Google pledges computing without limits in Compute Engine cloud platform

Posted on by

With its Google Compute Engine launched Thursday, Google is offering an IaaS (infrastructure as a service) cloud for running Linux virtual machines on the same infrastructure that powers the company itself.

via Google pledges computing without limits in Compute Engine cloud platform | Cloud Computing – InfoWorld.

From:  Where Google Computing Engine fits in

But how will customers decide whether to use Google Compute Engine, Rackspace Cloud, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, or another IaaS provider? For an informed answer to that question, InfoWorld turned to Michael Crandell, CEO and founder of RightScale, the cloud-management services company that helps customers work with everything from Amazon EC2 to Microsoft Azure.

Google I/O Day Two

Posted on by

Today’s first big theme: Chrome. Tim reports: “Brian Rakowski VP for (and inventor of) Chrome, shows device transferability among devices of tabs, bookmarks, with a multi-part contrived story, looking at his opened tabs from home and work, etc. from a phone running Chrome. Not only can open tabs from there, but (and this is cool), ‘we’ve made sure the back button works as well.’ So you can open a page from a different computer, and have the browsing history of that tab as well. This Chrome syncing affects settings, bookmarks, etc. Also, for those transferred tab pages, pre-loading! So when you click on a tab, it’s been loading and now should be read, BAM.” As before we’ll be updating the story live (below the fold) with his updates as they stream in.

via Google I/O Day Two – Slashdot.

Gmail Becomes World’s Largest Email Service; Google Continues To Unseat Microsoft

Posted on by

In January, Google mentioned in its earnings call that it had about 350 million monthly active users on Gmail; six months later, about 75 million more users had flocked to Gmail, growing the total number to 425 million monthly active users. By this measure, Gmail has dethroned Hotmail.

via Gmail Becomes World’s Largest Email Service; Google Continues To Unseat Microsoft – International Business Times.

Amazon cloud outage takes down Netflix, Instagram, Pinterest, & more

Posted on by

An outage of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud in North Virginia has taken down Netflix, Pinterest, Instagram, and other services. According to numerous Twitter updates and our own checks, all three services are unavailable as of Friday evening at 9:10 p.m. PT.

via Amazon cloud outage takes down Netflix, Instagram, Pinterest, & more | VentureBeat.

With the critical Amazon outage, which is the second this month, we wouldn’t be surprised if these popular services started looking at other options, including Rackspace, SoftLayer, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google’s just-introduced Compute Engine. Some of Amazon’s biggest EC2 outages occurred in April and August of last year.

Quake 3 Source Code Review

Posted on by

Since I had one week before my next contract I decided to finish my “cycle of id”. After Doom, Doom Iphone, Quake1, Quake2, Wolfenstein iPhone and Doom3 I decided to read the last codebase I did not review yet:

idTech3 the 3D engine that powers Quake III and Quake Live.

via Quake 3 Source Code Review: Architecture.

I was particularly impressed by :

  • The virtual machines system and the associated toolchain that altogether account for 30% of the code released. Under this perspective idTech3 is a mini operating system providing system calls to three processes.
  • The elegant network system based on snapshots and memory introspection.

Anyone else experiencing high rates of Linux server crashes during a leap second day?

Posted on by

THE WORKAROUND

Ok people, here’s how I worked around it.

  1. disabled ntp: /etc/init.d/ntp stop
  2. created http://linux.brong.fastmail.fm/2012-06-30/fixtime.pl (code stolen from Marco, see blog posts in comments)
  3. ran fixtime.pl without an argument to see that there was a leap second set
  4. ran fixtime.pl with an argument to remove the leap second

via debian – Anyone else experiencing high rates of Linux server crashes during a leap second day? – Server Fault.

TCPDUMP question

Posted on by

It seems to work as expected for me, but I did notice one thing. When I first tried to run the program as root, it failed to create the first file with a permission error. It turns out that tcpdump changes uid/gid internally to the user/group tcpdump. Since that user/group did not have write access to the directory, it failed. Once I created a subdir and gave tcpdump ownership of the subdir (chown/chgrp), tcpdump performed as expected.

via TCPDUMP question – FedoraForum.org.

GRUB 2.00 Boot-Loader Officially Released

Posted on by

The GRUB2 boot-loader features an EHCI driver, an official theme, ports to Itanium and SGI MIPS architectures, better default video mode selection using monitor EDID information, new drivers (EHCI / AHCI / ESCC serial / EFI / Network stack / VBE on Coreboot), new file-system support, improved file-system capabilities, new boot protocols, performance improvements, better internationalization, and improved installation support.

via [Phoronix] GRUB 2.00 Boot-Loader Officially Released.