"I have a mind like a steel... uh... thingy." Patrick Logan's weblog.

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Saturday, December 08, 2007

Embedded Lightness

I was out with a long-time friend and former co-worker last night. He's been working the last year or so on software for managing blade servers. Technically this is an "embedded system". Some veteran embedded system developers on his team have been learning just how much their field has changed.

Essentially the system consists of linux, lighttpd, php, and sqlite. Where the veterans were set on writing a lot of C and custom protocols for handling events in the server (blades coming and going, for example), they've been able to do everything using the web's architecture. They wrote some C to enhance the php interface to snmp.

They had some pre-existing C code that has a memory problem after some number of days. No problem, they just kill and restart the process well before that. When that code becomes the most important problem, they'll look at it.

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About Me

Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.