Summer is Finally Here

"Woof! there it is " ..... bark and the summer is gone....Enjoy ity whilst it lasts

Highlights from STAC Performance summit June 2011

Major event happened in London Yesterday bringing Buy and Sell sides togther to discuss issues and new inovations within the Securities Finance and Banking industries.

Professionals vendors and specialist consultancies attending the event continue to strive for better performance and less latency for trading purposes, pushing the boundaries of Modern technology and Parallelisation

Through Panel Deiscussion and 5 Minute inovation slots by vendors a full update in the industry was presented

Highlights included:

• New regulatory body will improve audit of trading techniques included current I.T used. This may include audit of all orders to subdue ' short selling' and other trading methods


• Oracle details its new 'Appliance' solution called Exadata. This merges propriotory O/S Hardware and Storage for an ultra low latency 'Combined solution'. A Major Market Data Vendor is interseted in implementing this is their latest Position Keeping and Risk system.


• Discussion on Impact of Non Software Middleware from such companies as Soltace which is alredy offering competative edge to London based trading engines and could have major impact on the 'Top Three' Market Data and Messaging Vendors MQ Series Reuters and Tibco.


• Further discussion on programing techniques to increase and reduce latency 'Jitter'


• Changes in Intel and AMD Chips to integrate GPU.

If you would like more information please contact us

IT Support London

DNS special symbols

"*" means any hosts which are not defined in DNS will be sent to the configured dns entry ( host)
in example any hosts not defined in the domain dns like newhost.mydomain.com will be resolved to IP address of dmz.mydomain.com
( CNAME is this example is alias)

"@" symbol in any DNS entry means 'Primary' which means just the domain name need to be specified. For hosts where you dont want a dns host name to have to specified in front of the your domain for a particular purpose. This is useful for email hosts ( mail exchangers or MX records in DNS)
so no other name is needed in front of the domain name

example dns entries

* CNAME dmz.myisp.com
@ MX mxchange.mydomain.com 5
@ MX backupmx.mydomain.com 10
poormx MX mydomain.com 20
mxchange A 52.25.134.234
backupmx CNAME backup.external-ispdomain.com
vpn-hosts A 52.25.134.235

In the example, two mail servers are enabled for mydoamin.com. Should mxchange.mydomain.com fail then backupmx.mydomain would receive email untill mxchange ( the primary server comes back online. notice the DNS priority Preference no's . The lower the number the higher the priority or the order in which the servers should be contacted.

backupmx.mydomain.com in example above is infact an alias for an ISP mail server definined in CNAME ( canonical name) entry lower down backup.external-ispdomain.com. So when the companies internal mail server fails their isp mail server takes over, until the private mail server is back online.

Mail backup servers or relays configuration are not part of this note.

@ is typically used in MX Mail Exchange record where you dont want the hostname to proceed the domain like poormx (above) otherwise your email address would look like someone@poormx.mydomain.com instead of someone@mydomain.com

to check dns entries which you have made have taken effect. use 'dig' on linux/unix hosts

or on windows 'nslookup'
then type
'set type =mx'
'mydomain.com'

will show current like mx records and their route values
mydomain.com MX Preference = 5, mail exchanger =mxchange.mydomain.com
mydomain.com MX Preference = 10 mail exchanger = backupmx.mydomain.com
mydomain.com MX Preerence = 20 mail exchanger = poormx.mydomain.com

REMEMBER DNS replication outside the UK to other Internet facing DNS servers might take upto 5 hours to replicate !

How to create a USB Install Device for Red Hat

I always forget how to do this so Ive posted a Link for reference

http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5/html/Installation_Guide/ch02s04.html

Regards

Chris

IT Support London

extracting files form .iso images on Linux and Solaris

To view the file contents inside a .iso file

Linux:
mkdir /mnt/iso
mount -o loop image.iso /mnt/iso

ls -al /mnt/iso to view files

or

Solaris:
mount .iso file as device
lofiadm -a /solaris10/iso/sol-10-u7-ga-x86-v1.iso /dev/lofi/1

mount device to file system
mount -F hsfs -o ro /dev/lofi/1 /mnt

ls -al /mnt to view files



it support london since 1990

Updated Redhat Virtualisation slides

After a recent webinar here is some interesting slides detailing how Redhat Virtualisation has progressed to date

http://www.infrasup.com/downloads/redhat-virtualisation-jan-2011.pdf

see page 19 for a price comparison


it support london Since 1990

Linux: search files hogging space on server files system

Ever had a server with a full File system and unsure where the issue is ?

use the command below to show disk usage in size order

as superuser

du -sk /* |sort -nr

Enjoy !


it support london Since 1990