Just another weblog
After a quick discussion with nox@ I made a copy&paste of his “VDR is committed now”-mail into the FreeBSD wiki. I also re-styled some small parts of it to fit better into the wiki. It is not perfect, but already usable. Now interested people can go and improve the docs there.
Thanks to Juergen for all his work in this area!
Today I stumbled again over some HeatMaps from Brendan Gregg (of DTrace-fame). This time it was the PDF of his presentation at the LISA 2010 conference. It shows nicely how he plans to evolve it from a single-machine (like in Analytics for Oracle Storage products) to the cloud. It is a very good overview about what kind of intuitive performance visualization you can do with this.
I would love to see something for FreeBSD (or other performance data). Maybe someone could take the DTraceTazTool as a base or hint and write something generic which works for a lot of things…
There are just too much nice and interesting things out there, and not enough time for all of them.
Brendan Gregg of Sun Oracle fame made a good explanation how to visualize latency to get a better understanding of what is going on (and as such about how to solve bottlenecks). I have seen all this already in various posts in his blog and in the Analytics package in an OpenStorage presentation, but the ACM article summarizes it very good.
Unfortunately Analytics is AFAIK not available in OpenSolaris, so we can not go out and adapt it for FreeBSD (which would probably require to port/implement some additional dtrace stuff/probes). I am sure something like this would be very interesting to all those companies which use FreeBSD in an appliance (regardless if it is a storage appliance like NetApp, or a network appliance like a Cisco/Juniper router, or anything else which has to perform good).
Seems that I will actively mentor again in this Google Summer of Code (as opposed to just review the submissions from students and/or acting as a fall-back mentor).
The project I will mentor is the “Make optional kernel subsystems register themselves via sysctl”-one from the FreeBSD ideas page.
The student already got into contact with me and it looks like he is motivated (he is already subscribed to several FreeBSD mailinglists, which is not a requirement we have in our GSoC docs).
I search a way to use one-time-passwords for jabber/XMPP (ejabberd) on FreeBSD. I do not want to use PAM (local users on the machine). Currently I use the internal authentication, and I expect that not all users of the jabber server will use OTP if available, so the problem case is not that easy (migrating existing users to a new solution can be done by changing the password myself and then telling them to change their password, but there needs to be a way to let them change the non-OTP password).
I assume that OTP is not foreseen in the XMPP protocol, so where could I ask to have something like that considered as an extension (if such a place exists at all)?
Oh, yes, sending the passwords over SSL is not an option (that is already the only way to login there). The goals are to have
