Category: Computer Hardware

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set default DISK$DATA:[OS.EOL]

Seeing the news the other day of HP is discontinuing OpenVMS brought back some memories. Mostly of all the different operating system’s I have used that are no longer around or have changed a lot. Back in my undergrad days, one of the first OS’ we used to program on was OpenVMS on a VAX. It was for an engineering class and we had to use Fortran 77. I remember our quota’s used to be about 5MB in size, which at the time was “huge”.

So to list some of the other OS’ I have seen gone by the way side (and other computer related items that had a huge effect on where I am at today.)

1. OpenVMS (used it between 1994 and 1999)

2. VM/ESA (not really gone, now called zOS, but haven’t touched it since about 2001)

3. Gopher (this is the “original” web…)

4. IRIX (SGI’s UNIX platform. I still have 2 SGI Indy’s and a copy of 5.3 and I believe 6.5, but haven’t had them on in years, maybe a vacation project some time.)

5. SunOS (not Solaris, but the old BSD based SunOS 4.x) my things have changed in the 19 years that I have been doing Solaris work

6. mSQL (mini sql). Not really gone, but surpassed by other’s (mysql, mariadb, etc). I used msql as my first PHP/FI + DB + Apache installation on a Solaris 2.6 box. I wrote a network management application that controlled DNS, DHCP, etc for university dorm connection management.

7. Trumpet Winsock, for the good old Windows 3.1 days when you needed a way to do TCP/IP over modem or ethernet.

8. NCSA Mosaic, the web browser that is credited with popularizing the WWW. Used to use this on some old SGI and DEC machines.

9. ULTRIX, DEC’s version of UNIX. It was on a lot of DECstations in the Engineering department and one computer in the CS department. Used to have a teacher that made us make sure everything compiled on it vs the Solaris or Linux hosts.

10. AltaVista, Search engine to use before Google came around. Now it is just a “front end” to Yahoo search 🙁

11. Atari 400, used to have one of these at the grandparents house to tinker on.

12. Commodore 64, used to have a couple of these when I lived at home. We I learned some BASIC programming. (Later went on to try Visual Basic programming on Windows 3.11 on a 80486 DX4-100 AMD PC.)

13. BeOS, was a really neat idea, excellent media support, unfortunately it was around the time of the PC vs Mac battle so getting buy in was hard.

 

This all also brings back memories how of rudimentary computers were back then and the lack of security. There was no SSH, everything on the VM, OpenVMS and UNIX machines was done through telnet. There was no SSL, and people didn’t think twice about typing in a credit card number on a web site.

I also remember doing web surfing with Lynx on various UNIX systems. And what goes along with Web browsing then email, the first GUI email client I remember using was Pegasus Mail on a Novell Netware based mail system. Once people started doing POP3 mail, people switched over to Eudora Mail. Which I used for a while, but not a lot. I for some reason stuck with Pine a text based mail reader, mostly because I used it on the server that received all the mail.  (And to totally geek out, there were times were I would telnet in to the POP3 port on the mainframe and read my mail by issuing the pop commands by hand.)

As for personal computers, I have had quite a few since my first one. My first computer only had a 40MB hard drive in it. It was a KLH brand 80386 SX 16 that I bought from Phar-Mor. I think I had it maxed out a 4MB of Ram which at the time was huge. I remember trying to play some game on it (I keep thinking it was SimCity, but may be wrong) and it needed more Video RAM cause it only came with 128K of video ram. So I had to buy more to up it to like I think 384K.

As a list of what I have had or still have, here goes:

  1. KLH 80386SX 16MHz – First, no longer have it, came with a 40MB hd, and a EGA 15inch monitor.
  2. AMD 80486DX4 100MHz – Used this to run Windows 3.11, Linux and later Solaris 2.6. It came with a 320MB hard drive. I later paid close to $300 for a 1.6GB hard drive for it. It had a VESA Local Bus video card and a Sound Blaster 16 sound card. No longer have this computer.
  3. Intel Pentium II 266MHz – Bought this in 1997 from a company called Vektron (who later went out of business, like all fly by night computer places back in the early days). It had 32MB of ram and a 500MB hard drive. It ran Windows 95, Windows NT, BeOS, Solaris and Linux. (I had bought bigger and more hard drives later, just can’t remember what all was in it.) I actually still have this machine, it’s most recent use was as a router for my home network running Solaris 10 with 3 NIC’s (one on Comcast, one on Verizon and one on my home network). The hard drive died in it a couple of years ago, so I turned it off, it is still sitting in a rack thought.
  4. Sun SPARCstation 2 – This was my first “workstation”. I got it second hand from a friend’s company. It was where I cut my teeth on Solaris. It ran Solaris 2.5 when I got it, and over the years I upgraded it to Solaris 7. Ironically it only had a 40MHz processor and 64 MB of ram. It had 2 huge external 800MB disk packs and a freakishly heavy 17 inch Sony monitor that used 13W3 connector with BNC ends. I still have this one, but the disk packs both died, so it hasn’t been on in years.
  5. Sun Ultra5 – 360MHz, 128MB of ram. One of the first “IDE” based lower end workstations from Sun. I still have this, but I think the power supply is bad, as I can’t get it to turn on :(. When it ran, I had Solaris 9 on it.
  6. SGI Indy – 2 of these 133MHz with 96MB of ram. One of the coolest “workstations” I ever owned. I believe they both still run, but haven’t been on in years. One ran IRIX 5.3 and the other ran IRIX 6.5
  7. Dual Intel Pentium III 933MHz – Bought this in probably 2001 I think. It is huge, it was a full tower with onboard IDE raid (which only works with Windows because of driver issues.). Right now it has 1.5GB of ram in it, ~2TB of disk and runs Solaris 10 with 7 zones running on it.
  8. IBM Thinkpad i1100, Celeron 500MHz. This one was given to me as a result of work being done for a company. It was my first laptop, and I still have it today. However it’s stats are very underwhelming by today’s point of view. The monitor is an LCD one, but not TFT, so that means there are all kinds of shadows and the picture isn’t crisp. It also only had a 5GB hard drive in it. Which means after installing Windows 2000 on it, there was only maybe a gig free. It also had no floppy drive, and no network ports. So I bought a Linksys WAP11 back in the day (probably in 2002 when I got this) for upwards of $300 so I could have wireless internet on it.
  9. ThinkPad A22p – 900MHz Pentium III. I bought this one as a replacement of the first. Side by side this one is HUGE, as it has a 15 inch display that runs at 1600×1200. It also had a 30GB hard drive (which was split in to 3 10GB chunks, one for Windows XP NTFS, One for Solaris 10 and one for FAT 32 to share files between the two OS’).
  10. AMD 3600+ – Got this one in 2005. It currently runs a combination of Windows XP and Windows 7. Has about 2.5 TB of disk on it.
  11. Sun X2100 – This server. Currently running Solaris 10, with a surprisingly small 160GB of disk with 4 zones on it.
  12. Apple MacBook Pro 2.0GHZ – This was one of the first Intel based Mac’s that was released in 2006. It had a Dual Core 2.0 GHz processor, 2GB of ram an a 100GB hard drive. It did have it’s issues (mostly battery and power adapter ones), but it ran solid for about 5 years. In the fall of 2011 the logic board “died” and it will no longer run in full “user” mode. (I think it is the graphics part of the board.) Still have it hoping for a price drop of replacement boards some day.
  13. Apple Mac Pro – Dual Quad Xeon 2.8GHz with 10 GB of ram. This is the best desktop I have ever had. It is fast and quiet. Right now I think I have close to 13GB of disk on it (both internal and external). I also dual boot it with MacOSX 10.8 and Windows 7 (for a couple of games)
  14. Apple MacBook Pro 2.8GHz iCore7 – the replacement for the one that died above. It is hands down probably 4 to 8 times faster than the 2.0 one that I had before.
  15. Sun V20z – Used to run VMware ESX 3.5 with a Sun T3 fibre connected Disk array. The V20z is fully loaded with processor (2) and ram (16GB). One loud machine…
  16. IBM X3550 – Dual Quad Xeon with 8GB of ram. Used to run VMware vSphere 5.0. Used it to play around with doing virtualization of my house servers. Unfortunately it is too loud to leave running 24×7, so it is only on when needed.
  17. HP XW8600 workstation – Dual Quad Xeon with 16GB of ram. This is my “production” VMware server at  home. It has 3 TB of disk it in and runs probably 11VM’s all the time. It was used to replace the noisy IBM one, and it is super quiet.

As for a list of operating systems I keep current with, it is many and with VMware it is possible to have “test” versions of everything sitting around which helps a lot. Basically the following is what I keep running:

  1. MacOSX 10.7 and 10.8
  2. Windows XP, 7, 8, 2008, 2008R2, 2012
  3. CentOS 6.3
  4. Solaris 10, 11
  5. OpenIndiana 151
  6. pfSense (freebsd)
  7. OpenBSD
  8. Ubuntu Linux

Well that is about enough nostalgia for tonight. Trying to think of other things to put back on the blog to start updating it more often. If you have any idea’s leave a comment (open for 30 days only to keep the spammers away..)

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How R-Studio for Mac saved my ass

I have an external Seagate Firewire 800 drive that I use on my Mac Pro that has over 700GB of VMware images on it. Pretty much anything I work on I have an image on there, everything from a Windows XP client to Microsoft Exchange servers, and Solaris, Linux and the such. I have had the drive for a couple of years and it has always been rock solid and fast too. (I bought it when Windows 7 screwed up my internal drives.)

Well today I  was wanting to run a VM off of that drive to test something, and noticed that the drive did not appear on my Desktop. Weird, it as plugged in, the light was flashing, but no icon. Hmm, where the hell did it go? So I unplugged it and plugged it back in. Still no go. So i tried switching power supplies, still no go. Then if I left it sit for a while I would get the error that it could not use the drive, or that it needed initialized. Holy crap, that isn’t good.

I popped up the command prompt, diskutil would list that there was a drive there, but no partitions on it. The gui Disk Utility would see the disk, and again no partitions and wouldn’t let me do anything with it. gpt wouldn’t let me read it. So I thought to my self, did Windows 7 screw the disk up again (it was working the other day when I had booted in to windows, but forgot to unplug it before doing so 🙁 ). So I booted in to Windows 7, it could see the drive but said it was unformatted. Double shit. So back to MacOSX, I went out searching for some data recovery programs. The first one was Data Rescue 3 while the graphics were gimmicky it didn’t even look like the demo version could even see 1 file on the drive. So I uninstalled it and started looking for another program.

In the past I have used the R-Studio for NTFS & FAT and both have worked wonders. I did a google search, and they now have a Mac version.  Now we are talking! So I downloaded the demo, and with in about 2 minutes of starting it, it showed me the entire disk and all the files that were on it. But since it was a demo it would only restore 10 files under 64kb.. So I bought it for $79.99. 2 minutes after buying it, it was busy restoring the files to another external 2TB USB drive. 6 hours later, 100% of my files were restored from the dead firewire drive, and my VM started up just like nothing had happen.  Needless to say it saved me hundreds of hours of reinstalling and setting up my VM environment. Now I just need to go get another drive to make a backup of this one.

 

So if you are ever needing to restore MacOS, HSFS, NTFS, FAT, UFS, EXT file systems, definitely check out r-tools technology and their R-Studio products. http://www.r-tt.com/  For $79.99 it was more than worth it!

 

 

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Blades and the true hidden cost

So as you may know by now, I am not a fan of “blade” technology, and rather despise it. One reason is that they simply are not as “powerful” as some larger systems. So what is this “true hidden cost”. What hardware vendors won’t tell you is that, while they think that their hardware is powerful and “compact form”, is that software vendors will almost rape you on the license cost. So lets look at a good example.

Say you are building a “cloud” (another word I absolutely hate, as it is just a buzz word some one made up, because “network” sounds so simple) for your company. You decided to go with the “all mighty blades” as that is the “current buzz” amongst the IT industry. So I buy a blade chassis from company X which happens to hold 10 blade’s that each hold 4 processors of 8 cores a piece and 128GB of ram (probably fictitious and not a real world blade). You also plan on implementing a virtualization hypervisor on your blades to build your “cloud”. On top of this hypervisor you will be using multiple different operating systems and various middle-ware. Sounds good so far right, just like any typical “cloud” environment. So now lets look at the pricing:

  • For the virtualization layer, we don’t care about CPU’s, just memory in use. So we have to buy enough licenses to support 10x128GB of ram. Again, not too bad, but as you add blades and/or memory your price goes up.
  • For the OS layer, this seems pretty simple, 1 OS license per Virtual Machine. Probably so far the simplest of all
  • For the middle-ware, now this is where the big bucks come to play. Different vendors license their software in different ways so here are some examples:
  1. Per VM, seems pretty simple, 1 license per VM. Easiest
  2. Per User, probably the second simplest algorithm, assuming you have an easy user base, i.e. all users are internal company users, or all are external users, etc.
  3. Per physical host, the most complex and costly. Why so? Well lets look in to this in more depth.

 

So in #3 above I mention that licensing middle-ware per physical host is the most complex and costly. Some people may be thinking that I am absolutely crazy by now but hold on to your seats and watch the money start adding up.

Say we have a fictitious product from vendor Y, the licensing of it is $100 per core of physical server, and the vendor of the software does not “recognize” virtualization.  So if we weren’t doing virtualization to license this product on one of our fictitious blades, that product would cost $3,200, as we would have to pay for all 32 cores in the blade. Still not too bad. But here comes the kicker, say that we created a cluster in our hypervisor that contained all 10 of the blades in our chassis. In addition to this, we have determined by usage that to be able to run Y in our environment, we only really needed a VM with 1vCPU and 2GB of ram. In a physical world, if you could find a server with one CPU, then we would only have to pay $100 for this piece of software. In addition if the vendor  Y supported virtualization you would only have to pay $100 to run it. However vendor Y is all about the money, so to run this one software package on your “cloud”, you would have to pay $32,000.

Wow, $32,000 vs $100 is 320% markup because vendor Y doesn’t “support” virtualization. But you are probably thinking, but hold on a second, I know that VM will only run on one blade at a time, why do I have to pay for all 10? Well because your VM has the possibility of running on any of the 10 blades at any given time. So you have to think of it sort of like auto insurance. Say you have 3 cars, but you can only drive one at a time (because you are only one person). But you still have to pay insurance on all 3, because there is a chance that you could drive any of them.

Does this make sense, hell no… But hold on to your seats because it gets even better. The vendor of product Y also make a hypervisor that does the same thing as another companies hypervisor. But the kicker is that if you use vendor Y’s hypervisor which has less features and abilities that vendor Z’s hypervisor, but does nearly the exact same thing (virtualize an OS instance), they will allow you to only pay for the 1vCPU license to run their product. This is just plain wrong, especially when you have already invested in vendor Z’s platform.

So with “cloud” computing being the current wave of IT, why can’t software vendors recognize that nearly 75% or more of most environments are already virtualized or moving to a virtualized “cloud” environment. If they can’t recognize this, then chances are people are going to go else where for their software needs. Because as your “clouds” get bigger the cost is exponential. To see that just use this as an example, the environment above is for a development. Once we go to production, say we have to have 10 chassis of blades, and there is a possibility of that one application running on any one of the 10 blades on any of the 10 chassis. So now instead of $32,000 you end up paying $320,000 for one little application, that only requires a 1CPU machine to run.

But what the hell does this have to do with blades? Well if you used larger hardware, you could decrease the number of physical servers that were in a particular cluster by consolidating even more. In the simplest term building up vs out. As an example say I could replace all 10 chassis of blades with 6 large servers (large meaning that they could hold 512GB of ram vs my max of 128GB of ram that my “blades” do). Now instead of paying for 100 blades with 4 processors of 8 cores a piece I am only playing for 6 servers of 4 processors of 8 cores a piece, a cost of $19,200, or 6% of the cost of using blades.

I leave it to you to see how much you would save by getting rid of your blades …