Dealing with software package management can be a daunting task, even for experienced sysadmins. From the long forgotten graft, going through the modern and insanely tweakable portage to the (allegedly) multiplatform pkgsrc or the very promising xbps, several have tried to build an easy to use, community-driven, simple, with good dependency-handling, optimal, reliable, generic and portable packaging system.

In my experience on both sides of the iron, as a sysadmin and developer, none of them work as one would like to.

But first, let’s explore what several HPC centers have adopted as a solution and why… and most importantly, how to fix it eventually.

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I’ve just pushed a set of trivial modules system scripts that will hopefully ease your deployment of Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop 3 Beta 4 on your university cluster… partly, at least. This sad “partly” made me think about the current state of things on IT and HPC.

Over time I’ve learnt that there are several unexpected issues when deploying hadoop on custom clusters that you don’t own. Those are mainly related to software management policies, non-root access (being auto-deployment unfriendly), quotas and queueing or “batch” systems.

Ignoring most of these “fixable” issues, it becomes apparent that the most juicy problem for a sysadmin trying to get the most of hadoop-related tools is the batch system. Be it SGE, SLURM or other non-DRMAA compliant exotic batch system implementations, you’ll have to deal with annoying integration quirks at some point, granted.

Making it all work can be challenging to say the least… but the question is: does it have to be that hard ?

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Aquest és un post-draft de la meva visita a San Francisco & San Diego, California que es va quedar així fa uns anys, deixo a la vostra imaginació el recorregut/experiències

Després d’11 hores de vol, trobar-se algú que t’espera a la sortida per portar-te cap a San Francisco en cotxe no té preu… thx HC !

• China Town al Grant street.
• Instrument de 2 cordes xino
• Golden Gate ? Red Gate ? Grey Gate ?
• Embarcadero és similar al moll de la fusta
• got wind ? got root ?
• sentat a pier 40 south beach harbor
• AT&T, l’estadi dels giants
• Lombart street
• Pier 39, lleons marins… va ser quan em vaig adonar que les pelis menteixen vilment: en aquestes alçades de California no es fa surf !
• Bubba gump existeix !
• Finalment creuem el golden gate: molt soroll
• 1000 suïcidis l’any

Un altre post encuat que feia un temps volia comentar (del Gener :-S): Coloqui tècnic sobre seguretat a Praga

Després de l’spam que es va currar en Pof al passat 24C3, aquest cop em tocava a mi fer una mica d’spam sobre radare ;P