Rundesk for Distributed Command Processing

A very useful open source tool is Rundesk.  Rundesk will dispatch, and process shell commands and scripts across servers either physical, virtual or cloud based. Its a useful tool to allow you automate ad-hoc tasks and procedures.

Suricata - IDS / IPS

Suricata is a high performance free open source IDS, IPS and Network Security Monitoring engine.

http://suricata-ids.org/

The basic install is along these lines

wget http://www.openinfosecfoundation.org/download/suricata-1.4.tar.gz
tar -xvzf suricata-1.4.tar.gz
cd suricata-1.4

bash autogen.sh

./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var
make
sudo make install

OpenMP an API to enable easier parallel programming in C, C++

OpenMP is an API to enable easier parallel programming in C, C++, and Fortran on shared-memory machines.

It’s widely supported on various system architectures and operating systems.

OpenMP is implemented primarily through compiler directives, which can be easily added to an existing serial C/C++ program.  These directives look like comments in your code.

The compiler can be told to ignore or activate these directives which in turn parallelises the code block with the statements.

This means that the conversion of your sequential C/C++ program to one that takes full advantage of a shared memory in a parallel computing system is a lot easier and can be taken in stages therefore you can test performance improvements step at a time.

To find out more

http://openmp.org/wp/

Parallel Programming in Rust

Rust, maintained by the Mozilla Foundation is a programming language which is intended to make writing secure, reliable, fast, and  parallel applications easier.

http://www.rust-lang.org/

Rackspace Cloud SDK

Rackspace has just launched its cloud SDK.

It is based on the OpenStack open source cloud services.

http://devops.rackspace.com/523/rackspace-sdks

Julia - Parallel Programming Made Easy

I always liked the name Julia but now we have a nice new parallel programming language with that very name.

The Julia Programming language is a parallel computing model that works across multiple cores and cluster nodes.

To read more
http://julialang.org/

Performance Testing Across Regions

Just recently I needed to perform some load / stress testing on a web application hosted on the east coast of america.

I had a number of dedicated test boxes around Ireland and the UK

but I was concerned that the geographic distance may be playing a part in the results I was seeing

So I needed to get a server in the US from which I could launch similar tests.

M-Net is a public-access UNIX system based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, owned by Arbornet

You can telnet in to m-net.arbornet.org, login with newuser, no password, and it will allow you setup a username with password on a free bsd shell

Great idea. It allowed me perform performance tests on my web app on the east coast from mid western US.