Unattended Upgrades

2012/01/16 by Leave a comment

We are managing a number of Debian servers in the office, for various internal applications. Initially, it was a simple matter of upgrading the servers manually. However, as the number of servers grew, the amount of repetitive apt-get upgrade commands that need to be entered became tedious.

Unattended-upgrades to the rescue!

Fortunately for Debian Squeeze, it is already packaged in the repository and installation is a simple matter of:

# apt-get install unattended-upgrades

However, what most guides do not tell you is that there is an additional step that is required to be done before it will automagically work. We need to configure apt to actually trigger the unattended upgrades. It is not triggered by default.

To do this, just issue a:

# dpkg-reconfigure unattended-upgrades

Answer yes when prompted whether to “Automatically download and install stable updates” as in the screen below:

That does it!

PS: To make it even friendlier, I have also configured each server to send an email to the system administrator whenever a system is updated.

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Internships at AESTE

2011/08/13 by Leave a comment

Listen to one of the interns here talk a little about his internship experience at AESTE.

  1. The work we do is HARD – but fruitful.
  2. The working culture here is different – in a good way.
  3. You get to meet other interesting people – who will enrich you.

An internship at AESTE is guaranteed to push you to discover strange new things about yourself.

Read what other interns learned through their experiences here.

Apply now!

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Misunderstood Motivations

2011/08/10 by Leave a comment

In the latest blog entry from one of our AESTE interns, he raised a couple of pertinent questions with regards to the very raison d’etre at AESTE. I thought that this might be an opportune time to address the issue.

First, I shall address a very commonly held misconception – “What use is the fastest multi-threaded 32-bits when others have already multi-core 64-bits”.

Global Microprocessor Market
Most people will probably think along the same lines except people who are in this industry who know that, the multi-core 64-bit market is a pretty small one. Microprocessors are used in a multitude of applications and markets from ovens, air-conditioners, cars through to smart-phones, medical devices, tablets, PCs and servers. Not everything is a multi-core cloud computing super-computer.

According to the EETimes, these high-end CPUs only account for less than 2% of the world’s microprocessor market. An even bigger shocker is that a very large bulk of the microprocessors sold (55% in 1997) are actually 8-bit microprocessors.

So, there is still plenty of room for the world’s smallest and fastest 32-bit microprocessor – as long as it can provide a compelling business case of 32-bit performance at an 8-bit price. Of course, there is a long road ahead of us to get there.

Which brings us to the second question – “Why would my supervisor pay thousands, every month, to develop open source projects just to let others to download for free”?

Open Source Business Model
Again, most people will probably think it crazy to spend money building something only to give it away for free, except people who are in the open-source business. I won’t go into all the murky details but let’s just say that the open-source business model is a well proven one.

According to Forbes, RedHat is set to hit US$ 1 billion in revenues this year (though I’m not sure how the current economic problems in the US might affect it). Not too bad for a company that spends millions developing its product and gives it away for free. Of course, RedHat is not the only successful open-source company, albeit the most successful one.

MySQL was sold off to SUN for US$ 1 billion in 2008. Google is set to conquer the smart-phone market with Android. Qumranet was acquired for US$ 100 million in 2008. The list goes on, with big and small companies in the mix.

At AESTE, we’ll just patiently wait and hope that our good work will one day be given due recognition. Business is not for the faint hearted nor those looking to make a quick buck. AESTE is in it for the long haul.

In the mean-time, we’ll continue to build cool stuff, from the depths of our hearts!

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Farewell Makan #2

2011/07/26 by Leave a comment

Two of our interns will be leaving us by the end of August.

It’s tradition here to treat everyone to a farewell makan when people leave. However, since August will be Ramadhan, we had to bring forward the farewell so that everyone could partake in it.

For the farewell makan this time, we went to Chilis at Mid-Valley. There was a good mix of food and talk. It is good to chat on random stuff, such as education and relationships, once-in-a-while.

Some people had steak, while others had quesadillas. I had salad. We had a plate of bottomless chips and some cake and ice-cream to share.

The food was so yummy that no one thought to take pictures!

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Clustering Icarus Verilog

2011/05/27 by Leave a comment

Icarus Verilog is a popular open-source digital circuit simulator distributed as part of gEDA. While it is a fast simulator, it runs largely single-threaded and does not exploit the modern developments in computing. Depending on the complexity of the circuit involved, a single simulation run can be fairly time consuming.

At AESTE, we are using our cluster of workstations to perform parallel simulation runs. While a single simulation run is still time-consuming and it cannot distributed, we can perform N number of simulations in parallel, giving a N factor speed-up in results collection.

This method also exploits our local GlusterFS cluster to maintain consistency between the files accessed on each workstation. The same input file can be accessed on all the workstations while the intermediate files are stored on each local workstation. This required changing certain parts of the simulation script so that it would use the local /tmp to store the simulation files.

Next, cluster ssh is used to execute the commands in parallel on different hosts. This speeds up the amount of data collected within a time period. The next step would be to investigate the use of a more generic grid-engine system for this. We will be looking into this in the future.

Guide here.

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