantly false, and therefore, the other is true. Now, you seem to miss your target of a paradox there, since two separate claims can very wel have different validities.

    Now I'm curious whether it is I or you missing the point here?

  • Re:XFS (Score:1)

    by emir ( 111909 )
    hmm if i understand it right *bsd ppl wont merge gpl code into their kernel (it would make whole kernel gpl) so i believe you are out of luck...

  • LinuxWorld Webcasts (Score:3)

    by lamefrog ( 79872 ) on Thursday February 01, 2001 @08:34AM (#464509) Homepage
    Penguin awards ceremony and other webcasts from LW available here [technetcast.com] at Dr. Dobb's TechNetCast. Includes MP3s.
  • Suddenly, our job of migrating from SGI to Linux just got a lot easier.

    Shhhhhhh!

    :)
    --

  • Um, bzzzt, wrong. SCO isn't pretty, or sexy, but they sell a LOT of licenses. They are a UNIX on Intel, and have a large business presence.

    There servers have never been the most powerful (running on Intel Architecture, which until 2-3 years ago was seriously sucking compared to real Iron), but they have sold a lot of licenses.

    The big Unix shops used to make a lot of money from licenses, but they were fewer licenses more $/license.

    Not getting hype doesn't make you insignificant.

    Hell, Solaris had limited presence in the Server room until the Internet boom, because their Hardware was considered substandard to IBM and HP stuff. However, they were a workstation player that gave their machines to engineering schools on the cheap, so people equated Sun with Unix.

    Marketing gives the perception of marketshare, not the reality.
  • oh yeah they are. and bsdi is giving out horns and tails....possibly the best common schwag there.

  • Re:Linux World (Score:5)

    by jbrw ( 520 ) on Thursday February 01, 2001 @07:27AM (#464513) Homepage
    News.com [news.com] has some video in RealVideo or Windows Media Player up now. They seem to be cutting over to a reporter live on the floor of the show, so I expect they'll be putting more up as they find their stories.

    The slashdot stand looks kinda slick...

    ...j
  • Sounds pretty racist, really.

    About as racist as those fijians wanting Fiji just for them, when 40% of the population are Indians that helped them out in the early 1900s. Fuck you Fiji.

    -- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!

  • SCO was hot 5-10 years ago. But since '95 or so they've been on the decline.

    SCO sold licenses because there were all these various business tools that would only run on SCO.

    About '96 or so most of these companies said "We're phasing out SCO in favor of X because it's easier/better/whatever".

    Typically that X was Windows NT, sometimes it was Solaris.

    I used to support an SCO ODT3 environment of about 8 workstations back in '93/'94.

    But I agree with you in regards to Sun's popularity. Java also worked to their advantage, not necessarily as a language but as a marketing hype generator.
  • There servers have never been the most powerful (running on Intel Architecture, which until 2-3 years ago was seriously sucking compared to real Iron), but they have sold a lot of licenses.

    Sure they have. I used to work for a company that sold a delivery tracking package which ran on top of SCO Xenix 2.3 and SCO Unix 3.2. (Hail Eris!) But that company was purchased by a company which made a delivery tracking package running on Solaris, and the SCO offering was being phased out. All across the planet, this is the pattern; Ditch your legacy SCO-based solution for the latest greatest thing, because no one wants to develop new products on top of SCO Unix.


    --

  • Shhhhhhh!
    It's ok - soggy themselves want to start selling linux, it seems - having the credit for the filesystem will just make them seem more informed I guess.

  • If your there go here tonight: (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    GO TO THE WETLANDS in NYC, 160 Hudson St, great DnB/Jungle party for all you linux users out there. Peace.

  • Re:How stable is XFS right now (Score:3)

    by Booker ( 6173 ) on Thursday February 01, 2001 @08:46AM (#464519) Homepage
    The official line from the XFS website is:

    Thanks to the extensive interest and contributions from the community, the XFS filesystem for Linux has made significant progress since its Beta release in September 2000. Although there are still some features to be finalized, the Beta code is currently stable in a majority of normal environments. We welcome and encourage interested users to try out the code aggressively in your test environments so that we can work through the final stage of the development and bug fixes to meet your production needs.

    I'm running it exclusively on my home workstation at this point, FWIW.

    ---

  • hmm if i understand it right *bsd ppl wont merge gpl code into their kernel (it would make whole kernel gpl) so i believe you are out of luck...

    This is true; However, lots of code for *BSD has been created by "interpreting" code in linux. Mostly drivers, and not anything as ambitious as XFS that I'm aware of (though I'm probably wrong, and that's okay) but it can be done.

    Alternately, I'd settle for any other truly journaling filesystem. FFS with softupdates is pretty good, but I want the whole thing.


    --

  • why don't browsers send timezone information in their headers, so that the servers can do the Right Thing(TM) with regard to displaying times?

    Because it takes more bandwidth and the same thing can be accomplished with a little javascript.

  • phat eclectic nubile girls under incredible nylon

    or if money is tight...

    plump eskimo native girls undulating in nylon
  • ---Oh man, you were SO hot... Damnit!

    Stupid, ugly, BSD, revenge soon, take out on everyone, all sorry, sooo sorry.

    ---
  • I wasn't able to make it this time.. :(

    Ahwell, the other two seem to be doing just fine.

    - Ceren
    FreeBSD's "Strange Attractor."

  • I can't speak to the performance issues, but I have some practical experience. XFS is used on workstations, just as ReiserFS and NTFS are. Journaled filesystems have many advantages that aren't specific to big iron: less fragile, more efficient, more resistant to fragmentation than traditional FSs.

    Here's an interesting basis for comparison: I lived through two similar blackouts, one in a company that had mostly Sun servers, another that had mostly SGI servers. No warning in either case (the Sun installation had its UPSs taken out by a massive power surge just before the blackout; the SGI installation didn't even have UPSs).

    In addition to the no-power time, the Sun-based installtion lost a couple days doing filesystem repair on all its system. The SGI-based installtion was back almost as soon as the power came back! An XFS disk is really a kind of database. As such, it's always in a consistent state. Changes to the filesystem are akin to database transactions. An incomplete transaction doesn't leave you with a broken filesystem -- you just lose the transaction. I know less about NTFS and ReiserFS, but I gather they have similar features. It's worth noting that XFS and NTFS didn't have defrag utilities for a long time. It's not that those are hard to write, it's just that fragmentation is supposed to be impossible on journalling FSs. Not in the real world, it seems.

    __________________

  • You probably did. There weren't a lot of people there, and I have blue hair....
  • was unbearable :-)
    Passing by the slashdot booth and the rest of the kieretsu, my sysadmin friend and I had to hold our noses.

    C'mon guys! Take a bath!
  • Anyone have a still photo of the thing?
  • I went today, and they didn't seem to be there...for that matter, the BSD booth was nearly deserted. More's the pity.

    "If ignorance is bliss, may I never be happy.
  • Were you there today? If so, I probably saw you at the /. booth...or at least, another person with blue hair
    "If ignorance is bliss, may I never be happy.
  • I can't speak for performance (it feels fast, but I haven't used ext2 on the same hardware), but it feels pretty nice here. Install is currently a dump/restore affair, but I was building a new machine so just installed a base Debian system on a 150MB partition, copied over an XFS kernel, partitioned and then dumped stuff into the new root.

    I managed to nuke the primary superblock while attempting to install grub (I got my partition numbering confused), but thankfully there are recovery tools on SGI's website. It took about a minute to recover things from the secondary superblock. My only other problem was that 2.95 miscompiles the XFS code (you get long hangs during even moderately heavy file i/o), and I couldn't find any EGCS packages for Debian that didn't conflict with more recent ones. I ended up installing a gcc 2.97 snapshot and dropping back to 2.95 for the couple of files that gave me compiler errors. Still, it gives me a damn cool version string :)


    Linux version 2.4.0-xfs (root@cavan) (gcc driver version 2.95.3 20010125 (prerelease) executing gcc version 2.97) #11 Wed Jan 31 11:41:20 GMT 2001
  • SGI are likely to promote Linux on their hardware. I don't see Irix being that long for the world in the lower-end workstation market based on a couple of conversations I've had with SGI people. If they port most of the useful features to Linux they get the advantage of a kernel that people will work on for free, letting them concentrate their efforts on the high-end multi-processor machines and media systems they make more money on.
  • most of the booths this year sucked. I'm not sure if it was just because it was the first day and not everyone was completely set up, but quite a few booths were nothing more than a few people sitting around. *cough*slashdot*cough*

    Is there even a point to these people wasting space at the event? Should there be minimum requirements for a booth? Maybe it should at least have a presentation per day (and, no, PS2 doesn't count). I think some of the best were Covalents mostly Apache talk by Ryan Bloom and the linux.com-live kernel compile walkthrough. I'm not saying the rest sucked, I just didn't get a chance to see most. The debian booth was dissapointing, as was slashdot.

    It also seemed most vendors were only interested in talking to you if you look like a potential customer. I can understand they do need to sell things and those are the most likely buyers, but when someone comes with questions, you don't just hand them the literature and send them off. The Intel, Covalent, Chiliware(oh yes) and Virtual Tek, LynxOS and SoftImage people were the most helpful people I talked to.

    I don't mean to bash anyone (except slashdot), this was just my experience and I was pretty dissapointed.

    bnoji bnoji@penguinpowered.com
  • This is only true if your filesystem was created with a 4Kb block size -- otherwise, you won't be able to do this.

  • Makes my job much easier (Score:4)

    by ayden ( 126539 ) on Thursday February 01, 2001 @06:37AM (#464535) Homepage Journal
    This is great news!

    Our research department made the decision to move from SGI Octanes at $30K a pop to cheap x86 boxes running Red Hat. Each SGI box has external storage between 8 GB and 36 GB.

    Practical upshot: We can hang any disk attached to an SGI off a Red Hat 7 machine. Suddenly, our job of migrating from SGI to Linux just got a lot easier.

  • The 'Dummies' award? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Since IDG is the publisher of the 'Dummies' series, does that mean that 'The Samba folk' won what should be referred to as 'The Dummies Award'?
  • The joke about Perl Monks getting great donations is that they had a pile of nickels and dimes on the table in their booth with a sign marked donations.

    But they did have cool stickers for your car or computer.
  • I was being serious! I love Linux and hate MS!
  • I'll be there in thirty minutes. Don't start without me.

  • Sounds like they're talking about tech support licenses for specific releases by specific companies.
  • It would be interesting in slashcode to see some more things added. Like to add in a controversial (sp) dropdown menu item or maybe a debateable menu item with the rest of the moderating tags.

    Also it may be nice to be able to send people email with /. articles, or posts.

    Lastly it would be nice if signatures could be longer.

    Just my .02 cents. I only use this code here at /. .

    I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
    Flame away, I have a hose!

  • --screw it I'm not going
    ---
  • Am I the only one who saw "Update: 02/01 05:18 PM by CT: " hours before 5:18 pm today? Taco got a time machine now?
  • surpassing Santa Cruz Operations Inc. (stock: SCOC).

    You missed the real irony in this paragraph. See my quote. I live in Santa Cruz, and have been a member of the geek scene here (to some degree) for over a decade. Once-proud SCO has become what, now? Oh yes. A linux shop.

    But in any case; Surpassing SCO is like kicking ass in a drag race against a Yugo.


    --

  • So now, the not-linux-related question is, is anyone working on porting XFS to some flavor of BSD? I'll be more excited when I can install openbsd on XFS.

    (Hey, I had to ask this question somewhere)


    --

  • How much of a speed increase have you (or anyone else) noticed over ext2? Does anyone know how XFS compares to reiserfs or ext3? I'm not necessarily looking for hard-and-fast benchmarks -- just for "does it 'feel' faster"? (OTOH, if you had hard-and-fast benchmarks, that'd be great, too.) Is it a pain (i.e. dump/restore) to convert filesystems over to XFS, or have they come up with some cleverness to convert ext2 partitions?
  • Man that seems like a huge leap to me. Is XFS stable enough for production on Linux? I sure hope so because I would love to run some Linux Boxes running DB2 and Websphere on a XFS filesystem. I love ResierFS but from what I understand XFS blows away reiserFS when it comes to speed!
  • He's back in Holland all right. The .nl version, that is.
  • Unfortunately, I am not able to make it to LWE. So who's gonna send me a sticker? ;-)
    To teach is to learn.

  • Yep, I know that's the first thing wanna I do when I go to a metropolis like NYC — congregate with nerds. Lord knows it's tough to find entertaining things to do in New York. :)


    Cheers,

  • Good "slow in-person website" comparison - I was there myself and incredibly bored (funny I didn't see you there...) and thinking how the web makes these things absolutely irrelevant. Who needs a dim-witted sales person trying to sell you, when you've got google [google.com]. I also felt guilty asking questions at booths, because I'm demonstrating that I hadn't read their faqs. I think in the end that's what tradeshows are:

    Documentation for people who can't rtfm.
    or
    An excuse for people to say the word "specs" 900 times

  • Does that finally settle the debate over which has the cooler logo (Linux or BSD)? With Linux, you've got a penguin. With BSD, you've got girls in red latex. Which is cooler? Still, the Linux guys can come back with some black-and white nylon numbers...
  • As I understand it, XFS is usually used in big-iron servers. I was wondering what its relevance was to smaller servers and workstation systems. I have seen that it has a very large code base, and a ton of features, so what are its memory/disk-space/performance characteristics. Is it slower/faster/about-the-same as ReiserFS, does it make your kernel huge or what? It seems that some people on this board have used XFS, so any insights would be appreciated.
  • Which makes me wonder: why don't browsers send timezone information in their headers, so that the servers can do the Right Thing(TM) with regard to displaying times?

    E.g. my browser should send a header like this:

    TimeZone: America/Chicago

    or

    TimeZone: CDT/-600

    Then the SlashCode could appropriately display the time that the story was updated as "11:18 AM". (Assuming that the "5:18" refers to GMT.

    It seems like a fundamental need for web-based applications. Why hasn't this been done?
    --
  • Yah, it's in my backyard, and I don't really see the need. I deal with enough unix weenies on a daily basis as it is that I don't have to go and find more.. ;)

    And I won't go without adequate swag to attract me.. The last 2-3 shows I've attended have been quite disappointing :(..

    Your Working Boy,
  • Don't get too freaked out by the size of the patches in the past couple of XFS releases. The patches are essentially designed to seed a CVS tree, and have all of the userspace code, and even RPM building bits (patches, etc.) included. As such, the patches look HUGE...

    A kernel-only patch is about 4 megs - granted, not small, but much smaller than the distributed patch.

    ---

  • Ehh, Vinyl's better.. How much is Wetlands' cover these days?

    Your Working Boy,
  • But didn't Linux first *define* BogoMIPS [tuxedo.org]?
  • Well, if you didn't already have a licence, you could buy a car and start driving around. And start wearing a gun. And a trench coat. Then you could kidnap planes and act kamikaze-ish. Redmond would be your target. Good luck!

  • The officers are wearing commando sweaters with special NYPD patches on the shoulders

    ...and one of them was Robert Simone! I saw him! Someone tell Sipowicz!

  • Any chance that someone will post a good summary of what went on at the show?
  • Especially when slash has to post 3 articles in a row.
  • Streaming Media would be cool too
    I may be dreaming, but it doesn't hurt to ask.

  • I tossed some money onto the perlmonks table yesterday afternoon. To tell you the truth, the appearance of the two people at the table was the most encouraging factor. I guess by the time the second day rolled around, they were pretty tired. I felt so bad I didn't even pick up a sticker. Anyway, those guys do a great job; glad to hear they're doing well.

  • XFS (Score:1)

    by onion2k ( 203094 )
    XFS has the ability to work with 512 peta-byte drives..

    Thats a lot of pr0n.
  • Still, Linux has made great strides. IDC numbers show Linux becoming the top-selling server OS in terms of licenses in calendar year 2000, surpassing Santa Cruz Operations Inc. (stock: SCOC).

    We are selling licences now? So this is how free software is going to make money: the software is free and free, but we sell the licences.

    Eh, what would I DO with this licence I bought?

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