Artem Russakovskii's programming and technology blog

Updated: July 21st, 2020

Today I was setting up a new machine (running OpenSUSE 12.1, but it's not really important), and after switching the network configuration from DHCP to static IP, lost all connectivity, in and out. /etc/init.d/network restart seemed to list the right IP, yet I was getting

"unknown host"

and

"Network is unreachable"

errors while pinging. I double and triple checked all the settings – DNS and gateway were set up right. I even rebooted, but nothing worked.

Then I vaguely remembered that I ran into the same issue a few years prior and also spent hours trying to figure out what was going wrong. The solution was so incredibly simple that my geek cred should have been docked 10 points. But …

I just came upon a pretty good Hadoop introduction paper posted on Sun’s wiki. Apache Hadoop is a free Java software framework that supports data intensive distributed applications. It enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data. Hadoop was inspired by Google's MapReduce and Google File System (GFS) (wikipedia). I wouldn’t call it an alternative to mysql – they’re in completely different weight categories. I like to think of Hadoop as a complement – I think it’s closer to memcached in its functions than to mysql. Perhaps a hybrid of both but a unique beast nonetheless. If you’re serious about scaling, you owe it to yourself to start exploring Hadoop yesterday.

A couple of …