Somewhere out there!

In the OSS document management (DMS) space there are two primary choices: Alfresco and KnowledgeTree (KT). Other systems that do content management, like Plone or Drupal, are often suggested as DMSs, but in my opinion while they maybe great for managing websites they aren’t really designed for a business DMS.

Nexenta is a Gnu-land based, Ubuntu derived distribution with a Solaris kernel. It does lag the mainline OpenSolaris for features and bug fixes a little, but is easy to install and brings the apt-get goodness to Solaris. The have announce a new platform called: NexentaCP (Nexenta Core Platform).

NexentaCP is Dapper/LTS-based core Operating System Platform distributed as a single-CD ISO, integrates Installer/ON/NWS/Debian and provides basis for Network-type installations via main or third-party APTs (NEW).

First “unstable” b65-based ISO with ZFS/Boot-capable installer available
as usual at: http://www.gnusolaris.org/unstable-iso/ncp_beta1-test1-b65_i386.iso

Please give it a try and start building your own APT repositories and communities today!

Note: this version of installer supports ZFS/Boot type of installations on single disk or 2 mirror configuration. For now, only “Auto” partitioning mode could be used for ZFS root partition creation.

More details on NexentaCP will be available soon.

This tech tip for “Consistent MySQL backups using ZFS snapshots“, is one of the compelling things about zfs. Maybe Netapp is better at the high level for this stuff with systems like Oracle, but for the other 90% of us zfs really creates potential options.

I noticed some issues while writing a blog entry:

[emptysands@smithers:~] w
 20:48:51 up 26 days, 19:59,  6 users,  load average: 24.71, 20.75, 13.89
USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT

… 30 minutes later …

[emptysands@smithers:~] w
 21:26:52 up 26 days, 20:37, 10 users,  load average: <strong>558.90</strong>, 537.18, 406.38
USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT

before they finally get the reboot actioned. They use filers and the diskio was low:

[emptysands@smithers:~] vmstat
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- ----cpu----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in    cs us sy id wa
 3 217 766800 280684   4668 176616    0    1     8     2    9     9 54  8 35  2

so it was maybe a rouge process. Not sure exact what the details are yet, I’m sure Dreamhost will post them in due course.

XenSource have just issued apress release on the new version 4.0.

Apart from the long delayed new features, tucked at the bottom is new pricing:

Review of the Sandisk SSD 5000 from Tom’s Hardware. Some highlights:

Another useful PDF tool is pdfsam. This will rip apart and glue back together your PDFs in a simple basic interface.

I’ve used Guaranteed PDF Decrypter a few times to remove passwords restrictions from PDFs. It is a clean, simple and easy to use product. I can even crack some PDFs, but only passwords with 40 bit, which basically isn’t much.

Flight of the Conchords at their best.

Q&A: Jonathan Schwartz on Sun’s open-source business strategy | The Open Road – CNET Blogs:

Why? Think about this: In a year where Sun arguably moved more aggressively to give away more free software than any other company, we grew our software business by 13 percent. It was the fastest-growing business at Sun (and doesn’t even include Solaris, which we don’t yet break out). We pumped out more software last year than we have in the history of the company. We gave it away. And yet our software business grew by 13 percent.

I’m happy this is the case, I think there is room for both Linux and Solaris. The more Sun opens up, the more infrastructure toys there are for us to pay around with! 😀