We are pleased to announce the release of Recital 10.0.2.

Here is a brief list of features and functionality that you will find in the 10.0.2 release. 

• New commands
  SAVE/RESTORE DATASESSION [TO variable]
  CONNECT "connectString"
  DISCONNECT 
• New functions (OData compatible)
  startsWith(haystack as character, needle as character)
  endsWith(haystack as character, needle as character)
  indexOf(haystack as character, needle as character)
  substringOf(haystack as character, needle as character)
  concat(expC1, expC2)
• New system variables
  _LASTINSERTEDSYNCNUM
• Enhanced commands
  Added CONNSTRING "connectingString" to the USE command to connect to remote servers (Recital, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, ODBC)
• Further SQL query optimizer improvements to boost performance
• Performance improvements in Recital Web
• Forced all temporary files into temp directory (improves performance when local tmpfs is used as temp directory and reduces network i/o)
• Fixed cookie and session variable problems in Recital Web
• Fixed problem with temporary files being left after some server queries involving memos and object data types
• Improved performance of the Windows ODBC driver
• Fixed a security flaw in Recital Web
• Fixed all reported bugs 

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

Occasionally as a Linux administrator you will be in the situation where working on a remote server and you are left with no option but to force a reboot the system. This may be for a number of reasons, but where I have found it most frequent is when working on Linux clusters in a remote location.

When the "reboot" or "shutdown" commands are executed daemons are gracefully stopped and storage volumes unmounted.
This is usually accomplished via scripts in the /etc/init.d directory which will wait for each daemon to shut down gracefully before proceeding on to the next one. This is where a situation can develop where your Linux server fails to shutdown cleanly leaving you unable to administer the system until it is inspected locally. This is obviously not ideal so the answer is to force a reboot on the system where you can guarantee that the system will power cycle and come back up. The method will not unmount file systems nor sync delayed disk writes, so use this at your own discretion.

To force the kernel to reboot the system we will be making use of the magic SysRq key.

The magic_SysRq_key provides a means to send low level instructions directly to the kernel via the /proc virtual file system.

To enable the use of  the magic SysRq option type the following at the command prompt:

    echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq

Then to reboot the machine simply enter the following:

    echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger

Voilà! Your system will instantly reboot.
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If when your attempt to create device meta-data fails this is drbd preventing you from corrupting a file system present on the target partition.

$ drbdadm create-md drbd0

v08 Magic number not found
md_offset 30005817344
al_offset 30005784576
bm_offset 30004867072

Found ext2 filesystem which uses 190804004 kB
current configuration leaves usable 29301628 kB

Device size would be truncated, which
would corrupt data and result in
'access beyond end of device' errors.
You need to either
 * use external meta data (recommended)
 * shrink that filesystem first
 * zero out the device (destroy the filesystem)
Operation refused.

Command 'drbdmeta /dev/drbd0 v08 /dev/sda4 internal create-md' terminated with exit code 40
drbdadm aborting

Once you have confirmed that the file system present on the target partition is no longer required at the prompt type the following:

Replace /dev/sdaX with the block device you are targeting.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdaX bs=1M count=128

Once this has completed the drbdadm create-md drbd0 command will complete with a "success."

$ drbdadm create-md drbd0
v08 Magic number not found
v07 Magic number not found
v07 Magic number not found
v08 Magic number not found
Writing meta data...
initialising activity log
NOT initialized bitmap
New drbd meta data block successfully created.
success
$