The Openfiler NAS/SAN Appliance (NSA) is a Storage Management Operating System / NAS Appliance distribution. It is powered by the Linux 2.6 kernel and Open Source applications such as Apache, Samba, LVM2, ext3, Linux NFS and iSCSI Enterprise Target. Openfiler combines these ubiquitous technologies into a small, easy to manage solution fronted by a powerful web-based management interface. Openfiler allows you to build a Network Attached Storage (NAS) and/or Storage Area Network (SAN) appliance, using industry-standard hardware, in less than 10 minutes of installation time.
Building upon the popularity of server virtualization technologies such as VMware, Virtual Iron, and Xen, Openfiler can also be deployed as a virtual machine instance or on a bare metal machine.
This deployment flexibility of Openfiler ensures that storage administrators are able to make the best use of system performance and storage capacity resources when allocating and managing networked storage in a multi-platform environment.
Openfiler is ideally suited for use with High Availability Recital applications as it incorporates:
- Heartbeat cluster manager
- drbd disk replication
- CIFS
- NFS
- Software and hardware RAID
- FTP
- rsync
- HTTP/DAV
- iSCSI
- LVM2
- Multiple NIC bonding for High Availability
- Powerful web-based GUI
In this article Yvonne Milne looks at the use of the Recital Remote Data Connectivity Functions with Recital Database Gateways.

If you have software packages which you wish to share with others or simply between your own personal machines, a neat and easy solution is to create your own YUM repository and provide your .repo file for download.
YUM is by far the easiest method of installing software on Red hat, Centos and Fedora. Not only does it mean you don't need to trawl the web looking for somewhere to download the packages, YUM does a great job of satisfying any package dependencies. As long as the required packages are available in the enabled repositories on your system, YUM will go out and get everything you need.
To create your own YUM repository, you will need to install the yum-utils and createrepo packages:
yum install yum-utils createrepo
yum-utils contains the tools you will need to manage your soon to be created repository, and createrepo is used to create the xml based rpm metadata you will require for your repository.
Once you have installed these required tools, create a directory in your chosen web server's document root e.g:
mkdir -p /var/www/html/repo/recital/updates
Copy the rpm's you wish to host into this newly created directory.
The next step is to create the xml based rpm metadata. To create this use the createrepo program we installed earlier.
At the shell type the following command:
createrepo -v -s md5 /var/www/html/repo/recital/updates
This will create the required metadata in the repodata directory of your /var/www/html/repo/recital/updates directory.
root@test repodata]# ls -l rwotal 44 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 28996 Jan 13 21:42 filelists.xml.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 284 Jan 13 21:42 other.xml.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1082 Jan 13 21:42 primary.xml.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 951 Jan 13 21:42 repomd.xml
To do a final consistency check on your repository run the following command:
verifytree /var/www/html/repo/recital/updates
We now have a fully functioning YUM repository for our hosted rpm packages.
The next process is to create a .repo file in the client systems /etc/yum.repos.d directory.
Navigate to the /etc/yum.repos.d directory on your system as root.
Using your preferred text editor to create the .repo file. In this example I will call it recital.repo.
Now paste in the following lines:
[Recital] name=Recital Update Server baseurl=http://ftp.recitalsoftware.com/repo/recital/updates enabled=1 gpgcheck=1
Once that is saved, at the shell prompt on the same machine (YUM client system).
$ yum repolist Loaded plugins: presto, refresh-packagekit repo id repo name status Recital Recital Update Server enabled: 1 adobe-linux-i386 Adobe Systems Incorporated enabled: 17 fedora Fedora 12 - i386 enabled: 15,366
As you can see the Recital repo is now being picked up and we have access to all the packages it is hosting.
See how easy that was!
The REQUIRE() statement includes and executes the contents of the specified file at the current program execution level.
When a file is included, the code it contains inherits the variable scope of the line on which the include occurs. Any variables, procedures, functions or classes declared in the included file will be available at the current program execution level.
The REQUIRE_ONCE() statement is identical to the REQUIRE() statement except that Recital will check to see if the file as already been included and if so ignore the command.
The full syntax is:
REQUIRE( expC ) REQUIRE_ONCE( expC ) e.g. REQUIRE_ONCE( "myapp/myglobals.prg" )
On entry to the .rsp page.
IF type( _session["state"] ) != "U"m_state = _session["state"]RESTORE DATASESSION FROM m_state
ELSE
// open up your tables for the first timeENDIF
SAVE DATASESSION TO m_state_SESSION["state"] = m_state
Another useful article on IBM developerworks shows how to build PHP extensions using SWIG. You can find the article here.
Ext3 commits writes to disk within approximately 5 seconds - Ext4 can take from 40-150 seconds. In addition, if a system is using Ext3 and crashes before the commit takes place you will still have the previous contents of a file where under Ext4 the file will be empty. Theodore Tso feels that this is a failure at the application level and that the file system is behaving as designed and as specified by the POSIX spec (which apparently does not specify what is supposed to happen when a system is not shut down cleanly). His solution to the issue is to suggest proper use of fsync() and lists various scenarios/examples in post 54 of the bug report (linked above). In addition he wrote a patch that recognize the rename() situation mentioned in his post 54 yet retains the normal Ext4 behaviors and performance in the majority of cases. Also a more "proper" solution has been provided which allows the behavior of Ext3 to be retained under Ext4 by mounting it with alloc_on_commit.
A somewhat related topic is the use of on-board caching by hard drives. This behavior can be modified on most drives by using hdparm.
Some options of hdparm are dangerous and are generally listed as such in the man page.
Hdparm is available from SourceForge and there is even a version for Windows.