;login FEBRUARY 2014 VOL. 39, NO. 1 : File Systems and Sysadmin & An Overview of Object Storage Matthew W. Benjamin, Casey Bodley, Adam C. Emerson, and Marcus Watts & Hadoop 2 Sanjay Radia and Suresh Srinivas & Loser Buys, Two Tales of Debugging Mark Bainter and David Josephsen & Improving Performance of Logging Reports and Dashboards David Lang & Change Management Jason Paree and Andy Seely Columns Practical Perl Tools: Redis Meets Perl David N. Blank-Edelman Python: The Wheels Keep on Spinning David Beazley iVoyeur: Counters Dave Josephsen For Good Measure: Measuring Security Book Value Dan Geer and Gunnar Peterson /dev/random: Cybertizing the World Robert Ferrell Conference Reports LISA ’13: 27th Large Installation System Administration Conference Advanced Topics Workshop at LISA ’13 UPCOMING EVENTS FAST ’14: 12th USENIX Conference on File and 23rd USENIX Security Symposium Storage Technologies August 20–22, 2014, San Diego, CA, USA February 17–20, 2014, Santa Clara, CA, USA www.usenix.org/sec14 www.usenix.org/fast14 Submissions due: February 27, 2014 2014 USENIX Research in Linux File and Storage Workshops Co-located with USENIX Security ’14 Technologies Summit EVT/WOTE ’14: 2014 Electronic Voting Technology In conjunction with FAST ’14 Workshop/Workshop on Trustworthy Elections February 20, 2014, Mountain View, CA, USA USENIX Journal of Election Technology and Systems (JETS) NSDI ’14: 11th USENIX Symposium on Networked Published in conjunction with EVT/WOTE Systems Design and Implementation www.usenix.org/jets April 2–4, 2014, Seattle, WA, USA Submissions for Volume 2, Issue 3, due: April 8, 2014 www.usenix.org/nsdi14 HotSec ’14: 2014 USENIX Summit on Hot Topics 2014 USENIX Federated Conferences Week in Security June 17–20, 2014, Philadelphia, PA, USA FOCI ’14: 4th USENIX Workshop on Free and Open HotCloud ’14: 6th USENIX Workshop on Communications on the Internet Hot Topics in Cloud Computing HealthTech ’14: 2014 USENIX Workshop on Health June 17–18, 2014 Information Technologies www.usenix.org/hotcloud14 Safety, Security, Privacy, and Interoperability Submissions due: March 6, 2014 of Health Information Technologies HotStorage ’14: 6th USENIX Workshop CSET ’14: 7th Workshop on Cyber Security on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems Experimentation and Test June 17–18, 2014 www.usenix.org/hotstorage14 WOOT ’14: 8th USENIX Workshop on Offensive Submissions due: March 13, 2014 Technologies WiAC ’14: 2014 USENIX Women in Advanced OSDI ’14: 11th USENIX Symposium on Operating Computing Summit Systems Design and Implementation June 18, 2014 October 6–8, 2014, Broomfield, CO, USA www.usenix.org/wiac14 www.usenix.org/osdi14 ICAC ’14: 11th International Conference on Abstract registration due: April 24, 2014 Autonomic Computing Co-located with OSDI ’14: June 18–20, 2014 www.usenix.org/icac14 Diversity ’14: 2014 Workshop on Diversity Paper titles and abstracts due: February 26, 2014 in Systems Research USENIX ATC ’14: 2014 USENIX Annual Technical LISA ’14: 28th Large Installation System Conference Administration Conference June 19–20, 2014 November 9–14, 2014, Seattle, WA, USA www.usenix.org/atc14 www.usenix.org/lisa14 UCMS ’14: 2014: USENIX Configuration Management Submissions due: April 14, 2014 Summit June 19, 2014 www.usenix.org/ucms14 URES ’14: 2014 USENIX Release Engineering Summit June 20, 2014 www.usenix.org/ures14 twitter.com/usenix www.usenix.org/youtube www.usenix.org/gplus Stay Connected... www.usenix.org/facebook www.usenix.org/linkedin www.usenix.org/blog FEBRUARY 2014 VOL. 39, NO. 1 EDITORIAL EDITOR Rik Farrow 3 Musings Rik Farrow [email protected] MANAGING EDITOR FILE SYSTemS Rikki Endsley 6 A Saga of Smart Storage Devices: An Overview of Object Storage [email protected] Matthew W. Benjamin, Casey Bodley, Adam C. Emerson, and Marcus Watts COPY EDITOR 12 HADOOP 2: What’s New Steve Gilmartin Sanjay Radia and Suresh Srinivas [email protected] PRODUCTION MANAGER SYSADMIN Michele Nelson 16 The Evolution of Managed Change in a Complex IT Enterprise PRODUCTION Jason Paree and Andy Seely Arnold Gatilao Casey Henderson 20 Logging Reports and Dashboards TYPESETTER David Lang Star Type 26 Loser Buys: A Troublesome Retrospective [email protected] Mark Bainter and Dave Josephsen USENIX ASSOCIATION 2560 Ninth Street, Suite 215, 30 When Data Is a Risk: Data Loss Prevention Tools and Their Role Berkeley, California 94710 within IT Departments Phone: (510) 528-8649 Klaus Haller FAX: (510) 548-5738 35 Using a Database to Store Data Captured with tcpdump www.usenix.org Mihalis Tsoukalos ;login: is the official magazine of the USENIX Association. ;login: (ISSN 1044-6397) COLUMNS is published bi-monthly by the USENIX Association, 2560 Ninth Street, Suite 215, 38 Practical Perl Tools: Redis Meet Perl David N. Blank-Edelman Berkeley, CA 94710. 42 The Wheels Keep on Spinning David Beazley $90 of each member’s annual dues is for a subscription to ;login:. Subscriptions for non- 46 iVoyeur: Counters Dave Josephsen members are $90 per year. Periodicals postage 49 Margin of Safety or Speculation? Measuring Security Book Value paid at Berkeley, CA, and additional offices. Dan Geer and Gunnar Peterson POSTMASTER: Send address changes to ;login:, USENIX Association, 2560 Ninth Street, 52 /dev/random Robert Ferrell Suite 215, Berkeley, CA 94710. ©2014 USENIX Association BOOKS USENIX is a registered trademark of the 54 Book Reviews Elizabeth Zwicky, with Mark Lamourine USENIX Association. Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to USENIX NOTES distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. USENIX acknowledges all 59 Transition of USENIX Leadership trademarks herein. Where those designations Anne Dickison and Casey Henderson appear in this publication and USENIX is aware of a trademark claim, the designations have 60 2014 Election for USENIX Board of Directors been printed in caps or initial caps. Margo Seltzer and Niels Provos, 2014 USENIX Board Nominating Committee 60 Thanks, Rikki Endsley Casey Henderson CONFERENce RePORTS 61 LISA ’13: 27th Large Installation System Administration Conference 90 Advanced Topics Workshop at LISA ’13 Musings RIK FEDITORIALARROW Rik is the editor of ;login:. like to attend the SNIA Storage Developer Conference [1], looking for [email protected] ideas and authors for the February issue of ;login:. Although the main I focus of SDC continues to be Microsoft SMB, I get to learn about other network/distributed file systems while there. Not that SMB 3 is not amazing. If you are still using older versions of Microsoft’s networked file system, you are living in the dark ages. But I was after other prey, topics of greater inter- est to file system and storage researchers. I’ve long been interested in Parallel NFS (pNFS), the long-awaited set of standards that allow the venerable NFS to work over a collection of storage servers. So I attended the pNFS BoF one evening at SDC, only to find that I was one of only five people there. I did say this was mainly an SMB conference. Fortunately for me, the people there, Brent Welch (Google), Matt Benjamin, Adam Emerson, and Marcus Watts (all with CohortFS) were willing to talk about distributed file systems. When I asked the CohortFS people what they were working on, the talk turned to object storage systems. File Systems I have a confession to make: I had no idea what a file system was by the end of the operating systems class I took in 1978. The class textbook covered IBM only, and years later, the class’ professor heavily criticized my chapter on file systems for my system administration book. That was certainly ironic, as he had totally failed to cover the topic. Then again, perhaps that was why he had commented that the material was “unnecessary.” In the 1970s, file systems were a bit alien. Really. People in the operating system course labs carried cases of punch cards. These weren’t their backups: they were the storage system. The ability to store files online was just beginning at the University of Maryland. So when I was tasked with writing a file system, I was stumped. I knew I had to build data structures that held lists of blocks, but beyond that, I had no idea what to do. I had never knowingly interacted with a file system. Three years later, I had my own, home-built, microcomputer system, which ran CP/M on 1 floppy disks, using a flat file system. My computer had built-in 5 /4-inch drives, but most of my customers used 8-inch floppies (with a capacity of more than 200 kilobytes!). I had both an external 8-inch drive and a Morrow DJIO card, and because I had written the manual for the DJIO, I thought I could patch in access to the 8-inch drive. What I did was build a device driver and CP/M file system, all in two pages of C code. Things were a lot simpler then. And, fortunately for me, there were other sources of knowledge about file systems (magazine articles in Byte!) than the professor who had ignored this topic. Object Stores As you will learn when you read the object storage article in this issue, object stores have been around since work done by Garth Gibson in 1990. His initial research into network attached storage devices (NASD) grew into Panasas, and later into object storage standards. Gibson and 2 FEBRUARY 2014 VOL. 39, NO. 1 www.usenix.org EDITORIAL Musings his cohorts had built a POSIX-compatible interface that allowed Kinetic drive fails? Not that the long-favored scheme of RAID for access to distributed object storage as if they were a more tradi- reliability works with drives as large as four terabytes. And repli- tional file system. The interface hid the behind-the-scenes work cation is expensive in terms of space for reliability. of distributing data among different devices to produce fast, reli- You can read about other peoples’ opinions about Seagate’s able, and scalable storage systems for super computers.