Sunday, November 28, 2010

Linuxha.net version 1.4.9 update soon

It has been more than a year since the release of 1.4.8 and so time has come around for a look over the code and minor tweaks and fixes to be performed. In the next couple of weeks version 1.4.9 will be released which will include the following changes, at the very least:


  • Heartbeat Daemon statistics - it will be possible to report on the performance of the heartbeat process to ascertain whether any settings should be changed.
  • Network and Heartbeat Daemon restart facility - a facility to restart these daemons completely rather than just reconfigure them will be available to improve online upgrading of software facilities.
  • DRBD updates - The version of DRBD including will be bumped to 8.3.8.
  • Daemon status reporting - The cluster status utility will include a facility to check the necessary daemons are all running.
Once this update is out I will be next turning to a new release of TrueCl the next generation clustering software which is working well at present.

Friday, November 26, 2010

Skulker v1.0.2 New Features

Over the weekend version 1.0.2 of Skulker will appear. This has a couple of interesting features:


  • time_limit facility - it is possible to indicate the maximum amount of time a rule should run for before continuing with the next one. This is an additional "filter" over existing ones so you can indicate that, for example, up to 5000 files should be compressed, oldest version but only taking a maximum elapsed time of two hours.
  • Random data scrubbing. The delete "file scrubbing" functionality has been extended to include a "random data" overwrite option (including multiple passes) if you might think it may be of use. A lot will depend on the OS and file system as to whether this does anything useful - absolutely not for copy-on-write file systems of course.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Code Manager 2 version 1.3.2 released.

The code is out there ... but not mentioned on freshmeat as yet since I've got to tidy up the user guide and push that out first. Documentation is never much fun, but most software needs at least a bit so I want to get that out too. Should happen in the next day or two.

1.3.2 has a few minor improvements but the main aim was to fix some problems. Nothing exciting or extras shiny to look at!

Saturday, November 20, 2010

Code Manager 2 Work

Code Manager 2 is a strange beast really. Is it a cross between a single site version control system and a release management system. As with a lot of my work the key defining aim is to ensure the target audience finds the tool easy to use yet powerful enough to be genuinely useful.

Oodles of documentation on the Google code pages for it, but suffice to say it works with a single working directory structure shared by developers and a repository stored elsewhere. Various different repositories are supported and it works on UNIX and Windows.

All the standard features you might expect are there - working at the individual file level; but so are a lot more. It is possible to compare "projects" (a collection of directories making a single development environment), and even tag releases and automatically create packages from them for various package managers.

If you fancy a simple version control system, but powerful enough to work with a largish collection of sources and like the idea of easy package creation, take a look.

http://code.google.com/p/codemanager2/

It is currently at version 1.3.1 and a version 1.3.2 is probably going to happen in a few days time with numerous small fixes and tweaks.

Skulker v1 Up and Running

Wow - it has been some time since I last posted! The good news is that the software has continued to develop despite the lack of news here. Firstly Skulker...

Well 1.0.1 is actually out at present and the key features I really wanted have made it and are working well. These are:

  • Multi-threading - the core code has been written to be thread friendly and the compress functionality supports threading across all recent (5.6 and above I reckon) versions of Perl. What this did show me is that lightweight threading in Perl is pretty inefficient but it seems to work OK for the compression module.
  • Internal compression types - it does now support use of "internal" compression - that is rather than running external programs it can optionally (if configured and available) make use of Perl modules greatly improving performance - especially when handling a lot of files.
  • Windows support - Working, including threading. Tested with Strawberry Perl and running in productions environments now just fine.
  • Scrubbing - zero's out files before deleting them. Aim is to help with storage reclaims on sparse storage (certain high-end environments).