A non-blog about the things we figured out 2013-02-09T08:20:20Z Manuel Oetiker, Tobi Oetiker, Roman Plessl, Fritz Zaucker http://insights.oetiker.ch/ http://insights.oetiker.ch/windows/SvnProperties4MSOffice.html 2011-11-23T15:25:39Z

SVN Keywords help me a lot in keeping my documents in order. Thanks to keywords I always know which version of the file I am looking at, when it was last modified and by whom. For text files, keywords are very simple to use. For binary file formats like the stuff you get with windows programms this does unfortunately not work. Binary keyword substitution may provide a way out of this problem, but only for the most simple of binary file formats. TortoiseSVN (> version 1.5) provides a way out of this problem. It can be acessed as a com component from within any windows application that provides the necessary interface.

http://insights.oetiker.ch/linux/vmware.html 2010-01-04T14:36:14Z

Running Windows as a guest in VMware is way cool, since this breaks the evil bond Windows enters with your hardware, acting as if the GUI was the OS. A few things to observe when setting up a Windows 2003 Terminal Server with VMware Server.

http://insights.oetiker.ch/conference/lisa08.html 2009-11-13T00:03:02Z

22st Large Installation System Administration Conference 2008, November 09-14, 2007, in San Diego, CA

http://insights.oetiker.ch/windows/w2k3_tuning.html 2009-11-07T23:23:48Z

With todays fast multi core servers "small business virtualisation" becomes a reality. It easy to setup and works quite well out of the box. But there is more performance to be gained for those who don't fear the registry.

http://insights.oetiker.ch/linux/external-journal-on-ssd.html 2008-09-11T22:05:55Z

Running a Linux Server on a HW RAID6 / LVM setup we are plagued by the fact that heavy activity on one file system will impact performance on all of them. If there is an active writer on one file system (especially meta data updates) then all other file systems will face extreme performance degradation. Especially read performance fell right through the floor. Response times become large and highly fluctuating.

http://insights.oetiker.ch/linux/raidoptimization.html 2008-06-08T07:39:38Z

Hardware RAID boxes are cool things. Plug them in and they behave like a big and fast disk. If properly configured, they'll be another 30% faster.

http://insights.oetiker.ch/conference/lisa07.html 2007-11-16T20:47:46Z

21st Large Installation System Administration Conference 2007, November 11-16, 2007, in Dallas, TX

http://insights.oetiker.ch/linux/fadvise.html 2007-05-21T09:57:24Z

The file system cache (buffer cache) helps programs to get to their data blocks faster by keeping recently used file blocks in memory. If you copy a large file tree, this has a devestating effect on the cache since all the copied data will also end up in the cache, force other data blocks out of the cache. This is very bad for system performance since of all the other processes on the system that had their data blocks in the cache before the copying started will suddenly have to reead data from disk again. Using posix_fadvise you can hint the OS that it should drop certain file blocks from the cache. Together with information from mincore that tells us which blocks are currently cached we can alter applications to work without disturbing the buffer cache. This article shows how this works, using rsync as an example.

http://insights.oetiker.ch/linux/vmware_hints.html 2007-05-06T10:11:41Z

This section contains some helping hints for issues with VMware Server 1.0.x on Linux.

http://insights.oetiker.ch/linux/lvm.html 2007-05-04T07:21:45Z

Rule number one: Don't Panic!. Think twice before you do anything. Rule number two: If you did panic, there is still hope.