SuperJason’s Personal Blog

It was a good weekend. Friday night, we all went to Heritage Hill for a Halloween event. Ryan got to go trick or treating at all of the historical buildings.

From the moment he got his dragon costume on, he was roaring at everyone. They all got quite a kick out of it. Many of the employees suggested entering him in the costume contest.

There were probably around 50 contestants in the costume contest, so it was pretty stiff competition. One of the costumes even included a complete pirate ship that must have taken hours to build.

During the competition, Ryan keep roaring when they would look at him. He won the contest for most creative costume. They said that the roaring sold it. He won a $5 gift certificate for the gift ship, and he’ll be getting his photo into one of the local newspapers. With his gift certificate, he bought a horse drawn carriage and a tractor.

The next day (Saturday for those not keeping track), we went to Nick & Kirsten’s annual Halloween bash in Neenah. They always throw great Halloween parties, and this year was no exception. They had great food, and prizes for different things. There were bones to find for booty, a pirate quiz, and a jar of candy where you had to guess the quantity. I counted the candy on one size of the jar, and then multiplied it out to get a rough estimate. It turns out I was the closest the right amount by far. I guessed 235, and there were 260 pieces.

It was a great weekend, but now I have to get some work done around the house today…

I’ve been setting up a new development VMware server, and I’ve learned a few things about RAID performance. Our server is a brand new 3GHz Quad core Xeon, with 10 gigs of RAM. We initially set it up with 5 disks, 4 for RAID 5, and the fifth as a spare.

VMware virtual machines tend to be huge, especially if you’re pre-allocating the disks. In my case, I’ve pre-allocated them to have 15GB hard drives. I set up a couple on my laptop, and then tried to copy them up to the development server.

Much to my surprise, the write performance was horrible. Copying one large file effectively brings the server to a halt, and the copy isn’t really that fast to begin with.

Upon further investigation, I found out that RAID 5 write performance is less than desirable. Write performance is pretty important when you’re moving around huge files.

This morning we decided to convert the array to RAID 10, sometimes known as raid 1+0. Write performance is great, and read performance is just as good as RAID 5. We also increased the NTFS cluster size to 64KB, to better match the types of files we’re storing (big ones).

The results have been excellent. I can now copy a virtual machine in 10 minutes instead of 30+. The only disadvantage is that I had to lose 143GB (1 drive in the array).

If you’re setting up a VMware server, I recommend:

• Set the NTFS cluster size high (64k), and match that to your stripe size
• Use RAID 10

I’ve been very busy at my new job. It’s a lot of work making sure things get started correctly. That’s why there has been a lack of posts. The irony is that I have a ton of stuff to talk about, so hopefully I can find more time to write about it now!

For now, I’ll leave you with this. My friend Shawn made a farewell comic for my departure from GE.

My friend ObiShawn jumped on the off-site backup bandwagon. I suggested to him getting a Dreamhost account, and use Rsync to backup all of his files. Using Rsync makes it super easy to only copy over the files changes. If no files changed, it only takes seconds to back up.

People are always peddling Dreamhost promo codes, because you can save money when you sign up. Any Dreamhost user can create promo codes, and customize them as needed. I see that they now allow you to also offer account upgrades. So, if you want to start with double the space, use the code “SUPERSPACEME“. That means you can get 1 TERABYTE of space for a reasonable price. Of course it grows 2GB/week. That should handle most users backup needs.

I’m using them to backup my server and my laptop on a regular basis.

Remember, Rsync is enabled on dreamhost by default, you simply need a client. It’s easy to get for Linux, or you can get a Windows version called cwRsync. The Windows version is the Linux version, but with the necessary Cygwin files. For the Mac, apparently there is RsyncX.

If you want good instructions on how to set up automated backups in Windows, there is a good guide here.

A short rant by Jason…

I’ve had to set up 2 computers over the past few days. Since I don’t use restore CD’s, I have to resort to downloading all of the drivers from the manufactures websites.

That normally wouldn’t be a big deal, since I have a 15Mb connection. However, a connection is only as strong as it’s weakest link. In this case, I think the connections of the web servers is very slow.

Can’t Gateway and HP afford something faster than a T1? What about Nero.com? An hour to download their software is ridiculous.

If they don’t want to spend any more money, how about letting me download the drivers using bittorrent? While they’re at it, just put ALL the drivers for a particular model into a single file via bittorrent. If they did that, I could probably get all of them in less than 5 minutes.

The last few days have been some of the most stressful I’ve ever had. I’ve decided to leave my 6 year career at General Electric. I don’t like to mention my current employer on my blog, so I can’t tell you where I’m going. Of course my friends and colleagues know where I’m going, or will shortly.

It was not an easy decision. GE has some of the best benefits including great healthcare, 401k, AND a pension. However, I think that this new position fits in better with my long term goals. It’s also a smaller company, which has many advantages. Things get done quickly, and you can have a sense of accomplishment and ownership. I get to do exactly what I love, with a great group of people.

Giving my notice wasn’t easy. My colleagues seemed depressed and stressed out, but they’ll be fine. This decision was for me and my family, and I think that people understand that.

In my new position, I’m going to be leading a team of ASP.NET developers to build a new generation of web sites. Some of these sites are public, and some are internal for specific customers. I should be able to keep on blogging about the challenges and solutions relating to .NET and C#.