matt massie wrote:
Yesterday, Steven Wagner wrote forth saying...
matt massie wrote:
i've just checked in changes to the monitoring core.
You bipedal monkeys never cease to amaze me with your ingenuity!
:) i'm a monkey boy and i laugh while i can in the eighth dimension.
A DVD worth getting, BTW.
In that case I'll upgrade all my Solaris boxen off of CVS today. Do
these changes break gmetad? I would imagine not since it's parsing
XML via an external module which I'm sure handles a DTD change
gracefully...
i'm going to update gmetad soon (today?) to incorporate some of the new
enhancements. at the minimum i'll have gmetad skip any metrics with a
SLOPE of ZERO. that'll save some serious disk I/O. i haven't tested it
but i'm 90%+ certain that gmetad is fine with the new changes (it just
will ignore them).
I don't know if RRDs like it when you skip data points like this. In fact
I am pretty sure they don't.
speaking of disk I/O. the guys at NPACI Rocks (http://rocks.npaci.edu)
thought of a cool trick with gmetad which i thought should be shared. the
biggest bottleneck in gmetad is disk I/O (writing to the databases). they
are monitoring almost 400 machines across the San Diego campus and
straining gmetad to the max (like totally). their solution: create a RAM
disk partition for the round-robin databases so that all data is in
memory. it works great.
Disk I/O hasn't been a problem for me yet (and I'm monitoring about 300
hosts so far ... here we have yet to witness the power of Ganglia on the
fully-operational battlestation) , but the gmetad box is running Solaris so
it's a slightly different ball game. As I've said before, my only
complaint with gmetad at the moment is its choking and dying in certain
circumstances relating to its sources hanging/crashing/rebooting.
But that *is* a neat trick.
Preston has been quiet so I am assuming that all is well with CVS on his
platforms...
yeh i think so. i'm sure preston wouldn't hesitate to let us know
otherwise. the BSD AIX universes still happy?
That reminds me, I should try this on SGI. It will be interesting to see
if libdnet compiles on it. Or on Tru64 for that matter.
:) we must get a large scale ganglia developers game going then. the
guys in my office (there are 6 of us) play delta force often around
5:30-6pm. we have one guy who is an amazing sniper... i cringe when i
hear his M82A1 (although since it's supersonic.. you sometimes hear it
AFTER it's too late). there is also a guy in our group who likes to play
the grenadier and run around with an MM-1 rapid-firing grenades all over
the place. i personally chose the gunner specialty and carry the M249 SAW
or FN MAG (although i really like the accuracy of the SAW and it still
cuts through walls just fine).
we don't have Army: Operations. who makes that? we'll have to look at
it.
An obscure organization called the United States Army.
You really haven't heard about it? It's made the conventional news - the
Army licensed the Unreal engine (the UT2003 version actually) and put
together a multiplayer and single-player FPS as a recruiting and training
tool. It is a little different from other FPS games - aiming is a lot
tougher (recoil is a huge factor now), grenades have a huge damage radius,
and there are a limited number of "slots" for each weapon loadout (lots of
fighting over the sniper rifle each round). Also, your team always appears
to you as the Army and the enemy always appears as whatever OpFor the map
uses (terrorists, insurgents, hippies, etc.), and the weapons match. It's
basically an open beta at the moment, but even the full game will be
offered for free (in gaming magazines and ... you guessed it ... at your
local Army recruiting office!).
You have to "qualify" to play online by going through some offline
training. This includes marksmanship (hit 23 targets to pass, 36 targets
to qualify for sniper training), advanced weapons training, and online
MILES training on a MOUT training map. Your performance is saved on the
authentication server, too, so no cheating. :) The M82 training is pretty
cool - for the final exam, they give you one bullet and say, "you have one
bullet and all the time you want to find and detonate a mortar shell on
this shooting range." It's pass-or-fail. :P
Pretty good game considering it's free (200MB download, check fileplanet,
bluesnews or nvidia's site) and it uses the UT2003 engine. Many minor
details are present that don't pop up so often in other games - the *sound*
of bullets whizzing by your ears, chunks of masonry and dust rising from
bullet hits, different weapon sounds for firing indoors and outdoors, etc. ...
Anyway, we are *waaaaay* off-topic...
