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GRAFFITI -- June 25, 2007 thru July 01, 2007>> 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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June 25, 2007
0215 - Good morning. Okay, not really. How I look back with longing on the quaint phrase "summer cold". That's what I figured it was - the symptoms matched, mostly ... and that's got to be good enough. Because who really goes to the doctor for a cold, to get the old advice: Rest, drink plenty of fluids, and you'll be fine in a few days. Ha! Well, anyway, I was laying in bed, still awake, a few minutes ago, wondering if I was going to get enough sleep to either a) drive safely into work; and/or b) even be able to effectively work, as such. I noticed that I seemed a bit unusually warm, even for me, in this house, upstairs. Huzzah! I'm running a fever, currently at 100.3°F. I think I'll login, send the wave-off email, finish drinking this hot medicine drink, and try to rest. Catch you later...
1241 - Hullo, again. The fever is down to 99. I didn't sleep as such, but there were periods of unconsciousness totalling perhaps an hour and a half. I'm not "working" today, but I am answering occasional questions by email. I had a bit of food, but not much, I'm not actually hungry. But I should eat more, and get more fluids into my system. Be right back.
Okay. Now I have a tall glass of cranberry juice, and a oatmeal rasin bar. I'm looking at them. They're looking back. This is like a junior high dance.
After reorganizing the computers and drives, I think I'm in a happy place. Here's the drill. Aside from Harmony, the MacBook Pro, I have three tower systems in my office. One is running Solaris 10 x86. Mostly that's powered down, but when I need/want to do experiments and learn more about that platform, it's ready for me. I could run it in a VM, I think, under Parallels. But I want a fair amount of storage for the purpose of mucking about with zones and whatnot. So, there's real hardware, and an occasional need. Nice match. That's on/under the table behind me.
Of the two towers next to my desk, one was Vroomfondel, the home server. His gig was mostly network file service: smb and nfs. But Vroomfondel was also my local IMAP repository, and he does internal DNS for us. That lets me stand up test machines and give them real resolving names, for example. And it's just possible that, since I am running my own internal DNS server, I can be authoritative for such domains as hitbox, doubleclick, and valueclick. It's amazing how much faster browsing is when domains like that resolve to 127.0.0.1.
The other tower was Vimes. Vimes was my main workstation prior to the acquisition of Harmony. With two gig of RAM, and an AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+ under the hood, along with a fan-less Asus nVidia GeForce 7600 GS video card, it was right sprightly. Readers who keep up with this place know that I recently had hard drive issues and slotted in three new Seagate 500G drives in a RAID0 configuration, giving me a ludicrous amount of desktop storage. Admittedly, since RAID0 is striped, losing any ONE of those drives makes all the data go away, it was reasonable to not keep any data that I cared about on it. So, what good is 1.3TB of storage if you can't trust it? That and I really didn't need to be adding this much heat all the time, so I was shutting down the box each night, and firing it up the next evening, to do those things which I prefer to do in Linux - mostly backup tools and mucking about with stuff that has large data sets, like Quake4, Doom3, etc.
I decided to merge Vimes and Vroomfondel. I don't need to game on Linux - I do very little except a bit of World of WarCrack, and I can play that as easily on Harmony as under Crossover Linux. So I unslotted the jukebox drive from Vroomfondel, and put that into the chassis that was Vimes. I built a configuration that looks like this, mounted:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 12G 462M 10G 5% /
/dev/md0 910G 177G 733G 20% /home
/dev/sdb1 373G 299G 74G 81% /home/music
/dev/sdc1 9.4G 1.8G 7.6G 20% /usr
/dev/sdd1 9.4G 424M 8.9G 5% /var
Twelve gig comes off the front of each 500G drive. The first is given to the / partition. The other two each contain a 2G swap, as well as /usr and /var respectively. The back 481G on each drive is used for a RAID5 array, all given to /home. The data on /home includes my linux home, backups from Marcia's Windows machine, backups from Harmony, backups from Zidane (this webserver, down near Houston). There's plenty of other cruft, and I'm going to see if I can clean that out a little bit this afternoon.
The new box is named Magickthyse. You'll have noted that I tend to flip back and forth between Doug Adams and Terry Pratchet variations for machine names. Harmony was the exception to that rule. Magickthyse does Windows filesharing using Samba, Unix file sharing using NFSv4, DNS thanks to BIND 9.3.4, and I've adopted Dovecot as the IMAP server to let me do my longterm message storage. Previously I'd been using Cyrus. But that stores mail in the /var/spool tree, and it's a pain to recover from when migrating the data. I've done it, but it's always an adventure. Dovecot is keeping everything in a Maildir in my home directory on Magickthyse. That comes to 399M for several years worth of mail that I thought I should keep. Not much, really, in perspective. The final big ticket item is a Subversion repository, so that I can track web changes. I have about 1.5G of data in the assorted live and historical websites. I use ssh to commit changes from the local copy of the webs on Harmony to the repository on Magickthyse.
Recent timing runs while running backups show me that I'm getting 220Mbit transfer rates to the USB drive, when moving large files onto unencrypted media. It's slower when updating the offsite backkup, because that's an encrypted filesystem, which adds some overhead. I'll test that in the next few days (when I make it back into the office, to do disk rotation) and report back on that. I expect it'll be faster on the new server than on Vroomfondel. Speaking of which, that's just sitting in place, powered off. In a month or so, when I haven't had to fire him up to figure out something that I missed. Just now I noticed that the backup pull from Zidane wasn't working quite right because I didn't have the host added to known_hosts. There will be little adjustments for the next few weeks to get it tweaked right.
Enough fun. Have a great day, or at least a better one than I'm having.
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June 26, 2007
0610 - Good morning, such as it is. I got about three hours of solid sleep to count on the plus side of the ledger. Downside is that isn't nearly enough to make up for the fact that I've gotten just that plus a little restless unconsciousness in total over the last two nights. I waved off work again, and I hate doing that. I'm going to rest more today. With the fever down and some Theraflu, I might see success in that arena. Maybe back later.
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June 27, 2007
2158 - Good evening. I'm not out of the woods yet, but I'm a lot closer. Another good night's sleep will do me wonders. I had a full day at the office today, and I've been busy this evening getting a couple of 250G SATA drives into my encrypted offsite backup rotation. Here's the good news: using all the power of this fully operation DEATH STAR, um, I mean workstation-based home server, heh, I was able to write over half a million files — 62723418584 bytes — to an AES encrypted XFS filesystem on a high speed USB port in 73 minutes. That's at 1-to-1, as this is the first rsync of the file tree. I'll be interested to see just how quick the weekly is, hereafter... as the Celeron in Vroomfondel was able to do the job in about 21 minutes. Next Tuesday should yield the interesting results.
I'm using an Antek Veris MX-1 enclosure, doing some product testing for an author I know. I'll agree with many of Bob's initial assessments: This is a solid little box. I'm not securing the drive firmly into the chassis, because I slot and unslot drives all the time. How well the PCB-mounted connectors hold up to my mistreatment will be something to note. I have the drive sitting upright in it's little stand, with the normally bottom-facing activity light pointed towards me, so it's easy to see what's going on. So far I've been quite impressed. It works very well as a USB drive. It also works fine as a SATA drive chassis. But either my motherboard or an interaction between my motherboard and the reasonably current Linux kernel I've got from Ubuntu 7.04 doesn't play well with Sata hotplugging. I can power it up and be detected just fine. But when I cycle down after unmounting the drive, the port doesn't reset properly, and I can't "logically" reconnect the drive until after a power cycle. I'll experiment with it more another time, possibly after getting more SATA ports, as I'm now using all four of those available on my Asus A8N-E.
Time for rest. Have a good evening.
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June 28, 2007
2311 - Good evening. A long day... I was out of the house a litle late, knowing that it would stretch a bit. So I was at the office by 0745 instead of 15 minutes earlier. And we were done at 1900, doing a post-business day move of systems and phones for a group of people in the office, from downstairs to upstairs. As the ranking FNG, I took the stevedore role, shifting towers and monitors to a cart, navigate a bit, ride the elevator, more navigation, and unload at the proper cube for each set of hardware. Rinse and repeat. That left two of the blokes that I work with hooking things up upstairs, while someone else labelled and moved the phones. We scheduled two hours starting at 1730. We actually started rolling at 1745 and were done at 1900. Rockin!
New tool report: MOC. That stands for music on console. It's not precisely the tool I want yet, but it's pretty darn close. It is a command line audio player, with server and client components. I fire up the player by typing mocp, and it tries to connect to the moc server running on the same system, if it doesn't find it, it fires one up. I can play mp3 and ogg format (and probably others, just haven't tested that yet), control the mixer, and navigate the extensive playlist in either linear or shuffle mode, and searching is just like in VIM or Firefox: type a '/' to get the search field. What's good about this? Well, I can play music on the server, and control it from the laptop while I'm untethered. That's the biggest deal. Oh, and it plays songs in file order by default, which is the ONE thing that I can't get iTunes to do. Given that I carefully name files to preserve playlist order, that's important.
I should go to bed, but I'm listening to David Bowie, Let's Dance. I saw the Serious Moonlight tour at the Oakland Coliseum on September 17, 1983. What a rocking show. The Tubes opened the show, Fee Waybill belting out Sports Fan, Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman, and other favorites. The unfortunately untalented middle band played a mercifully short set and was immediately eclipsed by the crowd singalong with the recently released Talking Heads single, Burning Down The House. As the light faded from the sky, the glare rose from the stage. David Bowie and that band put on a hell of a show, playing for perhaps two and a half hours. By the time Bowie hit the stage, I was about 30 feet in front of the right hand stack - it towered over me. On the big bass notes, my internal organs would try to leave the concert without me. Man, what a show! That was in the heyday of Bill Graham Presents, long before Clear Channel and the RIAA killed the heart of rock.
Must... go... to... bed. See y'all around.
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June 29, 2007
2118 - Good evening. We're taking a little break in the viewing, and I thought I'd surface here for a minute to see the world. We're currently mostly getting the Inspector Morse series from our friends at the Beeb, courtesy of Netflix. I'd like to note something I've found about British programming through Netflix: The discs are almost always in much, much better condition than most of the Hollywood movies that "we" sometimes get in our queue. I'd have to assume that, complementing with the quality of programming, the general type of person who rents these discs isn't going to treat them like shit, nor let the kids muck with them. So the viewing experience is better, the quality of the acting, story, and production is generally better ... sounds like win-win to me.
Happy Friday!
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June 30, 2007
1911 - No news is no news. I was going to work on the front porch today, but Marcia called it right. A restful day or two are going to do me a world of good. So I just did ... nothing. That's not so bad, eh?
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July 1, 2007
1229 - Good afternoon. We've done the shopping, and I've gotten some more subscriber content posted for Jerry - he's got Another Step Farther Out up in the MS Reader format now. Oh, hey! It's Moshe's birthday. Happy Birthday, my friend! Now, I need to water the flower beds, and weed the garden. But first...
Another Sunday, another day of pride and sadness as I take my time to list the fallen servicemembers from our Mideast entanglements. This is the most personally difficult part of my week, contemplating the fallen, their families, and the unit mates of our fine young people who gave their all in service to our country.
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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.
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