nixCraft Linux Sys Admin Blog

Posted: 31 May 2008 08:43 AM CDT

CNet has published an interesting information about Google data center and estimates that they have 2,00,000 servers spanned across 36 data centers across the globe. From the article:

On the other hand, Dean seemingly thinks clusters of 1,800 servers are pretty routine, if not exactly ho-hum. And the software company runs on top of that hardware, enabling a sub-half-second response to an ordinary Google search query that involves 700 to 1,000 servers, is another matter altogether.

Google doesn't reveal exactly how many servers it has, but I'd estimate it's easily in the hundreds of thousands. It puts 40 servers in each rack, Dean said, and by one reckoning, Google has 36 data centers across the globe. With 150 racks per data center, that would mean Google has more than 200,000 servers, and I'd guess it's far beyond that and growing every day.

(Fig.01: Google data center [credit:cnet news])

I'm well aware of HA and clustering technologies but this is massive setup with tons and tons of systems. Google uses distributed storage system and other in house developed tools.

Sounds like a great place to work

=> Google spotlights data center inner workings

An Interview With Chet Ramey - Maintainer Of Bash Shell

Posted: 30 May 2008 11:30 AM CDT

BASH shell is default on many UNIX / Linux systems. There is an interview with Chat Ramney, maintainer of BASH, the Bourne Again Shell. He talke about his experience maintaining Bash and few other things. From the page:

Bash, or the Bourne-Again Shell is a Unix shell created in 1987 by Brian Fox. According to Wikipedia, the name is a pun on an earlier Unix shell by Stephen Bourne (called the Bourne shell), which was distributed with Version 7 Unix in 1978.

In 1990, Chet Ramey, Manager of the Network Engineering and Security Group in Technology Infrastructure Services at Case Western Reserve University, became the primary maintainer of the language.

Computerworld tracked down Ramey to find out more.

=> The A-Z of Programming Languages: BASH/Bourne-Again Shell

Linux List The Open Ports And The Process That Owns Them

Posted: 30 May 2008 10:57 AM CDT

This is a user contributed quick tip.

How do you list the network open ports on your server and the process that owns them? The answer is simple use the following command (must run as root):
sudo lsof -i sudo netstat -lptu

This article / faq / short tip is contributed by Vikrant Joshi. nixCraft welcomes readers' tips / howtos.