e i g h t - c u b e d . c o m 

Patch panel example

Here's a patch panel picture. Although this still needs a little tidying up, it's fairly representative of the how neat we've tried to be putting the new room together. I'm sure it would be an eye opener for the previous people that let over 30 centimetres of cable spaghetti build up in front of the old computer room's core switches...

[03-May-2013]
Rack and stack, part 2:   I've been busy building this room. The majority of the equipment that will end up in the room is brand spanking new kit. All of this has now been racked and cabled, with the exception of some stuff that is lacking cables that the project manager overlooked and failed to order. Fortunately, most of that gear is not required for the first part of the relocation. The rest of the kit is old gear that will be physically relocated from the old room to the new room. This includes the OpenVMS CPUs. (287 words)

[06-Mar-2013]
Rack and stack, part 1:   We commenced the build on the new data centre yesterday. The backbone cabling is complete enough so that we were able to rack and stack the first of five cabinets, roll the new disk storage onto the floor, and power a few things up. (110 words)

[21-Feb-2013]
11th Birthday:   As of today, I've been on line for 11 years talking about my favourite operating system. Yay me. (18 words)

[12-Feb-2013]
EFN$C_ENF:   Use EFN$C_ENF everywhere you don't explicitly need to know when an event flag sets, and use a specified event flag (allocated by lib$get_ef) when you do. (281 words)

[11-Feb-2013]
Easy calculator for initial VHPT_SIZE value:   On Itanium, the Virtual Hash Page Table is an intermediate cache of address translations that sits between the TLB and physical address translation by walking the page tables. The default value in SYSGEN is 1, which allows for 1024 addresses to be cached. If you have large application with poor locality of reference, increasing VHPT_SIZE could be beneficial. (400 words)

[25-Jan-2013]
How to create a guaranteed unique filename in COBOL:   I was troubleshooting an issue where the FCP call rate was showing as extremely high on a node in the development cluster. The file lookup rate in the same MONITOR FCP window showed a corresponding number, so I knew something was doing a lot of directory access somewhere. (206 words)

[21-Dec-2012]
RMS hack:   After converting a file that's accessed 24x7 to add an alternate key, a number of programs started crashing because the programmer's testing had failed to uncover that the field that was turned into an alternate key had its value updated under certain conditions... and the FDL used to convert the file specified no changes for that key. And how we recovered. (687 words)

[17-Dec-2012]
Cable management:   Recently, I talked about looking for a cable database, and ended up settling for RackTables. Since then, I've ended up becoming a very big fan of this Open Source freeware product. (167 words)

[27-Sep-2012]
IA64 disassembly options:   What are the options for disassembling IA64 binaries? (163 words)