Interesting paper by Urs and Luiz, from Google Inc., named Warehouse-scale computers about building big-scale computing clusters, datacenters, power efficiency, cooling, performance, parallel computing, modeling costs, dealing with failures, etc.

I’ve rescued the following e-mail from Neil Brown about building a new RAID5 array in Linux and why one the disks, while the array is being constructed, is marked as a spare:

When creating a new raid5 array, we need to make sure the parity
blocks are all correct (obviously). There are several ways to do
this.

Write [...]

This post roughly describes what I do when I want to non-destructively upgrade my Linux system. By non-destructive means a procedure that allows me to upgrade but also to rollback if something goes wrong. As an example, I wanted to upgrade my Ubuntu system from Jaunty to Karmic. Since Karmic is now Alpha 1, the [...]

Recently, the Chromium team has started to provide official builds of Chromium for Mac OS X. Looks to me these builds are just the output of the continuous build process — also known as waterfall.
In any case, these are good news and to me a proof that Chromium for Mac OS X keeps evolving [...]

This post documents how I did set up Postfix 2.6 to relay all of its e-mail to GMail.
I used different sources to assemble what is described next. Worth mentioning are Getting Postfix to work on Ubuntu with Gmail, Gmail on Home Linux Box using Postfix and Fetchmail, Postfix Gmail SMTP Relay and finally Postfix TLS [...]

Today I was faced with the following problem: I was trying to configure one of the Ethernet interfaces of an OpenBSD 4.5 box with both a dynamic address leased via DHCP, but also a static IP address. Initially, I tried this:

# cat /etc/hostname.vr2
dhcp
inet 1.1.1.11 255.255.255.0 NONE
up
# sh /etc/netstart vr2

The problem with this approach is that [...]

Chromium is the open source browser developed by Google. The differences between Chromium and Chrome are very minimal. Chrome has custom icons and other parafernalia that, due to licensing issues, can’t be made available in Chromium. Chrome is also available as a binary for Microsoft Windows operating systems, and can be downloaded from the Google [...]