Category Archives: System Administration

Building Thrift on RedHat/CentOS 5.x

What’s Thrift you ask? Well to quote their website.

Thrift is a software framework for scalable cross-language services development. It combines a software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between C++, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, Erlang, Perl, Haskell, C#, Cocoa, Smalltalk, and OCaml.

 

And why do I needed it? Well I have been testing Cassandra for at work and one of the developers want to generate some csharp code using the Thrift API, so of course he wanted me to do it, since he was having problems getting it to work on his Window box.

 

So here is the short notes for what I did.

 

Downloaded Thrift code:
thrift-incubating-0.2.0.tar.gz

Installed/Updated required packages:
sudo yum install automake libtool flex bison pkgconfig gcc-c++ boost-devel libevent-devel zlib-devel python-devel ruby-devel

Unpacked the code, compiled, and installed it:
tar -zxf thrift-incubating-0.2.0.tar.gz
cd thrift-incubating-0.2.0
./configure
make
sudo make install

That’s it, have fun. Next project going to look at Lucandra: A Cassandra-based Lucene backend.

So many to choose from.

For the last month or so. There has been a debate amongst, my peers and I, on which is the better file system on Linux and how to benchmark and test it. So digging through my back log of emails I notice that Linux Magazine was running a series on the this some topic. So I thought I would sure.

Lies, Damn Lies and File System Benchmarks

Metadata Performance of Four Linux File Systems

Metadata Performance Exploration Part 2: XFS, JFS, ReiserFS, ext2, and Reiser4

Reinstalling the Boot Loader on RHEL

In many cases, the GRUB boot loader can mistakenly be deleted, corrupted, or replaced by other operating systems.

The following steps detail the process on how GRUB is reinstalled on the master boot record:

  1. Boot the system from an installation boot medium.
  2. Type linux rescue at the installation boot prompt to enter the rescue environment site link.
  3. Type chroot /mnt/sysimage to mount the root partition.
  4. Type /sbin/grub-install /dev/hda to reinstall the GRUB boot loader, where /dev/hda is the boot partition.
  5. Review the /boot/grub/grub.conf file, as additional entries may be needed for GRUB to control additional operating systems.
  6. Reboot the system.

Cloud computing

Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet.
Cloud computing can be confused with:

  1. grid computing—”a form of distributed computing whereby a ‘super and virtual computer’ is composed of a cluster of networked, loosely coupled computers, acting in concert to perform very large tasks”;
  2. utility computing—the “packaging of computing resources, such as computation and storage, as a metered service similar to a traditional public utility such as electricity”;
  3. autonomic computing—”computer systems capable of self-management”.