Using passwd command to lock and unlock Linux Account

To lock a linux account, you can use the command

# passwd -l username
Locking password for user username.
passwd: Success

You will notice on the /etc/shadow file, that there will be a ! before the encrypted password string
user1:!...........................

To unlock the linux account, you can use the command

# passwd -u username
Unlocking password for user username.
passwd: Success.

Tectonic shift as public cloud giants acknowledge the power of private deployment options

I thought the article Tectonic shift as public cloud giants acknowledge the power of private deployment options from GIGAOM is quite significance as the article mention that the

Both Amazon and Google, which launched huge price cuts and a raft of new services on Tuesday, clearly have the scale and resources to vacuum up a lot more corporate jobs into their respective clouds. What both lack is a full hybrid cloud strategy that would let businesses balance private and public cloud deployment as they see fit. And that’s public-private cloud coexistence message is the one legacy IT players like VMware and Microsoft have been pounding home.

But the public cloud companies are starting to get there. Google announced much faster data ingestion for its BigQuery database service that can now take in 100,000  rows per second versus 1,000 before.
......
The ability to pump data into and out of a public cloud whether from another public cloud or a private cloud or an on-premise database is a huge deal for enterprise accounts and something they want to be easy so they can avoid cloud lock-in.

Other related posts:

1. A peek into NTU's supercomputer and hybrid cloud  
2. 50% Enterprise to Use Hybrid Cloud by 2017

Shipments of Disk Drives Declines in 5% in 2013

I refer to this article Shipments of Disk Drives Decline 5% in 2013 from StorageNewsletter.com . According to the article,

A near-doubling of the market for SSDs in 2013 was unable to help the computer-related storage industry last year, which slid 5% in shipments because of continuing contractions in the hard-disk drive and optical disk drive segments, according to a new report from IHS Technology.

(Source: IHS Technology, January 2014)'

HDD down but not out
....
In the HDD segment, the rise of smartphones and tablets has dented the once-powerful appeal of computers, impacting HDD volume. The losses are especially apparent in the so-called client PC market-the consumer side of the PC business.

.....

Kipmi0 May Show Increased CPU Utilization on Linux

This article is takenf from IBM Support Portal. Kipmi0 May Show Increased CPU Utilization on Linux

Description

The kipmi0 process may show increased CPU utilization in Linux. The utilization may increase up to 100% when the IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) device, such as a BMC (Baseboard Management Controller) or IMM (Integrated Management Controller) is busy or non-responsive.



Fix

No fix required. You should ignore increased CPU utilization as it has no impact on actual system performance.

Work-around

1. If using an IPMI device, reset the BMC or reboot the system.

2. If not using an IPMI device, stop the IMPI service by issuing the following command:

    service ipmi stop


Details

IBM has requested that the design of kipmi be reviewed in future releases. Any changes that may occur through this review would be implemented in future Linux Distribution updates.

The increased CPU usage of kipmi is normal. The hardware interface is not interrupt driven, so the driver must poll the device for status and messages. It is this polling that is showing up as a busy CPU. The kipmi kernel thread has its priority intentionally lowered so that it does not interfere with other processes on the system. Even when it is polling in its tightest loop (usually when it thinks the BMC has active events it needs to handle), it will give up the CPU to any process that wants it.

The CPU usage seen for the kipmi0 kernel thread is what is known as IDLE time. Kipmi0 is running when there are no other jobs to run and is one of the lowest priority processes on the system.

This is the standard behavior for this interface and is not unique to this process running in an IBM environment or specifically with IBM Systems Director.

Configuring vSphere Flash Read Cache

This article Configuring vSphere Flash Read Cache is taken from  virtualizationreview.com. It is definitely a good read. One of good features of VSphere 5.5 is the Flash Read Cache.

According to the article,

This capability allows a VMDK (the VMware virtual disk format) to have a "slice" of higher performing SSD storage without putting the entire contents on the SSD. This only applies to reads, but it can be a great way to get a big boost in I/O that is shared across multiple VMs.

The picture summarise it so well

 

Do read the article for an in-depth explanation.