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GRAFFITI -- September 29 thru October 05, 2003>> Link to the Current Week <<Last Week << Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun >> Next Week Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable. About eMail - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message.. |
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September 29, 2003 - Updates at 0709 EST
Good morning. Spotted this one on Slashdot last night... Magnatune. Why, sez you? Ah, because they're the new kid on the block, and here's their motto: We're a record label. But we're not evil. Sounds like a good start. How does Magnatune achieve it's lack of vileness? Well, check out these key features: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike " license from Creative Commons. Wooo. Artist gets 50% of gross. Double wooo! The largest section right now is classical, which is nice (from my perspective), although right now I'm actually listening to some Beth Quist. The woman has an amazing voice... Anyway, back to Magnatune. Be warned - he doesn't have SSL setup yet, wait until he does before using the old plastic purchasing tool. Or use the Paypal link if you swing that way. On the Buy page, there's the first field of the form: How much do you want to pay? The pulldown below has $8.00 recommended, but the range is from $5 to $18, and below, generosity is solicited since 50% goes to the artist. Yeah, I'm impressed. That's Magnatune, folks. If you like what's happening there, go, listen and buy. Encourage sane internet music sales that support the artists.
So what else? Lessee, I put in another five hours yesterday with Larry and customers, installing 6 machines at the second site of the weekend. Whew. When I got home, I did the gutters, pulled up half the forming for the new concrete walk so that I could mow the yard, then did the mowing. Yeah, you caught that, did you? No, the latest butthead didn't turn up to finish his work. I really don't give a crap, since we're out of here in another few weeks, but still, where's pride of workmanship and finishing what you start??? Sheesh. I'll work about three or 4 hours today, then do some pre-purchase stuff for the new house, following Marcia's instructions.
I'd best be about it... Have a great day!
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September 30, 2003 - Updates at 0654
Good morning. Well, somehow I survived another day. A half day working yesterday, followed by house chores, pre-move organization, a couple of errands, somehow the day just frittered itself away. I did purchase a copy of Lara St. John's Bach Violin Concertos on Magnatune yesterday via the Paypal path. I got notice of the purchase acknowledgement, a download link, username and password. A pair of zip files, MP3 and WAV, are available at the top of the page, followed by an MP3 and a WAV version of each track. I must say, this is some wonderful fiddle tunage.
On the Linux front, I'm trying to make sense of Fedora. For those of you who hadn't heard, Red Hat has spun off its retail channel into a lightly-managed and sponsored "Open Source Project", melding with the Fedora Linux Project. This next link will die one day sooner or later, but the original Fedora Linux Project had this goal:
Fedora is a community project dedicated to building high-quality, 3rd party rpms, for the RedHat Linux distribution. Our goal is to facilitate easy package installation through automatic update methods such as apt and yum, while at the same time maintaining first rate security procedures.
There are a lot of Red Hat derivatives floating around. Mandrake grew out of a highly tuned and specially compiled version of the Red Hat RPMS. KRUD (Kevin's Red Hat Uber Distribution) is another that I've looked into. Fedora had never hit my radar before now... Anyway, the press releases push Fedora as being in a relationship with Red Hat as Mozilla is to Netscape. Mmmm. So what about Red Hat Linux? Well, it looks as though the supported products at Red Hat are going to be the Enterprise series. Now on a dollar basis, there really isn't going to be much difference between getting Red Hat 9 Professional with full support and a year's RHN subscription, and Red Hat Enterprise WS version 3 Standard. Both cost just under 400, and provide pretty much the same features, except that there's precious little server stuff in WS, and while it's NEW this month, the upgrade cycle's going to be 12 - 18 months. That may be great for certain Enterprise uses, but the software's going to be old and creaky long before the next version is slated to be out. No, really, I understand why... a stable platform can be developed against by third party software vendors. This is what companies like IBM are up against, with Websphere and Portal for Linux - these products are currently supported on FH 7.3. They'll be certifying against Enterprise v3 shortly, I presume, then they can have some enhancement cycles against the stable v3 plaform for a year. That's a boon for ISVs.
But what does it mean for me? I have to recommend Linux to customers. Where do I go? It's still easy to sell Linux against Windows, because of the lack of vulnerabilities (by comparison), and the ease of remote administration, which cuts costs dramatically for our customers. If we wanted to be rich, we'd just recommend and support, oh, say, IIS and Exchange, and live high off the continuous consulting dollar stream. But then, we have to sleep at night. So is RH Enterprise right for our small customers? If they're really already interested in Linux, then they're thinking free get-in cost, not an Enterprise version. Hell, sell them something with "Enterprise" in the product name and they'll think they've been done without a lubricant. Debian rocks, but people don't understand how a "distribution" where NO ONE makes a living at it, can possibly be good enough, let alone the best (IMHO). SuSE? Potentially, and staying in the retail channel market, at least for the time being. Mandrake still rocks too, but their road is rocky as well. SCO? Heeheeehahahahahhaaaaaa. Enough said there. There are hundreds of distributions - we recommend the dogfood we eat, which has been Red Hat and Debian. Debian stays secure and easy to update without needing an annual subscription. I'm leaning that way hard, although I'll want to do some integration projects on my own to get to where we can provide a consistent, excellent GUI box without much administrative effort.
Well, what about Fedora? I don't know. Let's see a release, do an evaluation, and see where things lead. In the meantime, I'm all for Open Source, any way you want it. Have a great day!
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October 01, 2003 - Updates at 0715
Good morning. Yesterday I spent the day updating Linux systems, researching authenticated DHCP and other short take tasks. Then I got home and started working on the garage. I boxed my workshop and many other things, broke down the shelving, and labeled things for the move. There's many more evenings of this ahead of me...
A note from Tom - Due to Tom being very, very busy with work, and receiving no notice of impending doom from his registrar, both Daynotes.com and Syroidmanor.com expired on Sept. 23. I spoke to him about it last night, he's going to take care of the problem in the next couple of days. In the meantime, don't bother trying to send him mail - that's broken too. Oh, and the tidbit of good news - he's about ready to start posting again. Anyway...
Now I've got to go. Have a great day.
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October 02, 2003 - Updates at 0637
Howdy. After another full day of work, I spent another evening in the garage, doing move-prep. I finished packing the garage and my mini-workshop in there. That's all staged towards the front of the garage, and off to one side, leaving an aisle. Then I cleared the boxes of stuff out of the garage attic, and got all our packing boxes left from last year's move down from that space too. Then I staged all that material at the back of the garage - the Bilbrey move packaging centre.
My office up here is ready, nearly, to be packed as well. I went through my collected electronics and disposed of a few boxloads of old useless crap, from tapes and old drives to any ISA bus cards, serial mice, and bunches of other stuff. The only thing left here before I can box the greatest part of it is the CD collection. There's a lot of overlap, and stuff not to keep any more. I don't mind archiving stuff for long periods of time, but I really am not ever going to need a copy of RH 5.2 again.
Marcia made a deal with the movers yesterday, so that's on for a few days after closing, after we've had a chance to clean and organize our thoughts around the new house for a while. It's almost time to start calling the utilities. Really, things are going quite smoothly, knock wood.
David T. weighs in on my distro confusion in an email from the other day...
Hi Brian,
Thanks for your Tuesday post. I too have been thinking a bit about this whole Fedora thing. Why can't I shake the feeling that they are trying to immitate the Debian project? Automatic update and conflict solving solutions such as apt are long overdue of course but there is one thing that I wonder about and that is if this will be a "install once, update regularly" type of distro or not. In other words, will they provide something like "apt-get dist-upgrade"? If not, and if they are going to be doing the major release and upgrade stuff as usual then Debian will get my vote.
If they are doing a distro Debian style then we will have to wait and see if they can provide something that Debian doesn't. Only time will tell I guess. I too will wait and see what happens with their first release. I might give it a go, and I might not. I have already tried so many different distributions and I think that I am finally content with my findings. I don't feel that I need to test out everything new under the sun "just because" anymore. My distro's of choice are Debian and Gentoo.
On a totally unrelated note, I remember when Tom Syroid stopped posting and I sent him a note saying that I would miss not being able to read his ramblings. He answered and told me to send him a note whenever anyways and I thought I was going to do that yesterday when I found out about a Linux happening in his home town next month (pretty strange, me being in Stockholm and all). So I clicked on his link at daynotes.org to find his e-mail address and VeriSign popped up and told me that there was nothing there. And he is still under the of "actively writing" part of daynotes.org Anyhow, I decided to click on a few links on the "On Sabbatical" side and found that all were still there except Shawn Wallbridge's webpage. I came to something called "M I Solutions Rite2U Super Store". I doubt that it is his company because this firm is located in California while Shawn is from Canada if I remember correctly. I guess he won't be coming back, huh?
Anyhow, could you provide me with Tom's mail address so I can tell him about the event? Marcel Gagné, the author (Moving to Linux: Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye!) is going to be speaking in Saskatoon on October 20 and 21. I thought I'd let him know just in case he is interested. If you don't feel comfortable with giving me his e-mail then that is OK. I'll just ask you to forward the details then to him
Have a good evening!
/David T.
And of course I forgot to tell Tom about Gagné's impending event as yet. This will help me to remember here. And Shawn? Are you out there?
Now it's the road for me, I've got one or two brief (5 - 10 minutes each) customer stops to make on my way to the main client site for the day, so I'd best be about it. Have a great day!
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October 03, 2003 - Updates at 0643
Good morning. So Shawn Wallbridge wrote to say hello, he's busy, and he might start posting at a new site one of these days. Tom still isn't back online, but be patient. And we got our committment letter from the lender yesterday... all continues to go well for the new house run-up to settlement day. And with that, I'm going to bail out on you - I have a long day ahead and as you can see from the timestamp, I'm trying to get yet another early start. Take care...
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October 04, 2003 - Updates at 0839
Good morning. I'm sitting here with my first cup of coffee, and Sally keeps snouting my arm, trying to get attention. Earth to Sally, "Okay, it works, now knck it off!" Heh. I did some backups last night. Marcia's critical files BKF (Windows Backup format) fits just fine on a single DVD. Then I decided to run my own. The first step is deciding what type of backup to make - plain files on filesystem, or compressed image format (TGZ, for example). I can fairly easily do either, although the TGZ is a LOT easier, so that's the route I took. Here's my usage:
bilbrey@goldfinger bilbrey $ du -s
22120609 .
That's just my home directory, and it's this morning's version, since I cleared out about 4 Gig of random accumulated crap (a few ISO images, etc.) Now, I don't want to backup my OGG files from the CD collection, so that means I can eliminate this lot of stuff:
bilbrey@goldfinger bilbrey $ du -s entertainment
11517356 entertainment
That leaves 10.5 Gig to backup. Given that DVD+R/W format discs are 4.7 Gig, that is three discs. That remains true even though they really mean Salesman's Gig = 1000^3, rather than true Gigabytes = 1024^3. The real number is more like 4.37 Gig. Still three discs, though. I also have a copy of the /etc tree in my /home, for backup purposes. So, as root, I ran the following command:
goldfinger home # tar zcvf backup/goldfinger.tgz \
bilbrey --exclude=bilbrey/entertainment etc
That made the compressed tarball, bringing the size of the backup down to a shade over 6 Gig. Too big for one disc, still, so I have to break this up into a couple of parts before burning the files to DVD. I figure two files of about 3.2G each should do fine...
goldfinger backup # split -b 3200m goldfinger.tgz goldfinger.tgz.
split: 3200m: invalid number of bytes
Try `split --help' for more information.
Scheiss! After some searching and experimentation, it appears that the split tool is limited in output file size to 2G still, even though that limit went away quite a while ago in the larger context of Linux file systems. Now what? Ah-Hah!
goldfinger backup #dd if=goldfinger.tgz of=goldfinger.tgz.a \
bs=1024k count=3200 skip=0 ; \
dd if=goldfinger.tgz of=goldfinger.tgz.b \
bs=1024k skip=3200
That did the trick. Using the dd command to write out the first 3200M, then another to skip the first 3200M, then write the balance to the second file. That gave me a backup directory that looked like this:
goldfinger backup # ls -al
total 12430009
drwxr-sr-x 2 root 50 144 Oct 3 22:21 .
drwxrwsr-x 11 root 50 264 Oct 3 21:26 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 50 6364160722 Oct 3 22:00 goldfinger.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 50 3355443200 Oct 3 22:20 goldfinger.tgz.a
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 50 3008717522 Oct 3 22:27 goldfinger.tgz.b
Perfect. Now to burn those files to DVD for storage. I use the only package that works with DVD+R/+RW on Linux today... dvd+rw-tools. They're easy to install in Gentoo, even though they're masked:
goldfinger root # cd /usr/portage/app-cdr/dvd+rw-tools/
goldfinger dvd+rw-tools # emerge dvd+rw-tools-5.12.4.7.4.ebuild
With the tools in place, I was able first to burn Marcia's backup to DVD+RW, then these two files:
goldfinger backup # growisofs -Z /dev/sr0=goldfinger.tgz.a
. . .
goldfinger backup # growisofs -Z /dev/sr0=goldfinger.tgz.b
That's it, the job is done. There's actually a fair bit of feedback from the running growisofs, starting with an initial format of a virgin blank media (if that's needed), then progress written to the terminal, one line at a time. A full 4.3G takes about 24 minutes to burn, that's not too shabby. Today I'll cat those files off the DVDs and back to disk, then check the result against the original goldfinger.tgz file.
But now I need to send an email to Mom, with more information about the new house. I was supposed to do that last night, but forgot after a conversation with Marcia about many chores leading up to the move, and a nice long scratch with the dog. I'd best be about my day, have a good'un yourself.
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October 05, 2003 - Updates at 0955
Good morning. While I started packing my office yesterday, Marcia and Sally went on a field trip to the doggy stuff store... um, Petsmart or something like that. Apparently Sally had a really good time, sniffing at all of the stuff on the shelves, wiggling and wagging for all of the people who chose to worship her, etc. As she was walking down an aisle, apparently she decided it was time to take a pigs ear, without asking permission. Marcia had a hard time getting it back from her, but then bought it anyway. At left you can see Sally working away at it, she wouldn't be parted with that ear until it was consumed. That takes a little doing when you're old and only have 6 teeth left...
Meantime, I packed my office of all the books, bookshelves, boxes of computer parts, other projects, etc. It makes a nice stack at the back of the room. Still in place are the computers, printer, monitor, a few items on my desk, and three things in the closet that move as is. Today I'll finish that out, prepack a bit of my closet in the master bedroom, do a little cleaning, and maybe pack some of the living room. I know, but I'd really rather be packed too early than be in a rush at the end, and we've got houseguests for the two weekends before our move.
Now I can go get some coffee. So I will. Have a great day!
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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.
All Content Copyright © 1999-2003 Brian P. Bilbrey.