[plug] Is the message below a bodgy email

Bret Busby bret at busby.net
Thu Jun 19 16:31:49 WST 2008


If the organisation from which the email message below, appears to have 
ben sent, is in fact a professional organisation, one person 
should not be sending an email using another person's name, and, the 
email message, if it is sincere, should be an email with an appropriate 
email message subject, rather than an email injected (yes, like SQL code
injection) into an unrelated subject thread on a mailing list, so as to 
conceal the purpose of the message.

Therefore, the question has to be asked; is the message below, bodgy?

--
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..............

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
  you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
   Chapter 28 of Book 1 of
   "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
   A Trilogy In Four Parts",
   written by Douglas Adams,
   published by Pan Books, 1992

....................................................


On Thu, 19 Jun 2008, Gary Robertson wrote:

> Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:37:13 +1000
> From: Gary Robertson <Gary.Robertson at hays.com.au>
> Reply-To: plug at plug.org.au
> To: plug at plug.org.au
> Subject: RE: [plug] Ubuntu woes
> 
>
> Hi There,
>
> Is anyone seeking or knows of someone who might be interested in a Linux
> Systems Administrator position. It is to support a web environment. The
> role will be working in a team to support about 14 servers. This is a
> fairly entry level role and is paying $45 - $55k plus super.
>
> If you wish to discuss further please contact myself on the number
> below.
>
>
> Kind Regards,
>
> Karmen Bakovic
>
> Senior Recruitment Consultant
>
> HAYS Information Technology
>
>
>
> Hays - Australia and New Zealand's leading specialist recruitment group
>
>
>
> T 08 9226 0899  |  F  08 9322 5386 |  E karmen.bakovic at hays.com.au
>
> Level 12, 172 St Georges Terrace, Perth WA 6000
>
> To search for the best jobs and candidates visit our website
> www.hays.com.au
>
>
>
> SARA Award winners for "Best Candidate Care by a Recruitment Firm" 2005
> and 2006
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: plug-bounces at plug.org.au [mailto:plug-bounces at plug.org.au] On
> Behalf Of Daniel Pittman
> Sent: Thursday, 19 June 2008 12:44 PM
> To: plug at plug.org.au
> Subject: Re: [plug] Ubuntu woes
>
> Steve Baker <steve at iinet.net.au> writes:
>> Daniel Pittman wrote:
>>> Steve Baker <steve at iinet.net.au> writes:
>>>
>>>> Nothing out of the ordinary in the kern.log, messages, syslog,
>>>> daemon.log, or the usual suspects in /var/log.
>>>>
>>>> All disks are in a hardware RAID - 8-port adaptec SATA-II raid card,
>
>>>> 2 discs in RAID-1 and 6 in RAID-5.  The two RAID-1 drives are 12
>>>> months or so old, the other 6 are all new.  My next plan is to find
>>>> the afatools kit from Adaptec and run the afacli command to check
>>>> the SMART status of the discs and then scrub (check) the arrays.
>>>>
>>>> What is confusing is some tasks are quite quick and others really
>>>> slow.  Unpacking a tgz archive was quick, aptitude safe-upgrade
>>>> takes a long time to do steps like read state information, build the
>
>>>> tag database, etc. but the download was quick, then it took even
>>>> longer to do the post-installation steps.
>>>
>>> It sounds, to me, very much like your system is delivering good write
>
>>> bandwidth[1] but terrible read bandwidth or latency.
>>>
>>> Unpacking the tar is fast iff the content is in memory, but the
>>> update is slow when it reads databases or faults in code from disk.
>>> Network runs at full speed, and the post-install was slow only where
>>> it had to fault in code, etc...
>>
>> Sounds like a good theory - I am not sure of the best way to test this
>
>> though.
>
> Well, the easy way would be to time reading a file that had not been
> read before, then time re-reading it.  That should show up as slow the
> first time around, fast the second.
>
> You should also be able to echo ... 3, IIRC, to /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
> in order to have the kernel flush all the caching.  Ah, there we go:
>
> http://linux-mm.org/Drop_Caches
>
>> I know of hdparm/sdparm but I don't know if they are appropriate for
>> RAID volumes.  I can time large file copies and such (eg dd
>> if=/dev/urandom of=/some/file bs=1048576 count=1024 or whatever) but I
>
>> have nothing to compare results to.  And how do I stop caching from
>> upsetting the results?
>
> Well, my expectation would be that y'all could stop other activity and
> time the commands 'dd if=/dev/zero of=whatever bs=1M count=100; sync'
> together, which should give you a view of the time to write data out.
>
>>> At a guess.  Oh, are you running a vendor driver for the Adaptec
>>> card, or is it all open source drivers?
>>
>> I'm running the default Ubuntu aacraid driver.  When I ran the
>> installer it found that driver automatically, so I just used that.
>
> That seems reasonable, and if the driver picks it up then it is real
> hardware RAID and all.
>
>> In my experience the aacraid drivers have been pretty stable and
>> reliable, and I believe that Adaptec have always been quite open about
>
>> providing specs for their hardware.
>
> Sadly, these days they sell a pile of "fakeRAID" cards, for which only
> binary drivers exist.  Great, isn't it?  Anyhow, that is why I ask.
>
> [...]
>
>> Something I forgot to mention is that it's also very slow to boot,
>> which could indicate a hardware level issue with the RAID card (or
>> maybe it slows down after the kernel loads the raid driver).  I think
>> it's the most recent firmware revision but I'll check on that too.
>
> I would almost guess that your RAID array was degraded, and that is
> killing performance.
>
> Actually, a question: you have a RAID1 and a RAID5, right?
>
> Is the terrible performance the same on both?
>
> Regards,
>        Daniel
> _______________________________________________
> PLUG discussion list: plug at plug.org.au
> http://www.plug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/plug
> Committee e-mail: committee at plug.linux.org.au
>
>
> For the latest recruitment news and career opportunities visit www.hays.com.au
>
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