By default, Firefox closes the entire window when you close the last tab. This can be annoying if you’re used to keeping the browser window open. Here’s how to change this behavior and other useful tab management tips. Prevent Firefox from Closing: about:config Open a new tab and type about:config in the address bar Click…
fclose() closes a file stream and disassociates it from its underlying file descriptor. It’s part of the C standard library, defined in <stdio.h>. #include <stdio.h> int fclose(FILE *stream); When called, fclose() flushes buffered output, closes the file descriptor, and deallocates the FILE structure. The function works with both input and output streams. After fclose() returns,…
C allows flexibility in coding style, but discipline matters. Consistent structure makes code readable, maintainable, and less prone to bugs. Here’s a practical approach that scales from small utilities to large projects. One Header Per Source File Pair each source file (.c) with a corresponding header file (.h). The header serves as the module’s public…
LVM (Logical Volume Manager) lets you combine multiple physical disks into flexible storage pools. This guide covers creating a volume group from multiple disk partitions—a common setup for servers that need flexible storage allocation across Xen guests, databases, or other demanding workloads. Prerequisites This assumes you have two or more unformatted disk devices available. In…
LVM logical volumes are a practical choice for Xen guest storage. They support dynamic resizing, snapshots, and efficient cloning — capabilities that make capacity management and guest provisioning straightforward compared to fixed disk images. This guide covers creating and configuring LVM-backed virtual block devices (VBDs) for Xen DomU instances. Creating the logical volume Start with…
LVM snapshots provide an efficient way to duplicate virtual machines in seconds rather than minutes. Instead of copying an entire filesystem, snapshots leverage copy-on-write semantics—physical blocks are only duplicated when the source or snapshot is modified. This approach works well for any LVM-backed virtualization platform, though Xen is used here as an example. Note: Xen…
Building and maintaining Linux clusters requires coordinated management of user accounts, storage, networking, and services across multiple machines. This guide covers practical approaches to common clustering challenges, from unified authentication to network isolation. Account and Storage Management Unified Authentication and Home Directories Centralizing user management across cluster nodes eliminates the overhead of maintaining individual user…
Xen remains a production-grade hypervisor used in enterprise environments (AWS EC2, Citrix Hypervisor), though KVM has become the default for most Linux distributions. This guide covers building a stable Xen Dom0 on current Fedora releases using modern kernel sources. Hardware Considerations This guide assumes server-class hardware with: Intel or AMD processor with virtualization extensions (VT-x…
Xen remains a critical hypervisor in production environments—AWS EC2, Citrix Hypervisor, and other cloud platforms rely on it—but most Linux distributions now default to KVM for general-purpose virtualization. If you’re working with Xen specifically, this guide covers Dom0 and DomU setup on modern distributions. When to Use Xen Xen is worth considering if you need:…
The default number of loop devices on most Linux systems is 8, which is often insufficient for scenarios like running multiple virtual machines with loop device-backed storage, containerized environments, or disk image management. If you need more than the default allocation, you’ll need to increase max_loop. First, check your current loop device count: losetup -f…
File compression is a routine task in Linux administration. You’ll encounter several tools, each with different tradeoffs between compression ratio, speed, and compatibility. This guide covers the most common compression formats: gzip, bzip2, 7z, xz, and zip. The examples below assume you’re compressing a directory called dir. Each tool supports compression level options — you…
Andrew Fikes, Principal Engineer at Google, presented on storage architecture and the fundamental challenges that emerge when operating at scale. The presentation from the 2010 Faculty Summit remains relevant for understanding how distributed storage systems must be designed and the trade-offs inherent in large-scale deployments. Core Storage Challenges at Scale Google’s storage systems had to…
Modern datacenters rely on distributed storage and processing systems designed to handle massive datasets across clusters of commodity hardware. Understanding these systems is essential for anyone working with infrastructure at scale. Here’s an overview of the major architectures and implementations you’ll encounter. Storage Systems Google File System (GFS) and successors GFS established the foundation for…
Cosmos is Microsoft’s internal petabyte-scale distributed data storage and query system, built to handle massive analytical workloads across their infrastructure. While Microsoft hasn’t published formal technical papers on Cosmos, information has surfaced through conference talks and engineering blogs over the years. Architecture and Scale Cosmos operates at truly massive scale: Storage capacity: Approximately 62 physical…
Colossus is Google’s successor to the Google File System (GFS), designed to handle the massive scale of data storage across Google’s infrastructure. While GFS was documented in detail in the 2003 SOSP paper, Colossus information remains sparse in academic literature—much of what we know comes from talks and interviews with Google engineers. Colossus serves as…
Historical Archive: This post lists conferences from 2012. The submission deadlines and venues are no longer current. For up-to-date conference information, check the official conference websites or resources like Conference Alert and CCF Deadlines. I am trying to find out the top conferences that have the largest average number of citations in the last 5…
Understanding distributed systems and cloud computing starts with the literature. These papers form the foundation for anyone working in the space — they’re not just historical artifacts, they’re still actively referenced and their design principles remain relevant. Internet-Scale Systems and Datacenters The Google cluster architecture paper remains essential reading. It laid out the practical realities…
Historical Archive: This post lists conferences from 2012. The submission deadlines and venues are no longer current. For up-to-date conference information, check the official conference websites or resources like Conference Alert and CCF Deadlines. This post lists important conferences related to Cloud Computing in year 2013. SOSP 2013 SOSP’13: The 24th ACM Symposium on Operating…
Historical Archive: This post lists conferences from 2011. The submission deadlines and venues are no longer current. For up-to-date conference information, check the official conference websites or resources like Conference Alert and CCF Deadlines. This post lists important conferences on Cloud Computing in year 2012. OSDI 2012 10th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and…