Kablink

Here it is, the little big surprise that Novell was going to bring.

As a way to reborn from its ashes, the project iFolder has grown to become a bigger collaboration platform called Kablink. (You will even be redirected to the Kablink page if you try to reach iFolder)

Kablink includes three projects under its umbrella:

• Kabling Teaming
• Kablink Conferencing
• iFolder

Still without time to test them all, the idea behind it suggests that now is trying to target the bigger new market the Groove (bought by Microsoft and included in Office 2007) is now creating. It's not only about sharing folders and having them replicated and available in online/offline mode (a blessing for road-warriors), or also including most of the workspaces capabilities presented by it's MS counterpart with "teaming" but, about adding more spice to it by including a conferencing tool with which desktop can be shared.

If the Kablink project is successful enough by gaining the needed momentum, it could posibly overcome other tools mainly by being opensource. This means that portable little devices (name it PDAs or Netbooks) will be able to have all those capabilites ported, which could mean the real step behind for a platform like this.

Good to have a way to store / sync /share information and collaborate with opensource software. Best Luck!

Ubuntu 9.04 ... countdown

... almost here!

Filesystems: ext4, btrfs, zfs ... hammer?

There are several new filesystems coming out of the wild. A whole new herd of beasts trying to be on top of the food chain. I'll take a brief look at them and try to uncover a stealthy one.

I'll start with, maybe the most interesting new filesystem, when it comes to features, which is ZFS. It has great volume management capacities included, snapshots!, easy to use management utilities and is very comfortable when it comes to share information (SMB, iSCSI, NFS, etc ...). It is also enjoying a good momentum since it was maybe the first one to include a whole set of features in "just" the filesystem. Con sider it a really good filesystem to create NAS/SAN devices.

To catch up, the linux comunity has develoved a nice ext4 filesystem that can kkep the pace of ext3 while adding some new features. There is a great descriptive article in linux magazine about it. Ext4 is considered to be [almost] production ready. For new features Btrfs is the development branch that will take the torch of filesystem lead (in the linux world, of course). This one includes "da'feature" which is snapshots. On the shoulder of this giant stand two interesting projects which are CRFS and POHMELFS, out of which LWN made a really nice article, but this are yet to come.

And, the last (but, of course, not least) of the new beasts in the town, HAMMER. The filesystem son of Matt Dillon, which comes with the OS son, Dragonfly BSD. It's a ... high availability, redundant, 64bit filesystem which was included in the 2.0 release of DragonflyBSD. HAMMER does with machines (in some way) what zfs did with partitions. To get an idea on what it will be able to do, take a look at Matt's presentation during NYCBSDCON08. Expect its features in Linux through its port or in the Tux filesystem.

Ext3 dir_index option.

Funny how thing sometimes come through. A friend asks me how to improve performance of a filesystem, if possible Debian GNU/Linux, so that it behaves well with a large amount of files.
Normally you want bigger IO, or huge files, or some availability feature but, this one is so important and understimated.
So, we started looking for benchmarks of filesystems oriented towards a modern solution which included even "out of boundary" solutions like OCFS2 or ZFS.

So, suddenly we found this fine H-Online article on how to tune Ext3 filesystem. And, there it is:

"The dir_index option can also be enabled after creating the file system using the

tune2fs -O dir_index

command, although it will only be applied to newly created directories. The existing directories of an unmounted file system can be changed to dir_index using the

e2fsck -fD

command after the dir_index feature has been enabled. For safety reasons, this should be followed by another forced e2fsck run by including option -f."

Sometimes the option you need is right below your nose!.
Please feel free to share any experience on handling directories with large amount of files.

From the ashes ...?

Every some certain amount of time I try to check some of my favorite projects to see hoy they evolve. One of them is iFolder, as is easy to be seen. Its development has been stopped for quite long probably as Novell lost interest in it. Now, after Mono 2.0 has hit the streets, I go and visit de iFolder web page to find this:

Will we have a iFolder for Mono 2.0?, will it have p2p encrypted conectivity?, will it be a good alternative to MS Groove?.
Let's see ...