Linux HPC clusters now dominate the market. We often hear about the “big ones”, but many small individual or group clusters still exist. I believe, the rapid and disruptive growth was due to the low barriers to entry. You could play with “it” before you committed big resources to a larger system. A simple and effective “try before you buy” proposition.

If you’re an old hand at database programming in PHP, you’ve likely come to the conclusion that there’s nothing fun about putting data into, or retrieving data from a database. If you’re a database newbie, you’re probably still confused about all that” magic” and how best to harness it to do your bidding.

ZFS is an advanced filesystem created by Sun Microsystems but not supported in the Linux kernel. The ZFS_on_FUSE project allows you to use ZFS through the Linux kernel as a FUSE filesystem. This means that a ZFS filesystem will be accessible just like any other filesystem the Linux kernel lets you use.

You see, when I first started, my team had our very own "music" server where we stored all of our music files so we could listen to them at work, and share them. It was just a plain old file server running on an old beaten down box. It finally crashed, and we never brought it up again. I figured, why not bring it back? Plus I wanted to play with a free NAS server OS based on FreeBSD called FreeNAS. That is exactly what I did!

Despite a variety of open source testing tools, until recently there wasn't an easy way to measure and compare the performance of two Linux-powered machines. Phoronix Test Suite (PTS), released this month, addresses this -- and how!

I don't know how about you, but my personally favorite book of all times is J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings". I bet that everyone who read the book is familiar with the following verse:

One Link to rule them all, One Link to find them,
One Ling to bring them all and in the network bond them

The keyword to understanding what the Master had on his mind is the word bond. What Tolkien was referring to, I believe, is bonding of network interfaces.

Under Linux, it is possible to run a number of Windows applications without having Windows installed at all. This is done with Wine. I'm not talking about the fermented beverage some of us are quite fond of, but a package that runs on Linux. Allow me to paraphrase from the Wine Web site . Wine Is Not an Emulator.

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