There are few places harder to get to in this world. But therearen't anywhere it's harder to live.The average temperature in Antarctica at the bottom of the Earth is a balmy 58 degrees below.That's when the sun is out.For millions of years they have made their home on the darkest,driest, windiest and coldest continent on Earth.The Penguins.Penguin is technically a bird. Although one that makes his home in the sea. Each year at around the same time he will leave the comfort of his ocean home and embark on a remarkable journey.He will travel a great distance and though he is a bird. he won't fly.Though he lives in the sea. he won't swim. Mostly, he will walk.But he won't walk alone.It is March ......
March of the Penguins ,The IceWalkerz!!


Sound Tracks of "March of the Penguins ", feature film by National Geographic Channel.
What is Linux ? You’d probably say, “Linux is an operating system.” Yes, but remember, however, that the strictest definition of Linux is only the kernel . The more relaxed definition would be an overall package called a distribution that is ready to install and use. There are well over 300 distributions of Linux, most of them containing commonly-needed applications—and even games! Linux was originally meant to be a UNIX clone. Here, by clone,we mean that it would look and behave like UNIX. But bear in mind that Linux does not contain a single line of UNIX code! The source code of the two is entirely different.Linux was officially introduced only in 1991 by its famed creator Linus Torvalds,who at the time was a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Little did he know that his creation would grow in size and popularity to the extent it has today.Linux is what it is today because of the help of developers who worked on it not for money but for the kick of it. They were driven by passion and belief in a cause.Did you know that most servers today run on Linux? That means there’s a good chance there’s Linux somewhere behind all those Web pages you see. Linux is not just an OS you use at home instead of Windows; a whole range of enterprise suites are now based on the Linux platform. From network servers to Web servers, several places have Linux as the backbone.There are countless brains at work who pursue the technology—not for money, but out of sheer interest and passion.Linux boasts of some of the best online peer support today. Linux is standing today showing the IT world the innovation that can be achieved by sheer community work. And,Linux is free too. It appears, there is after all something like a free lunch! When the world around you is trying Linux, why would you want to be leaving behind the excitement?

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Maximize performace of Oracle and IBM DB2

Commercial databases such as Oracle and IBM DB2 can maximize performance by using raw I/O. One may use the raw command for both IDE and SCSI devices. This will map a raw device to a blocked device for an entire disk partition. To see if your system is using raw I/O issue the command: raw -a

* Configuration file: /etc/sysconfig/rawdevices

Add entries to this file to invoke raw I/O upon system boot.
* Devices: /dev/raw/raw??
* Raw device controller: /dev/rawctl
* Sample use of command: raw /dev/raw/raw1 /dev/hdb5
* One must be of group disk to use the raw device or change permissions:

chmod a+r /dev/rawctl

chmod a+r /dev/hdb5
chmod a+rw /dev/raw/raw1

Note: The above information applies to Red Hat distributions. This info may be different for other distributions. i.e. S.U.S.E. uses /dev/raw1 as a device and /dev/raw as the controller.
You can mimic Red Hat behavior with a symbolic link: ln -s /dev/your_raw_controller /dev/rawctl

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