Blogs

Hi all,

Just a heads up that we are moving to a model where we post previews of upcoming releases.

Starting now, we are going into a mode where long before a GA release we will be posting development builds. At first, they may be a few weeks apart but over time our goal is to post builds as soon as new functionality or API’s are ready for comment.

This first Preview #1 will have backend performance and scale improvements as well as some cool new features. The developers and PM’s will be posting to this blog the specifics of what is new, how to try it, and where we are going.

Our hope is that we get early feedback on new features and…

According the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), there are 798 venture capital firms managing more than $235B in the United States. These are long-term, professional investors who specialize in funding and building new, innovative companies.

So how do you figure out who to approach for funding? This is the area where I find entrepreneurs make the biggest mistakes. Most of us approach investors we know. Perhaps you have a friend who knows a VC or you have a friend who is a VC. How do you know if your friend or the person you get introduced to is the right investor for you? Most likely they’re not. Not all VCs are alike. Some are geared for early stage and some are…

I find this hard to explain even though its an extremely simple concept. It would be nice to get some feedback since I think we want to productize the idea but we are not clear on what makes sense.

If I have a search/report that I want to run faster, I will save that search and have splunk run it over a small timeframe (5,15,30,60 min) taking the results of that search/report and feeding them back into an index i create to hold cached results.

For example, suppose I like to run nightly reports where I show “top users by bandwidth”. Its easy enough to run the report every night, but suppose there are times during the day when I want incrementals,…

Hey Kids,

How are things? so I’ve made some progress in my attempt to code myself out of a job. Just checked the scripted auth into the preview branch which should be released in a few days. It’s very basic right now with more improvements to come. At the moment userLogin, getUserType and getUserInfo are the only methods you need to fill in.

I’ve written up a sample that interfaces with PAM on the linux, using /etc/passwd to get user lists. Mac users skip the pamauth.c compile you don’t need this app and pam don’t like macs ( can’t say I blame pam on that score)

First off a pamauth.c program to compile that will talk to pam for ya. Donated…

Lately we have been doing some work with persistent connections. If you are familiar with Comet the Flash/AS3 URLStream class provides an interesting alternative. The URLStream class exposes raw binary data as it is downloaded.

Unfortunately, this week we ran into a rather tricky memory leak when using this nifty class. An event listener was subscribed to the progress event and over time memory usage steadily increased to a point of making the browser inoperable.

After a little digging we narrowed the problem down to the URLStreams usage of the ByteArray. It seems as if URLStream was reallocating a buffer for the array and the short turn around time (on the reads) was not giving the garbage collector enough time to throw out…

I have a funny habit with our code in the front end, where if something’s just too complicated, but i cant see the better solution yet, I’ll give its pieces long descriptive names. It’s basically so they’ll stick out later, we’ll think ‘why is this thing so ugly and complicated’, and it’ll help us remember to revisit it. (btw, I’m not claiming that this is good development practice, it’s just a trick i use, faintly reminiscent of the blue-wire red-wire stuff in the Mythical Man Month).

So anyway, I bring it up cause Johnvey saw one of it’s cousins out in the wild, taking the whole concept to an extreme. Check it out.

Arguably though, this is so extreme that it’s not reallyDescriptiveNames…

Recycling is universally considered to be a good thing, right?

Good. Then that means that we at Splunk are obligated to play play beer pong every Friday! I figure that with all the bottles and cans that subsequently go into the recycling bin, we’re probably offsetting a small percentage of the many computers we use here… amirite?

If you disagree, you can voice your opinions in person. See you here Friday at 5PM.

Last week I was in NYC for Interop 2007. Interop in NY is a significantly smaller conference than the big brother Interop in Vegas. I’d say there were 7,500 to 8,000 people at Interop NYC this year, compared to 18,500 in Vegas back in May. Somehow though I always find the New York show more interesting. Perhaps it’s the lack of constant firefighting in the NOC that gives us all more time to have meaningful conversations about the latest networking technologies. Plus somehow New York just seems to have more substance than Vegas. Call me crazy but…

This was also the first Interop where we had a chance to apply the magic of Splunk genre 3.0. We had a record number…

Ruby on Rails is a popular programming framework for quickly creating web applications. It provides its own web server for development testing, and ships with OSX, which means the tools are now widely available to a broad group of programmers/coders/hackers. Coupled with the fact that most Rails developers use either Linux or OSX, and Splunk runs great on both of those platforms, it seemed obvious that we should come up with some sort of solution for mashing the two together.

I mentioned this in passing to one Sean Dick who is a developer friend of mine in Oklahoma City. What follows is a nearly identical post to the one he made over at his self-named blogpost on Blogger on how to get Rails to…