zabbo

Alright, put yourself in the mindset of a server in my basement. You’re kind of sad that the guy who maintains you is a few thousand miles away. Then his lovely wife has the nerve to go to California. It’s pretty lonely down there. What do you do?

Yes, that’s right, you have a few fans fail. Then heat gathers in the top of your ancient PC case. Which causes the power supply, cleverly designed to sit in the top of the case where heat gathers, to fail. The faulty power supply pulls power from two drives in a four drive array which flips the array into degraded mode wherein it can only return errors. Which hangs the machine as ext3 gets IO errors in the journal. You’ll show them!

I’m quite lucky to live a few blocks from one of the most capable sysadmins that I had the pleasure of starting my career with. I gave him a call, we shared some Simpson’s quotes (mostly Professor Frink), and managed to get things up and running again. He was able to transplant a power supply from a neighbouring test box. Thankfully the power drop didn’t damage the drives. Phew.

This was made that much funner by the fact that I hadn’t yet synced the most recent CRFS changes from that machine to a box at Oracle. The source that I’m giving a talk about on Friday here in Melbourne. Where the source is intended to be released.

So, I guess this means I get to play Christmas on Newegg with PC hardware when I get back. Yay, prezzies!

I’ve long been a fan of of the discontinued APC AP9211 distribution unit. To wit:

1. It’s an efficient 1U, taking up just enough space for the 8 outlets.
2. It is gloriously devoid of any moving parts, including noisy fans.
3. powerman comes with scripts to manage its outlets from the command line over ethernet. Once you get used to the convenience of “powerman -c $host” you never go back.
4. It’s common enough to easily be found on ebay.

That last point brings us to this post. Mark got a pair for his machines after I showed him the light. He got them from an auction that has 3 days left and, at the time of this writing, 19 units left. Each has a pretty reasonable price for immediate purchase with shipping.

APC MasterSwitch AP9211 w/ AP9606 Control Module — ebay auction 230196539398

It’s a chance for poor kernel developers out there to stop being frustrated by having to lose time rebooting boxes in person.

I’m very excited. In a small number of hours someone from the PostgreSQL project will be coming by to take away my old fiibre channel storage setup. I had used it for OCFS2 development, mostly, but haven’t touched it in ages. I do hope it works out well for them. It consists of the following:

1. 8 incredibly long copper cables
2. about a million (ok, 11) copper GBICs
3. 8 qla2100 PCI cards (these are not excellent)
4. A tray of 10k rpm Cheetahs, complete with funky NetApp firmware, which could kill a man who attempted to lift them unaided
5. a fibre channel switch whose fans could then wake said dead man

Did I mention the excitement? This crap — er, fantastic storage infrastructure — will no longer take up space in the basement.

These days I do my storage work on an HP DS2405 which is directly connected to an Emulex LPe11002, both donated by said companies. The old setup could hit 100MB/s on a good day. The current kit hits 450MB/s without trying very hard. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.

A significant number of my friends — not exactly newcomers to software! — have embraced OS X. With memories of the early days of the Mac, I was nervous. Allow me to share the story that finally pushed me over the edge.

A few months ago I spent an hour or so configuring X on my Dell X1 to support both the built-in LCD and an external LCD monitor. There were a few scary moments where I, being human, screwed up the configuration of which pipe went where and gave the laptop’s LCD some very bad refresh rates. Luckily it wasn’t damaged.

When I finally got it working the result was pretty cool! Windows flowed off of one LCD and onto the other. I had to logout and edit the config file to disable the second display, or change its resolution or anything, of course. That’s just how X rolls.

Then a week later Alice plugged that very same LCD into her MacBook Pro and it just worked. Live. We tried unplugging it with apps on the display being unplugged and they were moved back onto the remaining laptop LCD. Holy crap!

Step back for a moment and imagine that we’re talking about something other than the dizzyingly complex world of software and computers. An expert using tool A gets mediocre results after an hour of risky work and any user instantly gets superior results using tool B. Why on earth would anyone chose tool A?

That was roughly my line of thinking when Apple released the MacBook Pros with the Core 2 Duo. I broke down and ordered one. That was about two weeks ago and I’m happy to report that things have gone as well as I’d hoped they would. I haven’t had to fight the hardware support battles that are sadly present in the Linux world. I’m appreciating having apps that work nicely together. I think this is the first time that I’ve had the significant players in my contact game — phone, palm, mail app — all talking to each other.

I was down in the bay at Oracle HQ last week. I was asked to give a presentation. I threw together some slides with Keynote. I plugged the projector in and hit the “Play” button and had each slide on the projector and the presenters display — the current and next slides, time spent total and on the current slide — on the local laptop LCD. Even the most mouth-foamy Linux advocates had to admit that this was neato.

Don’t get me wrong. Linux is a fantastic tool for a non-trivial set of problems. Our customers certainly have some serious problems that they prefer to solve with Linux. My day job is still working with Linux. I’m damn good at it and I enjoy it. This leads me to Parallels, the current leader of the OS X PC virtualization pack. It was trivial use an FC6 ISO on the network to install Linux in a virtual machine. I now have a window, which I can full-screen if I so desire, that offers the comfortable Linux environment. Hence the title of this post — I didn’t give up Linux in exchange for OS X. I made it so I can use the modern desktop in OS X to avoid trivial hurdles while solving hard problems for people with Linux. I’m one happy camper. A hoopy frood, if you will.

I couldn’t end this post without mentioning Quicksilver. I was referred to it about a week into my OS X experience. I have been using computers for nearly all my life and I can say this with a straight face: Quicksilver has changed the way I interact with the computer. I will not attempt, and no doubt fail, to clearly describe it in depth. Tutorials exist for that level of introduction. I will, however, share this example of the keystrokes required to bring up my dad’s (a.k.a. Doug) entry in Address Book at any time: control-space, d, o, u, return. I now take this kind of warm-knife-through-butter efficiency for granted.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) effort aims to develop a laptop that costs U$100 which will be used to educate children, particularly in the developing world. For quite a while now our friend Chris has been heavily involved in the project (that’s him!).

Chris finally convinced me that tackling some of the technical problems, particularly in getting the kernel to run efficiently on such lean hardware, would be a lot of fun. I’m excited by the notion of a project I can spend hobby time on that lots of people are actively interested in. So I requested a board and here it is! I have to order some USB kit to get a development environment up and running but that shouldn’t take long at all.

For the past few months Aaron and Chris and I have been trying to help Free Geek out with their sparc gear. Chris and I finally found some time to help out and had a great time.

For those who don’t know, Free Geek is a non-profit which finds productive uses of donated computers which would otherwise be scrapped. They focus on getting the most bang out of the time their volunteers give by working with maintream PCs. They’ve been given a fair number of old Sun sparc machines but don’t have the expertise to move them. Chris and Aaron and I didn’t love the idea of these nice old Sun machines being recycled for lack of recognition so we tried to get Free Geek to let us help them. It took us a few weeks of poking at the organization before we were introduced to the guy who has worked with their sparc gear in the past and things got rolling.

The goal, of course, is to connect machines with people who can use them. So we need to know what’s in the machines. In the past they’ve only gotten as far as writing down the banner from the Sun prom which isn’t all that informative:


Sun Ultra 5/10 UPA/PCI (UltraSPARC-IIi 270MHz), No Keyboard
OpenBoot 3.11, 128 MB memory installed, Serial #10414024.
Ethernet address 8:0:20:9e:e7:c8, Host ID: 809ee7c8.


I threw together some scripts to automate the task of taking inventory of the machines. It turned out ot be fairly easy to set up the laptop to use expect to boot into an Aurora rescue image. This lets us test that the box can at least boot the kernel into a prompt and once we’re in the image we can run some commands to see what’s in the machine. We now have a list of what’s in the first handful of machines. We’ll be getting in touch with as many communities that use sparcs as we can find.

So, here comes the pitch. If you are interested becoming the happy owner of some sturdy old ultra or 4m workstation-grade machines please do let me know. I’ll make more noise here once we have a relatively stable location for the list of available hardware.

Apple released their adorable Mac mini a few days ago. A release like this invariably results in our little circle of friends trading URLs around and marveling at the shiny new toy. One of them, a piece at MacCentral, finished with an indirect quote of an Apple exec:

It was, to paraphrase one Apple executive, to solve the problem of how to make a $499 computer without it being a piece of junk.

That got me wondering. Say you don’t happen to actually run Apple software (I don’t). Say you’re willing to forgo the off-white polycarbonate (no problem). Say you’re able to spend an afternoon dodging bullets and jumping through hoops assembling PC hardware (I actually enjoy this crap; send help). How much junk can you wrestle together for $500?

Quite a bit, it turns out. I had a hard time chosing interesting parts on newegg while keeping it under $500. I eventually reached a local minimum at $530:

$104.50 ANTEC Glossy Piano Black ATX Desktop Case
$69.00 AOpen "AK86-L" K8T800 Chipset Motherboard
$69.99 ROSEWILL ATI RADEON 9600 Video Card, 128MB DDR
$127.00 AMD Athlon 64 2800+, 512KB L2 Cache
$60.00 WINTEC AMPO 184-pin 512MB DDR PC-3200
$72.00 Seagate 80 GB Barracuda 7200RPM SATA
$31.00 Rosewill 52x32x52x16 CD-RW Black Combo Drive
---
$533.49


$530 doesn’t seem so unreasonable given that the upgrade to an insignificantly faster processor and 80G drive brings the Mac mini to $600 list. This thing would definitely be noiser and bulkier but at least it’s not a hulking beige monster. It’s also missing firewire and wireless.

For your trouble, though, you get more punch than the stock mini brings to the party. Should you happen to care for such things.

After throwing this together I noticed that Deb had done almost the exact same thing. Great minds, and all that. I was aiming for the vanishing fraction of the market that I happen to occupy while Deb was doing the calculation for the vast majority of users out there. Good times.

A while ago some of us helped Chris move his machines from his office on the 8th floor of a building in downtown Portland down into the building’s basement. I don’t think I ever put the pictures of this up anywhere. Doing so gives me an opportunity to try out this Exhibit plugin that I’ve been considering.

The machines in question were noteworthy. They were very powerful for their time but that time was, well, a decade ago. They are from the era of solid metal and large fans all rolled into a heavy chassis the size of a North American household appliance on casters. Sun sparc center 2000s and Cray 6400s to be exact.

The path from the office to the basement passed through the elevators, through the lobby and out onto the sidewalk, around the building and in a service door, and down another elevator into the gargantuan basement. You can imagine the looks five scruffy guys got while rolling these noisy machines around the corner of a building downtown on a weekend.

Also, it was raining.