6 – 10 June gave advice on Linux VFS and Perl script dependencies and shared a monitoring project from ships at sea.
Starting off, Sebastian put the Linux Virtual File System (VFS) API to the test. Since the improvements made to “path lookup” and “dcache” in Linux kernel v. 2.6.38, performance gains of up to 35% were promised. Unfortunately Sebastian found only a 7% improvement in his test system of a home directory with git-checkouts of various Linux versions and an additional 1 million files. He tested both the current stable Debian 2.6.32 and the recently compiled v.3 on the same system. From these results, he recommended against VFS for Debian Squeeze servers, in favour of the corresponding distribution kernel.
Also happy to help, Eric shared his script to check the dependencies of various Perl scripts. Helpful to those who find themselves installing missing modules for unfamiliar Perl scripts, it extracts the modules used, and checks if they are already on your system. Through the commented lines, missing modules can then be installed via CPAN.
Finally from the consulting team, Birger got excited about his recent monitoring project for Aida cruises. At the headquarters in Rostock and on their cruise liners across the seven seas, Aida needed to ensure their IT infrastructure would always run smoothly. So Birger implemented Icinga with LConf for centralised configuration, and enabled monitoring results to be received via satellite from ships at sea. Understandably for him, the project gave the term ‘monitoring satellites’ a whole new meaning.
