Software
vCloud Director Cluster got you down?
Apr 27th
vCloud Director – the VMware solution to building on-demand infrastructure for the enterprise and cloud computing…works.
But there are some trials you must encounter and complete before things work smoothly.
TL;DR: I failed at first but found the problem with the issue being firewall services blocking inter-cell communications. This post is about the log entry and how it isn’t very clear that there is an error to resolve.
MySQL, data partitioning, and me
Jan 26th
So I have this database of bytes transferred from many of the devices on our network.
It queries these devices every 5 minutes storing many pieces of data, from the number of packets in and out to the number of bytes (or octets in network speak) in and out on an interface. (it also gathers statistics on errors, Cisco environment items, discards, etc). I am mostly concerned with the bytes transferred, so while the other data is collected – I am not using it at this point.
But what happens when you have 16 months worth of data?
Before you say ‘i dunno’, I’ll tell you: it is slow to query it back out, even with minimal indexes.
I have ~54 GB of data (including indexes), and 250 tables (each device has multiple tables, each table stores one type of data only).
So, how to get some speed back? Read on!
DNS MX vs IPv4 & IPv6
Nov 12th
Yesterday – a very interesting issue cropped up…
Another local provider had email warnings being generated that they could not connect to our frontend MX servers.
The error itself was:
IPv6 is not supported
Which is not very clear for a reason email can not be delivered. I mean, my systems are working fine with IPv6 and we have native IPv6 connections occurring regularly.
So I scour our logs looking for case-insensitive ‘ipv6′ and all I find are hostnames with that listed, no errors, nothing with the word ‘supported’ listed.
The other provider thinks that maybe it is an issue on their side, which looks to be right, but for a different reason. Speculation: Their mail servers were trying IPv6 connections but were (at the time of discussion) not necessarily configured to handle IPv6 connections. No route (and router) for IPv6 means error. This makes sense.
But the culprit looks to be how different resource records are handled, and a probable mistake by me (humans…).
Xfinity vs Hulu direct – what’s up?
Nov 7th
So, Xfinity, the new name for the Comcast triple play, is using Hulu as the backend content provider.
What could go wrong? Oh, maybe the video quality will be 1/2 of what Hulu provides directly!
Could be that Comcast is re-compressing the data and I have included the screen captures to prove it. If Comcast isn’t re-compressing (and I don’t know/have the technology to check on this, sorry folks!), it is at least sending a very subpar version of it over the Internet connection provided by Comcast to my home.
I tried to get the same second, same frame, but it was almost impossible. These screen captures are about the same second, but are not the same frame unfortunately, but should be close enough for comparisons sake.
UPDATE: While at work before leaving, I decided to redo this to see if I could get closer and as luck would have it, I was able to snag the screen captures on what looks to be very close to the same frame. Comparison is much easier this time, though this computer I did the screen captures from isn’t as clean, but it is more apples to apples.
I won’t be using Xfinity to watch any type of television at this rate, and I don’t pay for Hulu Plus, and unfortunately, NetFlix doesn’t have current television episodes available for DVD or streaming so a third comparison is impossible right now. I’d rather burn my limited 250GB on higher quality video than what I have seen on Xfinity.
Here is Xfinity (provided by Hulu, provided on Fancast) and directly from Hulu, click the images for the full size (1680×1050) resolution as captured on my MacBook Pro.
Xfinity via Fancast - Chase - Havoc
Hulu - Chase - Havoc
