Thats how I am spending my Friday. Oh happy happy joy joy

[one must not post when on pain medication … nope, bad idea] somewhat exceeding our targets for Q1 on these units. I had hoped to have had an additional sales resource online by now, but the person I wanted to hire chose a different path. More power to him. Will continue to look for the right person (here in Michigan). First siCluster in Texas. University deal, GlusterFS atop it. Several more deals we are working on as well.

We are working on the text of this, but it is for organizations within the state of Michigan. We like our state, and we are going to give an extra discount for credit card/cash purchases over the next few months. Details to emerge. If there is interest outside of the state of Michigan, please reply below. The day job has some of the highest performing, and most reasonably priced storage available in the market today.

Going this morning to a customer who had a set of systems compromised. It appears that a windows trojan did some keylogging, and someone logged in, as root, from the compromised machine. Whoops. Folks, stay safe. Don’t use passwords for ssh. Use keys. And, bluntly, seriously reconsider running any windows machine anywhere near a server/HPC resource. Our efforts to help fix their problem are going to cost this customer thousands of dollars and lots of our time.

We had been considered sending in an RFP response to a customer for a system. Long past history with this customer suggests that they are basically interested in validation and consulting from us, never really interested in purchasing from us. This is unfortunate, as we are Michigan’s only local HPC company, and they are a university in the state of Michigan purchasing HPC gear. It makes it look good for them with their higher ups to include us, even if they never award us any business.

see here. It looks like they largely ignored my edits, so some of the numbers which I fixed several times aren’t fixed in the final. Also, I don’t have the slightest clue who that person is on the document. Not a clue. Has no relation to Scalable Informatics.

Autoyast, kickstart, … All of them suffer from the “hey lets do it all for you”. Don’t get lured into this. Assume they are singing a siren’s song. I’ll argue that autoyast is lightyears ahead of anaconda by virtue of it not ^&$^*&) forcing you to reboot the machine in the event of a control file error, you can recover. But the point I need to stress, despite (likely) vehement protests to the contrary … One should spend as little time as possible inside distro configurators, and push as much of this work to outside tools as possible.

Coming from the Register … Yeah … leave it to folks in the UK to say it with far more eloquence than I can. But there is more. Oh … much more … Imagine if you have to tell the people giving you money to lend credence to their policy, to provide a sound theoretical and evidentiary basis for the policy … that there are at minimum, nagging doubts, and at maximum, the policy is based upon weak or incorrect science … imagine telling these people that they are wrong.

A tactic used by advocates of a particular viewpoint on anthropogenic global warming (e.g. we humans caused warming on our planet) is to make the claim that the science is “settled”. I covered this before. Specifically I pointed out that science is never … ever “settled”. In fact, the very fundamental aspect of what makes science a profoundly useful to humanity, is that it questions and is free to question everything.

At the day job. Ok, not a complete blow up … but it lost all of its config for 2 hours. Its an appliance router, and about 4 years old. Starting to show its age. I have a “spare” (as in unused) motherboard/RAM combo, with 4x Intel GbE ports (2x PCI-x cards) that looks like its going to take its place. Just deciding upon the distro to do this. Looking at endian, clearos, and a few others.