Archive
Posts from 2010
UNIX IPC tutorial in C
Brian Hall, "Beej" wrote a cool tutorial explaining all the different aspects of traditional UNIX Inter Process Communication (IPC). He provides a lot of C code where you can compile / test these concepts yourself for a better understanding. The high level concepts in this tutorial would be great material to use in conducting technical interviews. =) Thanks Brian!
$ read more →Wiping a hard drive with preclear_disk.sh
I recently picked up a couple of Seagate 1.5TB hard drives and based on the reviews I wanted to conduct an EXTENSIVE burn on each drive (a number of people have reported these drives suffered from the "click of death"). There are various tools to read and write data to a drive, but the most thorough tool I've found for Linux is preclear_disk.sh. Preclear writes a bunch of data to the drives, and checks to make sure the data read matches the data that was written (it writes out a special signature to assist with this). It also monitors hard drive SMART counters, and will report errors as it detects them…
$ read more →My 1000th blog post
Wow, I can't believe 999 blog entries have been posted to the prefetch blog! This blog started all the way back in October of 2004, and was a way for me to document technology as I learned it. I never thought people would actually read it, and am even more amazed that this site now generates close to 600k+ hits per month. Yikes…
$ read more →Configuring a caching only DNS server on Solaris hosts
While investigating a performance issue a few weeks back, I noticed that a couple of our Solaris hosts were sending 10s of thousands of DNS requests to our authoritative DNS servers. Since the application was broken and unable to cache DNS records, I decided to configure a local caching only DNS server to reduce load on our DNS servers. Creating a caching only name server on a Solaris host is a piece of cake. To begin, you will need to create a directory to store the bind zone files: After this directory is created, you will need to place the 127.0.0.1, localhost and root.hints file in the conf directory…
$ read more →The state of OpenSolaris
Matty and I haven't really spoken much about the current state of the OpenSolaris project. Oracle has been pretty tight with releasing any type of information about their plans / directions in which they will be taking Solaris / OpenSolaris. Its caused a lot fusteration. The OpenSolaris Governing Board threw down the gauntlet and has threatened to dissolve pending some direct interaction / involvement from Oracle…
$ read more →