[CentOS] measuring kernel speed

Mon May 10 18:30:05 UTC 2010
Ross Walker <rswwalker at gmail.com>

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 2:05 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/10/2010 12:37 PM, Ross Walker wrote:
>>
>>> I think it is unfortunate how difficult it is to back up a working linux
>>> machine and restore it onto different hardware, given that the system
>>> really is very hardware independent.  But, detecting the hardware and
>>> mapping it to device drivers seems to be a black art hidden inside of
>>> anaconda and then the local hardware related settings are fairly
>>> hopelessly intertwined with application and user preferences in your
>>> backup copies.  I always thought that this would be a common enough
>>> problem that some distribution would address it, but so far it hasn't
>>> happened.
>>
>> That's why God invented the systems administrator!
>
> Well, yeah - I suppose you could say the design is good for the job
> security of sysadmins and for requiring support subscriptions from the
> distribution vendors, but it's something that the computer really should
> be able to handle by itself just like it does during the initial install.

Computers are dumb, and if we give too much power to the OS vendors
they'll enslave us.

>> Here I use kickstart scripts for baseline server types that perform
>> all the basic configurations on install.
>
> Have you totaled up the hours you've spend on these tasks that would be
> unnecessary in a better-designed system?  And even if that sort-of makes
> sense for servers that have a basic "type", what about ones that have
> application developers as users and end up accumulating all kinds of
> cruft that you don't know about?

After the initial time to research and setup the system the time to
maintain and extend was minimal, and these were setup a long, long,
long time ago (circa Windows 2000), use rsync or DFSR to replicate the
config to other deployment servers in remote offices.

I definitely recommend it.

Just need to setup clear policies with the developers, save your work
here and it will be recoverable, save your work there and you are SoL.

>> If I am setting up an ESXi infrastructure the first thing I would do
>> is setup a Cobbler server and a Windows deployment server (maybe a
>> Solaris Jump Start server) and integrate it with the VMware vCenter
>> templates. Then it's all point-n-click server deployment from there.
>
> Don't forget that you can use ESXi for free, but not vCenter.  But,
> there's really no problem in just copying/cloning VMware images around -
> you don't have to go through any extra contortions to be able to
> reproduce them (with variations for every OS), you just need to save a
> baseline copy before adding specialized applications.

Sure, I just mentioned vCenter as I use it here, but as in the email
to John, it could easily be scripted from a VM.

No need to clone or image either, I can have a server deployed over
the network in much quicker time then if I imaged it and a whole lot
easier to maintian long-term then a clone.

-Ross