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June 23, 2005
Wireless Experience (part II)
As we wondered around the offices with laptops and phone headsets we were picking up very strong signals from all staff including management. So we advise to avoid the same questions and a multitude of confused expressions that you inform users that you maybe carrying out a wireless survey.
On a more serious note a comprehensive site survey helped us define coverage area and data rates and determine the most precise placement of the access points. Our surveying involved both diagramming the coverage area and measuring the strength of the signal. While signal strength can tell you if the signal is strong enough to be received, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) measurements help compare the signal to the noise. We found that if noise in the band is high enough, it can cause reception problems, even if there is a strong signal from the access point. Because signal strength alone is not sufficient, using both SNR measurements and packet retry count (the number of times packets that had to be retransmitted for successful reception) is the best way to validate the coverage area.
Packet retry count, which should be below 10 percent in all areas, is the ultimate method for determining the edge of RF data reception. You may have areas where the signal is strong, but because of noise floor, or multipath interference, you cannot decode the signal, and the packet retry count will increase. Without an SNR reading, you will not know whether packet retries are increasing because you are out of range, the noise is too high, or the signal is too low.
Posted by Saheed Akhtar at 02:10 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 15, 2005
Being Open
June 14th 2005 saw the launch of OpenSolaris. For those of you that don't know OpenSolaris is a development project based on the source code for the Solaris Operating System.
This is clearly an important part of Sun's strategy and the entry on Jonathan Schwartz Weblog is particularly telling. He says:
There have been a few moments in my career where I've really felt like taking a step back, and saying "I'm proud to have been a part of that."
Today is just one of those moments. This is one instance where a broad cross section of the industry, focused on by a few incredible participants, did something our kids will learn about years from now. Because in the pantheon of Internet history, this will have its own chapter.For me it merely reinforces my belief that open source software, open standards and community development projects are an essential part of our industry.
This is an area that I'm pleased to say Talis are starting to take seriously. With the recently announced Project Silkworm we are embracing initiatives such as Creative Commons and Open Standards. We are also encouraging participation from key players in the Open Source community.
Who knows, maybe in years to come Talis will have its own chapter.
Posted by jimprince at 10:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 07, 2005
New features in Sybase ASE
As well as looking at what Solaris 10 has to offer we are also looking at the latest version of Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise.
Version 12.5.3 includes a number of useful new additions. Here are some of the highlights.
- Dynamic Cache Management: You can now adjust memory used for caches without any need to restart the server.
- Job Scheduler: You can automatically schedule jobs such as backups and consistency checks, so no need to use the cron file. You can also use the scheduler to monitor resources such as connections and locks, which can be dynamically adjusted as needed.
- Automated Database Space Management: databases and logs can automatically grow to meet changing load & system requirements.
- Automatic Garbage Collection: Unused space is cleaned up during garbage collection cycles, making it unnecessary to run maintenance tasks such as table and index reorgs.
- New tools: DBXray and DB Expert are two tools designed to help monitor and improve the performance of your databases.
- Dynamic Listeners: You can now start, stop, or query system listeners without having to restart Sybase.
- Dump and load across platforms: You can now dump and load databases across platforms with different architectures. A Windows or Solaris X86 based MIS Server anyone?
All these new features sound great. We've now got to spend the time investigating how we can make the best use out of them.
As always your feedback either via comments on this blog, on the Infrastructure Forum or directly via e-mail would be appreciated.
Posted by jimprince at 07:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
