March 2006 - Roundtable

Job available: PostgreSQL
by John Lange 29 Mar '06

29 Mar '06

There is a need for a PostgreSQL specialist with a prominent Winnipeg company. If you are interested or know of someone who is please contact me off-list. -- John Lange OpenIT ltd. www.Open-IT.ca (204) 885 0872 VoIP, Web services, Linux Consulting, Server Co-Location

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Question in last night's meeting about dtrace and user code
by Stuart Williams 15 Mar '06

15 Mar '06

Someone asked a question during last night's presentation by Willem van Schaik regarding dtrace's ability to instrument user code. The answer as I understood it was that dtrace can't do that, that it can only trace OS events. I vaguely recalled from Bryan Cantrill's presentation and my subsequent reading that user code could be instrumented, and it can! Section 7 of the Usenix paper mentions this (http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/dtrace/dtrace_usenix.pdf) and there's a good slide presentation on Adam Leventhal's blog (http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/ahl/20050301) that briefly explains how it's done. In a limited sense it's not dtrace doing this instrumentation but the pid provider. This provider is written to work with dtrace, and it's written using an OS trap (when a probe is enabled), similar to how dtrace is implemented on x86. Stuart Williams.

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Sun T2000
by Bill Reid 13 Mar '06

13 Mar '06

A message from Shawn: I will be bringing a Sun T2000 machine that I have on demo to the MUUG meeting tomorrow night for those people interested in taking a look at it. This is one of the machines using the UltraSPARC T1 (aka Niagra) processor which has 8 cores on one chip with 4 threads for each core. http://www.sun.com/t2000/ Here is the output from the operating system showing that it does see 32 actual processors. http://www.wallbridge.net/t2000/prtdiag.html http://www.wallbridge.net/t2000/psrinfo.html If anyone would like to see something run on it for benchmarking purposes, please get in touch with me, I don't think we can do it at the meeting, but I might be able to either get you a shell or run it for you. I will have some pictures up soon at this URL ... http://www.wallbridge.net/t2000/images/ thanks shawn

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Spring cleaning - 3 computers
by Sean Walberg 11 Mar '06

11 Mar '06

I've got 3 computers here I want to get rid of since I don't use them. They're all of the K6 generation, I think they're all K6-2/233 or similar with around 128MB of memory. Perfect for a Linux firewall or tooling around, not so good if you're doing ray-tracing. Computer 1 - 19" high case, video, Hard drive, CD, floppy, 1 NIC, 1 modem Computer 2 - 13" high case, 2x 1.2G hard drives, floppy, video, 2 NICs Computer 3 - 13" high case, 3G hdd, video, CD, NIC, SCSI (ext connection only), sound I live in Riverheights, weekend or evening pickups preferred. First come, first served. Thanks, Sean -- Sean Walberg <sean(a)ertw.com> http://ertw.com

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MUUG Meeting, Mar 14, 7:30pm -- BrandZ (Linux in Solaris 10 Zones)
by gedetil＠cs.umanitoba.ca 07 Mar '06

07 Mar '06

The Manitoba UNIX User Group (MUUG) will be holding its next monthly meeting on Tuesday, March 14. The meeting topic for this month is as follows: BrandZ - Running Linux in Solaris 10 Zones With the release of Solaris 10, two new important features were added to the operating system: zones and dtrace. With zones, multiple instances of the OS can be configured, enabling a virtualized deployment environment. In this presentation by Sun's Willem Van Schaik, we will look into the next phase, called BrandZ, which allows the installation of non-Solaris operating systems like Linux and BSD into a zone. Linux running in a Solaris Zone opens up new possiblities, like analyzing and debugging Linux programs with DTrace. BrandZ is still under development, but try-out versions are available as part of OpenSolaris and Solaris Express. The group holds its general meetings at 7:30pm on the second Tuesday of every month from September to June. (There are no meetings in July and August.) Meetings are open to the general public; you don't have to be a MUUG member to attend. ********************************************************************** Please note our meeting location: The IBM offices, at 400 Ellice Ave. (between Edmonton and Kennedy). When you arrive, you will have to sign in at the reception desk, and then wait for someone to take you (in groups) to the meeting room. Please try to arrive by about 7:15pm, so the meeting can start promptly at 7:30pm. Don't be late, or you may not get in. (But don't come too early either, since security may not be there to let you in before 7:15 or so.) Limited parking is available for free on the street, or in a lot across Ellice from IBM, for $1.00 for the evening. Indoor parking is also available nearby, at Portage Place, for $3.00 for the evening. ********************************************************************** For more information about MUUG, and its monthly meetings, check out their Web server: http://www.muug.mb.ca/ Also note that MUUG maintains two mailing lists, called "muug-announce" and "roundtable". If you're not already on these lists, we encourage you to subscribe now: http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/ The "muug-announce" list is used for monthly meeting announcements (such as this one) as well as other important announcements of interest to MUUG members. The "rountable" list is meant to be a forum for follow-ups to topics discussed at the meetings, or for round-table-style discussion on other topics that come up between meetings. Of course, for this to be effective, we need to reach a certain critical mass. So, please subscribe, and stay involved! -- Gilbert E. Detillieux E-mail: <gedetil(a)muug.mb.ca> Manitoba UNIX User Group Web: http://www.muug.mb.ca/ P.O. Box 130, St-Boniface Phone: (204)474-8161 Winnipeg, MB, CANADA R2H 3B4 Fax: (204)474-7609

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