My Wushu Blog

A friend of mine got my the coolest birthday present I think I’ve ever recieved, and that was a bunch of new and super kick ass hardware. This will soon replace my current server, which is in such bad shape it cannot compile java code, or perl from source. Before I replace it, I wanted to play around with ZFS that comes with FreeBSD 7.0.

Here is a quick rundown of it all:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 (2.66Mhz 4MB cache)
• Intel S975XBX2 workstation motherboard
• AMCC 3Ware 9650SE 4 port SATA RAID controller (4x PCI-e)
  • Batter backup for the 3Ware so I can enable cached writes
• 2GB ECC Crucial Memory Kit
• 750 Watt PC Power & Cooling power supply
• ASUS EN6200 LE 16x PCI-e nVidia GFX card
• Plextor DVD+RW PX-810SA SATA
• 4 Western Digital 1TB Drives

All of this was of the highest quality, and Chris said since he got my into FreeBSD, he felt I should have a stable and rock solid system since my current “server” has died 6 times. So after getting it all put together and powering it up… it wouldn’t post. I swapped the cpu with an older Pentium 4D that I’ve had lying around until my htpc comes back up and that worked. It turns out, the motherboard doesn’t support the 1333Mhz bus speed of the E6750 Core 2 Duo. So I’ve done some testing with the p4 as the cpu, and most of the tests were I/O bound and not CPU.

First off was to test out ZFS. Since it is new to FreeBSD (new in general really) I followed a ZFS tuning guide for 7.0 and followed some pretty stock directions:

$ zpool create tank raidz da0 da1 da2 da3

Which automatically mounted a 2.7TB filesystem. This was a lot nicer than fooling around with partitioning and filesystem tools. I also like the feature set of ZFS compared to standard RAID’s like self healing and data checksums. Performance was a little slower. Doing a simple ‘dd’ with 1mb block size showed about 101MB/sec

 dd if=/dev/zero of=/tank/1gb.dat bs=1m count=1000

1000+0 records in

1000+0 records out

1048576000 bytes transferred in 10.420047 secs (100630640 bytes/sec)

Not bad, and since my GigE network cannot saturate that type of I/O I’m pretty satisfied with those results. I use this system as a network file server, among the other network related services like NAT, www, and mail, so my biggest concern was getting more than 80MB/sec (around gigabit ethernet’s limit).

BUUUT I am underutilizing my fancy 3Ware raid controller, so I can’t just leave that alone. I blew away the ZFS volume and created a full RAID5 with the controller. Everything was fine with the exception of fdisk, which isn’t usable for large volumes. I emailed 3Ware’s support wondering why my 2.78TB volume was only being partitioned at 722GB. They quickly responded with ‘use gpt’, which I did:

$ gpt create /dev/da0

$ gpt add -t ufs /dev/da0

/dev/da0p1 added

$ gpt show /dev/da0

	       start        size  index  contents

	           0           1         PMBR

	           1           1         Pri GPT header

	           2          32         Pri GPT table

	          34  5859311549      1  GPT part - FreeBSD UFS/UFS2

	  5859311583          32         Sec GPT table

	  5859311615           1         Sec GPT header

I did a newfs -U -O2 and mounted the new /SafeKeg. Another dd test showed higher numbers, about 150MB/sec, and with the tw_cli tool installed I can manage the 3Ware card from FreeBSD itself. Very cool. I did play with iSCSI, exporting a 50GB file to my Windows desktop, but the performance was incredibly slow, like 1-2MB/sec. Terrible! I’m not sure if Free/NetBSD’s iscsi-target is at fault, or Window’s iscs initiator, or if iscsi is just not all that up to snuff. I thought it would be nice to utilize, but I’d like to expierement with it more to see exactly how much performance I can squeeze out of it.

UPDATE (10/09/2008):

After getting a few comments on my poor iscsi performance, I have patched to the latest version and I have been MUCH happier with the results. On my little home network I’ve gotten around 40MB/sec for reads and writes.

mike Geekyness FreeBSD, kickassery, ZFS

For me, wushu hasn’t always been kick ass and fun. I’ve gone through periods where I hated going to class, and I either wouldn’t have gone at all had it not been for my strong habitual nature ( I run on auto-pilot on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I just show up to class no matter what) or lately I would have found any work excuse to not go. Somewhere along the line, I stopped being excited about wushu, I stopped dreaming about learning cool styles like bagua, fanzi, longfist, etc…

The first slump was after the 1st or 2nd year. It was at the point where I realized I wouldn’t be as good as I wanted to be. Naive I know, I’m a grown adult and I still wanted to do all the things the Beijing Wushu Team could do. I still have a hard time with a good tornado kick, and I can’t even do an aerial. Then I had my famous accident, and it’s why my friend Jenny at work calls me “Celery Leg”, which pointed me in the direction of Southern Fist.

I’ve never been a fan of Nanquan. I’m still not really into it to be honest. When I was watching wushu clips like mad, I never enjoyed the nanquan clips, I much preferred to look at changquan, bagua, staff, broadsword, straight sword, fanzi, you name it I would watch it. Except nanquan. So after I hurt my leg, Patti had me work on a lot of upper body stuff (cause my leg was messed up), then eventually I worked with Peter and Pierre learning the compulsory nanquan. I felt a little shunned for a while because I wanted to continue to do wushu, but I wasn’t learning the style that I really liked.

That slump lasted until Mark came back to wushu west. He’s not only one of the most exciting people to coach you, but he always has new and interesting ways to make you work harder and laugh at the same time. He also had his own nice take on nanquan, and he taught me a few forms, and we did a few demo’s together

So Mark, Pierre and I had this nice southern group amongst the longfist people. We learned southern broadsword, lots of little techniques, and Mark’s pretty good at showing the application of a move, which I got a lot from. I was motivated again, no more splump.

Then that trecherous bastard moved to China and wont come back

I was able to do okay on my own for a while, Li Neung Miao came by with the current BWT in October of 2005 where I picked up a nice southern staff section that I later expanded into a 1:00 form to compete at CMAT with. I was feeling pretty good at that point, and traveling to China was pretty kick ass. But I was getting frustrated after that because I no longer had the coaching from Mark, or a nanquan person that I require (believe me, I NEED someone to show me what to do). I would try out a few moves I picked up from a clip and Patti would almost be disgusted at it, either it was my interpretation of the move or not it didn’t matter to me. If I wasn’t receiving any coaching support for the style, but instead relying on video’s, why show up? why pay? So I was trying to learn other things from Patti, something she had an interest in.

That is were the current slump has come in, and for the past year I’ve been so unfocused it has made me worse off than when I started wushu. There are a lot of factors involved, work, the depression I got when I came back from China and realizing I’m just a joke at wushu compared to real athletes, the website thing… it all wore away at my excitement for the sport, for coming into class, for really focusing on what I was working on even after class.

I left working on a broadsword set, which I was really starting to enjoy because it had that old school flavor to it. I’ve been out of it for over a month now and I almost feel like I should join the beginners when I get back.

mike Wushu

Let’s back it up a bit and go on record for exactly how I got the nickname, and the insane amount of flexibility in my left leg.

I began learning the newer longfist compulsory with Isao. Stephanie was teaching us the first section. I remember it was towards the end of class and I was exhausted and hungry, probably dehydrated too. We got to the part where you do the jumping inside-kick and land into the splits where I faltered. This was before Wushu West had carpets, and that slick hardwood floor was dangerous. We used to do the jumping kick and then SLOOOWLY go down into the splits ( and I couldn’t even stretch that far ), but I was too tired to hold the stance, and I went down full force into the splits with a sick crunching sound. First time I even did the splits, it just wasn’t what I wanted.

It sounded like not just one piece of celery being snapped in half, but a whole bundle. I popped right up and muttered ‘ow ow ow ow ow’ in circles, then excusing myself to the restroom. I didn’t throw up or anything, and I teared up a little and I probably let out a “FUCK” outside. I tried to sit down but those ridiculous bench seats at wushu west are horrible if you happened to pull your hamstring. The worst part is I had to drive myself home from Berkeley to Antioch, try to sleep, and then go into kaiser the next day. I didn’t even get a decent pain killer, I got freaking Advil, and I spent almost two months on my ass. I used to have a nice picture of my leg, where the back of it was all bruised and purple. gross.

That leg is 2x more flexible that the other, it’s crazy. I can hold it out straight, and then lift it so the toe is at the same level as my chest. I almost got head to toe with it last year, and those front stretch kicks with it are pretty nice. Too bad the other leg is so stiff, its odd when one leg can do more than the other. The response I get from Patti when we do basics are “Wow, everyone, see how well Michael can do it!”, and other non wushu people usually say “Jesus christ, what is wrong with your leg! Thats not natural!”

mike Wushu