Amazon EC2 Console Improvements

EC2 has made some improvement on the console. Do take a look at Amazon Web Services Blog. Some of the features are:

1. Cloning Security Group Rules
   You can now copy the rules from an existing security group to a new one by selecting the existing rule ad choosing Copy to new from the Actions menu:
   
2. Managing Outbound Rules in VPC Security Groups
   You can now edit the outbound rules of a VPC Security Group from within the EC2 console (this operation was previously available from the VPC console):
   
3. Deep Linking Across EC2 Resources
   The new deep linking feature lets you easily locate and work with resources that are associated with one another. For example, you can move from an instance to one of its security groups with a single click:
   
4. Compare Spot Prices Across AZs
   The updated Spot Pricing History graph makes it easier for you to compare Spot prices across Availability Zones. Simply hover your cursor over the graph and observe the Spot prices across all of the Availability Zones in the Region:
   
5. Tagging of Spot Requests
   You can now add tags to requests for EC2 Spot instances:

SGI UV way of doing Hadoop

I thought this video clip is quite interesting as it proposed Large SMP-like machine, in this case SGI-UV to solve "Big Analytics" Issues. Do look at this interesting video from SGI - Hadoop-WHAT? How to find that needle of information in your own Big Data haystacks (HD)

Using mcelog to detect cpu and memory issues on CentOS 6

 mcelog is a daemon that collects and decodes Machine Check Exception data on x86-64 machines

According to mcelog website, 

The mcelog daemon accounts memory and some other errors errors in various ways. mcelog --client can be used to query a running daemon. The daemon can also execute triggers when configurable error thresholds are exceeded. This is used to implement a range of automatic predictive failure analysis algorithms: including bad page offlining and automatic cache error handling. User defined actions can be also configured.

For CentOS 6, mcelog is a default install. But you could do a yum install

# yum install mcelog

CentOS has already configured the cron to run hourly check. You can take a look at /etc/cron.hourly/mcelog.cron. It should be something like this below

#!/bin/bash

# do not run if mcelogd is running
service mcelogd status >& /dev/null
[ $? -eq 0 ] && exit 0

# is mcelog supported?
/usr/sbin/mcelog --supported >& /dev/null
if [ $? -eq 1 ]; then
       exit 1;
fi

/usr/sbin/mcelog --ignorenodev --filter >> /var/log/mcelog

To view the error, do take a look at /var/log/mcelog

# less /var/log/mcelog

To see log in real time,

# tail -f /var/log/mcelog

A peek into NTU's supercomputer and hybrid cloud

A writeup of "A peek into NTU's supercomputer and hybrid cloud" by Enterprise NTU efforts to deploy Hybrid Cloud IT Architecture

NFS Share getting a (1) appended when adding NFS storage at VCentre

I seems to get be getting this (1) appended to the NFS Share when I enter the NFS storage and volume and Datastore Name at the VCentre "Add Storage" dialogue box. I was using VSphere 5.1 and VCentre 5.1

There are 2 scenarios

Scenario 1 - Case Sensitive for the ServerName
Do look at NFS share getting a (1) appended when adding to a new host in existing datacenter . The solution is due to different caps for the storage name


Scenario 2- Missing "/" for the Storage Folder

For example ( I have this in my existing host):

Server: 192.168.1.1
Folder: vol/vol1
DataStore Name: MyDataStore 

Do note that the volume has already mapped in other hosts. I realized that the correction error was very simple. I missed the "/" in front on the vol/vol1

Server: 192.168.1.1
Folder: /vol/vol1
DataStore Name: MyDataStore