lifebsideben

I ordered a new server from theplanet.com (whom I really like, so don’t take this as a dis — I’ve been a customer for over 5 years, and plan to continue with them). So the new server is supposed to have 2 hard drives. Turns out the provisioned it with only one, and then told me, oops, we need to order the hardware. A few hours later (yes, really–I think they must have run out to Fry’s), they said it was in stock, and needed to take the machine down to install it. Fine, I said do it anytime. They actually did start about 30 minutes later (and this was the middle of the night), while I was online. While I was yum-installing packages. Sigh. Here’s from the lastlog (remember these are in reverse order, and some data removed for my protection

reboot system boot 2.6.xx Thu Mar 6 03:46 (00:01)
root pts/1 63.xx.xx.xx Thu Mar 6 03:37 - crash (00:09)
root pts/0 63.xx.xx.xx Thu Mar 6 03:29 - crash (00:17)
root pts/0 spyglass.dllstx4 Wed Mar 5 07:26 - 07:26 (00:00)
root pts/0 spyglass.dllstx4 Tue Mar 4 11:55 - 12:02 (00:07)

Hmm, if they could log into it the previous day, it really doesn’t take much longer to just log in and run ’shutdown’, huh? Apparently flipping the power switch is a lot easier. Alright, I can deal. Anyhow, they did install it, so I log in and happen to do ‘history’. Looks like the tech wasn’t too sure of him/herself:

1 fdisk -l
2 exit
3 ls
4 exit
5 fdisk -l
6 reboot
7 fdisk -
8 fdisk -l
9 reboot
10 fdisk -l
11 df
12 mke2fs ext3 /dev/hdb1
13 ls
14 mkdir /Backup_drive
15 mount -t ext3 /hdb /Backup_drive
16 fdisk -
17 fdisk -l
18 reboot
19 fdisk -l
20 mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb0 Backup_drive
21 mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb0 /Backup_drive
22 mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 /Backup_drive
23 df
24 reboot
25 fdisk -l
26 ls
27 cd ..
28 ls
29 fdisk -l
30 reboot
31 fdisk -l
32 cd ..
33 ls
34 mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb /Backup_drive
35 mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 /Backup_drive
36 fdisk -l
37 history

Wow, that’s a lot of fdisk’ing. And kind of a lot of tries to mount it, considering you just ran fdisk so much. And hey, you didn’t add anything to my fstab or similar… but you did create a silly directory in the root of my other drive. Feh.

Ah well, at least it’s installed and seems to be working fine, and the turnaround was really quite fast to get it done.

Tags: bofh, hardware, hosting, linux, sysadmin, the planet

…is that you end up demo’ing it to everyone who noticed you have one

It’s a pretty awesome device, and the (relatively short–90 minutes) wait on Friday was definitely worth it! Bragging rights are fun, sure, but besides that it’s just such a hugely more useful device than my previous (Nokia 6682)… the browser is such much better you can’t compare, Wifi is great, and overall usability (except for it being a little “slippery” by default, without a case) is leaps and bounds over any combo device I’ve ever had.

Now if we can just get Flash working on it… c’mon Apple, let Adobe play We all love QuickTime but let’s be serious!

Tags: apple, hardware, iPhone

I spent probably 6 hours today trying to get Bacula working fully. I’d never tried it, but have been thinking about trying to implement a “real” backup system for some time. By “real”, I mean, something that can back up the most important bits of my two Macs, my remote webserver, and even bits of the RAID5 array that are “super critical”, to a separate harddrive, handle incrementals, and not involve lots of hackery on the clients. Bacula does seem to fit the bill, and I picked up a 400G eSATA drive to add to the server last week for about $100 to be the backup media (tapes? we don’t need no stinkin’ tapes!)
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Tags: bacula, hardware, linux, mac, NAS, software

So I bought a UPS at Fry’s the other night (ironically, at the same time the power was going out at my house!) for the RAID box in the garage. None of the sub-$100 UPSes seemed to have official support for Linux from a software standpoint, and obviously that’s a big deal since I want it to shutdown cleanly in the case of power failure. I also wanted line conditioning, as the outlet I’m plugged into is right next to the washer and dryer, and although it’s likely a different circuit (haven’t tested this yet though), I’m sure when the dryer kicks on it could cause voltage fluctuation nearby.

So anyhow, it seems $70 was about the cheapest for line conditioning, and I didn’t want to spend much more, because I don’t care about lots of sustained wattage–after all, this is just a mostly-idly headless Athlon XP, and that’s it; I don’t want a giant UPS just to keep it running long enough to safely power down in the really rare occasion we have an outage (so far we’ve only had one in the 15 months we’ve lived in this unit.) I ended up buying the Belkin F6C550-AVR with USB connectivity. It’s got a nice form factor, reasonable power capacity, and votage conditioning. I figured, there’s gotta be a opensource driver/daemon for the monitoring of this baby, right? Certainly there must be standard protocols these things speak, if not straight ASCII… wrong.

It turns out, the UPS landscape is a fractitious, highly proprietary place. Basically NO company makes one with a simple serial ASCII protocol, it’s all binary (well, OK I can understand that), unpublished (for shame), and inconsistent. There are some projects for opensource support of monitoring various devices, the best of which seems to be NUT (Network UPS Tools), partially funded by one of the enterprise UPS players (short tutorial on NUT with Fedora here.) But the Belkin support is pretty slim, and it doesn’t look like the one I bought even has much monitorability beyond “hey, the power’s about to go out” and “my battery’s dead”. This just won’t do. I was about to pack it up and head back to Fry’s, but decided I really could use another UPS for the Tivo etc., anyhow, and I don’t care about the monitoring aspect for that (ok, also the box is kind of heavy and I didn’t want to go through Fry’s Return Line of Hell–in other words, the tactic works–they’ve helped convince me to keep it to avoid the hassle of the return process. Damn you, Fry’s!)

This time I’m going to be smarter about it and do more research up front, like I usually do. I just didn’t think UPSes would be (could be!) that big a deal to get support for. The NUT folks have a compatibility chart, so I think I’ll try to pick something from the intersection of that list and upcoming / current deals on Techbargains. Feh!

Tags: hardware, linux, software, ups

So the new Mini is announced. Let’s forgo the cheaper model as pointless, and focus on the higher-end one. Here’s the relevant differences IMO:

• Dual-core Intel CPU (yay!)
  Yeah baby, bring it!! This is the oomph the Mac needs. My 1.42GHz mini is definitely underpowered. Definitely the highlight.
• Cheesy onboard graphics chip (boo!) with shared RAM (mega-boo!)
  Sorry, but the Intel GMA950 seems pretty lame for 3D performance. I suppose gaming isn’t the Mini’s (nor Apple’s, for that matter,) forte, but still. Can this thing pump out 1080p HD via the DVI port? Yeah, but don’t expect to do any cool frontrow effects on it smoothly. And what’s with the shared RAM?
• DL DVD-R drive (sure, fine)
  Yeah, whatever. If it helps bring down the cost of blanks, I’m all for it. My mini is already upgraded to this, so obviously I think it’s got some value.
• Port changes
  The subtracted the modem (yay!) and 1 FW port (boo!), add more USB ports (uh, mild yay).
  Who is going to use a mini via dialup? Nobody, exactly. They’ve wisely ditched the useless modem and added USB ports. I’m guessing the FW port is only staying there at all because of legacy iSights and harddrives… but sounds like USB2.0 is definitely the wave of the future. Honestly, I think this is a Good Thing, even though FW seems to be a technically superior (certainly, more sophisticated) design, and faster in practice.
• Up to 2G RAM (big yay!)
  And even better yet, the mini gains another DIMM slot, so you can populate it with 2×1G DIMMs. Nice. Why no go with a 4G max then, I wonder?
• SATA drive (yay) but still 5400rpm (boo)
  Right interface, wrong rotational speed. Sounds like this is going to cripple the video streaming capabilities out of the box. Again. Can’t they just punch a few holes in the lid to let the few degrees extra heat from the faster-spinning drive, out the top?

There’s some other changes as well, like audio in as well as out, which are nice but nothing amazing–they’d be big disappointments if they were missing, however. iLife 06, great, I just bought that anyhow. [Update: I just discovered it does NOT come with the Mini standard, but is a full-price option!] Bluetooth 2.0 is a nice upgrade, although unlikely to matter for most folks.

Looks like I won’t be upgrading, as much as I really really want the dual core Intel and 2G RAM. I’m hoping there’s a version that’s 1″ taller, with dual 7200rpm SATA drives and a better video chip in the future. Hopefully, this will be timed well with a new OS and iLife upgrade so I can save $200 or so on those, as well But I am interested to hear how this is working with large LCD panels for HTDV/HTPC playback use… I suppose I could still be swayed, but it’s over a $1000 investment–considering the base model is $799, and gotta upgrade to 2G RAM as well.

Tags: apple, hardware, mac

I bought a server last night from a guy off Craigslist. Great deal, but there’s one thing I forgot about… “real” servers are “real” loud. It’s been a while since I had a 2U box cranking all its fans in a home setting, and it’s making me wonder about the viability of this solution as a “throw it in the closet” server. Hmm.

Oh, the machine specs are dual-P3 550, Intel LX440 motherboard, 1G RAM, SCSI (9G and 36G disks installed). I’m planning to toss a 250G IDE or two in there as well and make it the superduper LAN mp3/file/cvs server/linux development box/mysql slave (backup) to prince.org’s dataset.

The guy who had it previously tested it with NT, and that lasted on it about one hour at my place. Which is about 45 minutes longer than it would have been, had I been able to find a floppy disk (ANY floppy disk) to turn into a Fedora boot floppy. I needed that because I only have Fedora on DVD, and this server of course just has a CD-ROM drive (that may change in the future…) Anyway, I finally just burned a CD with the boot.iso image off the dvd, pointed the localhost config on Apache on my windoze box at the Fedora DVD, and booted into a HTTP install on the new server. Took a while (for kicks I said “Everything”… so now I even have Russian support for KDE, etc.), but worked fine.

A little disappointed that the Bogomips for each processor is just over 1000 (according to /proc/cpuinfo) and on my rented prince.org server the single CPU is around 4000 (P4 2Ghz). I’ll have to experiment with a sequence of mysql and apache operations though, and see how they compare under “real” situations, or a vaguely reasonable fascimile. Probably the performance of this thing, properly configured (utilizing 3+ spindles, instead of the 1 IDE device on the real server now) will still kick the rented box’s ass. I’d love to be able to buy a few more cheap boxes like this and throw ‘em in a local colo, so at least I could control my own servers, instead of relying on folks 1000 miles away… and even then, not being able to throw a bigger harddrive in, etc.

Tags: hardware, linux

So, I buy a Microsoft wireless desktop (mouse+keyboard) from Costco the other day, and gave my old optical mouse to the wife for her Mac. Everything seemed fine, software installed OK, la-di-da… the mouse worked OK on the fairly reflective white keyboard tray on my el cheapo Ikea desk (a problem in the past), etc. But then… I noticed something odd. Like a bad smell, but only faint, it crept up on me until I realized, what the hell? What have they done with the Inser/Delete key area?!?

On most PC/104 (I guess they’re still called that) style keyboards, there are six keys to the right of the main QWERTY section, typically above the inverted-T arrow keys. These keys are Insert, Delete, Home, End, Page Up, Page Down. Makes sense. Logical layout. Easy to learn.

But on this new keyboard I bought? Nope. Rearranged. Minus one key. WTF? “Insert” is just gone. Delete is now twice as high (including essentially the space where Insert used to be, ohhh now that is handy!), and Home and End are no longer in the same column. Whaaaa? I suppose 80% of users never use the insert key; they probably don’t use home and end much either. But the other 20% of us do… so stop penalizing those that DO use something, for the supposed benefit of those that DON’T!

Now I understand why the link entitled “Learn how Microsoft leads the industry in the design and production of ergonomic hardware” on this page goes to a 404 error! This sucks ergonomically. Now to do cut/copy/paste, I need to use these one-hand-bending ctrl+x, ctrl+c, ctrl+v keystrokes, instead of the easy-to-reach (left hand on ctrl or shift…) tap insert or delete. That’s not better from an ergonomic standpoint! Oh, wait, maybe I’m supposed to use the function keys that are now assigned to ‘cut’ ‘copy’ ‘paste’… yeah because reaching up there to learn NEW keys, that are ALREADY assigned functions in most apps, is useful. Did I mention you need to put on “F lock” to use the function keys as regular F keys? So I guess learning F2 for ‘modify’ and F5 for ‘refresh’ and ‘ctrl+f4′ for close, etc. etc. were a waste of time. Grrrrr.

I would blame Microsoft for all of this, but it looks like maybe this keyboard is just a rebranded Logitech device. I wouldn’t be surprised, as my previous Logitech keyboard also had this F-lock stupidity which was another reason I wanted to get a different keyboard in the first place! At least this one does let me reprogram all the silly ‘multimedia’ keys at the very top… although I have never used them on previous keyboards anyhow. But, I suppose assigning a key to Firefox, to iTunes, etc. is OK… but it’s not like they’re not always loaded, anyhow.

Tags: apple, hardware, microsoft