If you need to upgrade the bios firmware of a Dell system (to fix some bugs or add some enhancements, etc.) and you are not running Windows or RHEL (the systems Dell is officially supporting and providing upgrading solutions) there is still hope. I used to manage some Dell’s running RHEL and I loved how easy it was to run all the firmware updates released by Dell for RHEL. I always hoped that there will be some a solution for Debian also. And the solution exists, and I will exemplify it bellow by updating the bios of a Dell PowerEdge SC1435 system.

Read the rest of this entry »

We need more and more powerful hardware for the most demanding applications and for the increasing number of users served. Even so most of the big datacenters will not offer (at least in their standard offer) the top hardware systems that are available to date. Why? well because this might not be economical (they will get their investment in purchasing the server hardware in too much time), or they might have established ongoing deals with hardware manufactures for a high lot of servers (that they received the proper discount of course) and want to finish them first.

Read the rest of this entry »

Intel introduced Hyper-Threading Technology (HT) in its line of Xeon processors in 2002. HT Technology enables multiprocessor servers to act as if they had twice as many processors installed. Intel’s HT Technology allows a single processor to handle two independent sets of instructions at the same time. In essence, HT Technology converts a single physical processor into two virtual processors. Currently HT is present in other Intel CPUs besides the high level Xeons, like Pentium 4 (with 800MHz CPU bus speed) or Pentium 4 Extreme Edition and the dual-core Pentium Extreme Edition.
For more details see Intel’s site: http://www.intel.com/products/ht/hyperthreading_more.htm

Read the rest of this entry »

There are many ways you can find our various information about the hardware configuration of a Linux system. You can get the information directly from /proc, you can use lspci, etc. And if you are using X then there are many ways to show this information in a nice way. Still, I would like to show you the power of this little tool (lshw) that I found very useful if you are using a SSH connection to the system, and you want to get a quick overview on the hardware details of the system. LSHW can report exact memory configuration, firmware version, mainboard configuration, CPU version and speed, cache configuration, bus speed, etc.

The installation is really simple, and you can find some details about installing lshw on Debian, or Rhel, Centos, or Fedora in the small posts I have written for this. Read the rest of this entry »