October 7th, 2008
Today is one of those nice days you stumble upon every now and then. Being a geek, you simply have to be happy when a processing monster like this arrives to your workplace.
Yep. It is! Octality’s first and very own Sun Fire 12000. Yes, I know it was recently retired by Sun, but still 52 processors and 288GB of RAM make a hell of machine to test things on. The photograph was taken this morning at the storage room.
Being dedicated to High Performance does have its benefits, don’t you think? It’s deffinitely getting interesting around here. I bet not many start ups get this kind of hardware after just a few months of existence.
By the way, this fella isn’t precisely small. It is 191×85x166 cm and weights 987kg.
Posted in Hardware, Linux, Projects | No Comments »
September 26th, 2008
As advanced yesterday, the release is here! I wasn’t too sure when we would polish the final details, but everything is ready now and it doesn’t make much sense to postpone the event.
The previous major release was five weeks ago, and since then Cherokee has kept getting better. It already outperformed its competitors as it was. Now prepare yourselves to be amazed.
Besides improved performance, the list of enhancements includes a state of the art MySQL bridge and load balancer, SNI support, important usability enhancements for Cherokee-Admin, better help system, several bugfixes and a bunch of some more cool things.
As always, here yo have the list of relevant links:
I hope you enjoy it. This is serious stuff!
Posted in Misc | No Comments »
September 25th, 2008
Just to let you know, at the Cherokee Project we’re developing frantically these days and we’re done with most of the pending issues we had in mind.
Cherokee 0.9 is about to be released, and as always it comes with interesting enhancements. And yes… once again there will be a performance boost.
I’ll get into details when we ship the product. Stay tuned!
Posted in Misc | No Comments »
August 14th, 2008
The day has finally arrived. After a lot of hard work, we are finally releasing 0.8. It has improved quite a lot in this time. It is faster, much more stable and has been thoroughly tested and documented, at last!
Unfortunately not everything are good news. After putting in a lot of effort fixing the Windows build, we finally decided to postpone this until 0.8.1 the next major release. It has been too long since the last release, and having so many improvements it doesn’t make much sense to hold the relase back just to offer it simultaneously to all platforms. This was the only thing holding us back beside some bugs that had to be fixed, so now this is our one big remaining task for the next release ;)
This is our best release ever. By far. Improved performance, interface and documentation enhancements and lots of new features: much faster I/O cache, huge FastCGI performance improvement, updates (and binary upgrades) are now handled gracefully with no downtime, the load balancing is better and a lot more. Alvaro just sent the official release note minutes ago.
We have a lot of fresh ideas, and as always feedback and feature requests are more than welcome at the mailing lists. Here is the download link. Enjoy it! ;)
UPDATE: I’ve just updated the documentation available at the site.
UPDATE: A quick update to fix some minor bugs has been released: Cherokee 0.8.1.
Posted in Linux, Projects, Python | 4 Comments »
August 7th, 2008
Many users have told us that they would love to have some more documentation about Cherokee. One of the tasks before relasing 0.8 (which is almost ready by now) is documenting.
Yesterday I wrote a small tutorial that will be part of the documentation. It is a simple walkthrough to set up a couple of virtual servers, basic authentication (PAM and flat) and some redirections.
It will be available at the official site as soon as we make the release, at http://cherokee-project.com/doc
Here it is for now. No screenshots and not much styling in my blog, sorry. It’s just a quick cut&paste. There’s a lot of other stuff I should be documenting instead of blogging ;)
Configuration Quickstart
This section briefly describes the whole administration web interface provided by cherokee-admin. This is the only recommended way of configuring Cherokee. If you are looking for development information, you should refer to the appropriate section, especially cherokee.conf file specification.
We will first show a quick overview of the available options, followed by a simple walkthrough. You can learn more about the options in their specific documentation entries.
Posted in Linux, Projects, Python | 6 Comments »
July 25th, 2008
Ok, this is officially not something to blog about. Especially if you want to keep your girlfriend and go on being one of those rare Slashdot readers that actually have one. But Alvaro just gave me a little something he and Lidia brought me from their last trip to Las Vegas.
Isn’t it great? ;)
UPDATE: Just when I believed it was so obvious, a friend asked me about the meaning of this. And there I thought everyone knew the Starfleet Insignia from Star Trek. I think the one in the mousemat corresponds to the periods between 2351 and 2371. Not quite sure about that. I can’t say that I’m a hardcore Trekkie anymore. Listen to what I’m saying: Sometimes I even forget whole Star Trek races! Unforgiveable!. Luckily every single computer I’ve had since the early nineties has been named after one, so at least those … ;)
Posted in Humor, Misc | 1 Comment »
July 17th, 2008
As it was anounced some time ago, Cherokee 0.8 will once again have a native Windows binary. We’ve been having a lot of requests because our Windows users haven’t had the chance to taste Cherokee-Admin since it was born.
Beware that the Windows build has to be taken with a grain of salt under Windows. A lot of work is still needed since some major changes -like a totally rewritten I/O cache, a lot more efficient and stable- will be coming by the time 0.8 is released.
These are the necessary steps to setup a suitable building environment.
Like Alvaro said in his blog, installing the whole bundle of needed tools is not trivial. In fact, there was a strange problem with the provided autotools (automake 1.8.2 and autoconf 2.59) of the previous environment that made us have to manually tweak things in order to successfuly finish the compilation of Cherokee. This has been tested on a Windows XP virtual machine.
This is what you need to install.
Posted in Misc, Projects, Python | 4 Comments »
July 6th, 2008
It is rare for me to post something not related to computers. Some could say it is rare for me to post. Period. But lets just stick to the first sentence or I might very well get lost before I even finish talking of what I wanted to tell you about in the first place.
What was that again? Ah, yes! Posting about non-computer stuff. There is always a first time.
Yesterday I went to the Teatro Bellas Artes to watch a show called ¡Comicapela!. The group of performers is called b vocal, and I must say everyone had a great time with them. A really comical show with all five team members singing a capella in a Bobby McFerrin fashion. Yes, that’s right. Every single instrument was voice made.
I really enjoyed the evening. They’ve been there since June-11th, and the representation lasts until July-13th, though it is possible that the show gets extended until the end of the month. Here is a link to buy the tickets. If you have the chance and you’re Spanish spoken, the show is totally recommended!
Posted in Humor, Misc | No Comments »
June 9th, 2008
Our next release of Cherokee, 0.8.0, will once again have a native Windows package.
A few moments ago it was officially announced at the mailing list.
We had plans to finally fix it in the very near future, but Alvaro decided to speed things up a bit. This guy is amazing! ;)
I’ve been rather busy these days and haven’t been paying all the attention to the project I would have wanted, but everything started moving on Windows’ side of things just a couple of days ago. I really didn’t expect it to be ready this soon, but here it is: Cherokee Windows Build. The development branch already compiles and works on Microsoft’s OS. Just check out the latest SVN version and give it a try.
Alternatively if you can live without Windows and want something more stable, you can just download the latest official release, Cherokee 0.7.1 Cherokee 0.7.2 (as of June 12th).
Posted in Linux, Projects, Python | No Comments »
May 25th, 2008
A couple of months after the previous Cherokee stable release, and once a lot of work and testing has been done, here it is: Ladies and gentlemen, Cherokee 0.7.0 is out!. You could take a look at the official announcement, but what you should really do is try it out. Seriously. Every single one of us is working hard on the project -make that extra-extra-hard working in Alvaro’s case-, and the results are clearly visible.
We have a lot of fresh ideas, and as always feedback and feature requests are more than welcome at the mailing list. The Summer is almost here, and this one will prove to be extremely productive. Just trust me for now. It will ;-)
Here is the download link.
Posted in Linux, Projects, Python | No Comments »
