How many languages were used to build that?

I spent two days tracking a nasty bug in PRM, a performance monitoring module in Sun Management Center, and wondered how many languages were involved with creating the product.

So far, I've found the following:

1. java
2. tcl
3. sh
4. awk
   
5. sql
6. perl
7. C/C++
8. XML
   
9. ASN-1

Are there any missing?

How many languages can you use for product development without things getting too complex?
Some of the languages have a specific focus, like sql for db queries, sh for system adminstration (start/stop components), and the data description languages XML for SMF and ASN-1 for describing snmp mibs.

Automated Configuration Management

Paula Rooney talks about the advantages of Puppet, an open source tool for automated configuration management.

These tools are essential if you want to scale up deployment of servers, especially now that more services are being hosted on virtual servers, making deployment of the hardware, O/S, and application completely independent.

"One senior systems engineer at Digg.com was able to rebuild 60 [virtual] machines from scratch in two hours [using Puppet] that would have taken two full days of work if done manually. 'And I was largely a spectator,' said that engineer, Paul Lathrop, of Digg. 'Now that’s automation.' ”

Puppet is not the only game in town, if you're interested in these tools, you also need to look at cfengine, isconf, and bcfg2. Interestingly enough, two of projects appear to use trac for release management. These are all open source projects, with various levels of commercial support. The commercial nova edition of cfengine, adds some extra features for a price.

The value of these tools is that they offer automatically enforced policies, with implicit reporting of any exceptions.

Een kandidaat voor ZFS at home?

Willem de Moor van Tweakers.net Nieuws de presentatie van de Asus Eee Station PC NAS, op Cebit deze maand.

Het doosje is wat steviger van opzet dan de gebruikelijke Home NAS appliance. Zo bevat het vier Gigabit Ethernet pporten, 2GB aan DDR2 Ram geheugen en een Intel Atom N270processor, geklokt op 1,6 GHz. Er is ruimte voor twee harde schijven in een raid0-, raid1-, of jbod-configuratie. Het prijskaartje komt op een 700 dollar.

Het systeem draait onder Linux, vanuit een 512MB Flash geheugen. Hoe veel moeite zou het kosten om dat te vervangen door OpenSolaris en ZFS?