Wibblelog

… so of course they pick that time to break.  My backups server at home (wakko), which is a mac mini, decided to melt its internal hard drive on about Dec 31.  Sadly it took me until Jan 4 to notice, because I don’t have ironclad enterprise-grade monitoring of my home network. (Of course, what I do for a living is maintain an enterprise-grade monitoring system. Irony!)

It took about 30 minutes for the recovery process to turn into this scenario, as such things always do.  Internal disk in mini dies.  Of course there’s no serial port on the mini, nor is there a monitor in the closet where it lives, so I take it out and attach it to the tv in the bedroom, where I discover that there’s rampant filesystem corruption, which isn’t fixable because of I/O errors on the internal disk.  OK, call it a loss - let’s attach its external disks (which are in USB+Firewire enclosures) to an older Thinkpad that conveneintly also has Linux installed.  Wait, what?  What are all these USB timeout errors?  These things worked perfectly with the mini!  Oh, it turns out these enclosures work great when attached via Firewire, and not so well via USB.  Actually it turns out one of them is fine, but the other one own’t work at all via USB.  Oh wait, the fine one isn’t so fine - its fan has siezed up and the disk is about to catch fire.  Thankfully, I have a spare disk enclosure to replace that one.  Still only one working disk out of two required to get my backup pool mounted, though.  Hmmm… aha, I have another spare disk enclosure, but it’s the one I don’t like because it traps heat.  Let’s try it anyway.  Yay, it works!  Now to get LVM started.  WTF, device mapper not working?  Hm … manually load the kernel modules.  Try again.  Woo, lvm works now.  Filesystem mounted!

Now what?  Um … I dunno.  I guess I should get backuppc installed on this new machine so backups start working again.  At least I didn’t actually lose data to this.  In theory even if the backup pool was lost I wouldn’t be losing data, becuase hey, it’s backups!

I think the lesson here is that even my backups server wants to have redundant storage so I don’t have to waste a day fixing it every time it throws a disk.

Oh, and some monitoring stuff wouldn’t hurt.  What do people use for monitoring their stuff?  Nagios seems to be miserable - is there something nicer out there that’s free?

Comments(2)

There are 37 ethernet ports in my apartment.

But only one in the spot where I put my desk.

*sigh*

Comments(0)

I’ve always thought system emulators are really cool, but this one takes the cake for me at the moment. JPC is a full x86 emulator written entirely in Java, and it actually runs at a pretty good speed. Very impressive. If you’ve been wanting to play with old DOS games you haven’t seen in a decade or more, here’s your chance!

If you’re more interested in a native-code x86 emulator, DOSBox is always good, but it takes a little bit more fiddling to get going.

Comments(0)

This Simon guy wrote a bunch of useful things about running a ZFS fileserver at home, including a discussion of why he chose it and why he went with OpenSolaris rather than FreeBSD/MacOS/Linux. He went through the same sort of setup process and decision-making that I did, but he did a much better job of documenting it for posterity. If you’re considering running (or replacing) a home fileserver, I recommend giving this a quick read. (via)

Comments(0)

My friend Andrew seems to be having the standard silly sort of problems that one encounters when using USB mass storage devices for anything even slightly serious. I really don’t miss that collection of problems - I finally switched from using various USB-attached hard drives to using eSATA disks. Same disks, same enclosures, just a different controller in the host pc. It works sooooooo much better, and it’s faster. The assorted USB disks worked kinda acceptably when I was doing Linux software raid5, but failed miserably when I tried OpenSolaris. I’m glad something just forced the issue so I had to quit using a crappy setup.

I wish Andy luck with his USB storage setup, of course, and particularly the Zonbu hardware he’s messing with (which seems to be particularly neat), but I’m pretty happy with my nice stable SATA arrangement and ZFS :-)

Comments(0)

Why does Solaris (as of SXCE N76, at least) still use old-school unix crypt(3C) passwords? crypt is totally deprecated as a password hash, even according to the manpages included with the OS. All you have to do to fix it is set CRYPT_DEFAULT=1 in /etc/security/policy.conf, but good god, why is the default still __unix__ there? Compatibility with solaris 7? People who still use that should probably be punished. :-P

(update: Actually it turns out that better password hashes weren’t supported in solaris until Solaris 8, which is a mere seven years old - it came out in Feb 2000. Ben Rockwood wrote something more useful than I did about the matter a year ago.

Comments(0)

I’ve finally gotten around to messing with OpenSolaris a bit at home, and I’m simultaneously impressed and disappointed. I’ve been excited about stuff like ZFS for a long time now, and I’m anxious to run my home fileserver with that, but as with all projects in computing it’s more annoying than I want it to be to get things working.

My problem with Solaris and OpenSolaris at the moment is that it seems like the features I want are perpetually right around the corner, so I should wait just a little longer and then everything will be happy and perfect. First it was ZFS existing, then ZFS in a stable release, then ZFS root, then BrandZ (the magic stuff that lets you basically run a Linux distribution inside a Solaris zone), and now the Solaris CIFS server which is supposed to be super awesome and integrated, but doesn’t quite exist yet. The code is there, but it’s not in the most recent release of SCDE or SXCE or Nevada or Indiana or Solaris or whatever the hell it is I’m supposed to be using… Which leads me into another bit of complaint: Which freaking version of Solaris do I even want?! I was less intimidated by this stuff when there was just Solaris, and it was a big mean monolith of UNIX that required you to wear suspenders and grow a beard for ten years to use it properly. The stuff that’s coming out now is incredibly cool, but also wicked fragmented. I understand that project Indiana is intended to unify the Solaris universe significantly and bring it closer to the computing nirvana everybody wishes for, but as always, that awesome thing is juuuust around the corner and not here yet. I’m continuing to be patient, and now starting to try using these things and perhaps contribute to the community, but I have to wonder if six months from now I’ll still be holding out for the next must-have feature that will be just around the corner in another few months. The answer is probably yes, of course, given the nature of the computing universe. What I really hope for, however, is something that’s good enough to settle down with for a while and really use. I’m OK with patches, bug fixes and workarounds, as long as there’s something I’ll be able to install on my machine at home and know that I’ll be able to use for at least a year or so without absolutely needing to reinstall it to keep up with the OpenSolaris community. When can I have that?

There is a good side to this, though it’s shrouded in more complaining. I installed Indiana on my little desktop machine at home, and it damn near works. Aside from some glaringly obnoxious omissions (no compiler? no java? WTF!), I’m running into all sorts of trivial little things. For instance, I have a SUN KEYBOARD attached to my machine, and some of the keys don’t even work. I could really care less about the Stop/Again/Props/Undo/Front/Copy/etc buttons, but having the volume and power keys work would be mighty nice. Also, when I logged into the default desktop, which is a GNOME setup that looks exactly like Ubuntu (not a complaint, mind you), I found that the default terminal was anti-aliased, which I hate, and Firefox font rendering was NOT anti-aliased. WTF, kinda. I grabbed my .Xresources file from elsewhere and fired up a plain old xterm (which was not in the default system PATH, of course) and was happy enough. So what’s my point? The fact that I’m even bothering to voice these petty complaints about a Solaris system is fairly amazing. Think of all the things I’m not complaining about: X came up like magic, with the right screen resolution for my 24″ LCD panel. Audio works. Really - it just works. WIFI works, to my great amazement. I booted up, it asked me what wifi network to connect to, I provided it with my WEP key (which I have memorized, thankfully), and it just freaking worked. I’m still a bit stunned at that one. I mean, Ubuntu works that smoothly these days, but it’s still a pain in the ass to get Windows to work with the average wifi card if the driver for it isn’t included with Windows. Holycrap, Solaris beats windows at network configuration. Never thought I’d see the day.

Update: No sooner did I post this than I read someone else’s very similar rant right on blogs.sun.com: Read what Bill Sommerfeld has to say about the matter. Tim Foster also has something to say about brand fragmentation.

Comments(2)

All this “wireless” stuff is getting pretty amazing. It didn’t really hit me until I started using it all at once how much of it I have, but here’s what I’m doing right now: Typing on a bluetooth (wireless!) keyboard and using a bluetooth (wireless!) mouse on the Mac Mini attached to my TV, which is connected via wifi (wireless!) to a linksys wrt54g access point, which is connected via an actual ethernet cable to my Soekris box running OpenBSD (this is normally my home router, when the cable modem is working), which is connected via yet another actual ethernet cable to my laptop, which has an EVDO cellular modem in it (wireless!) and is providing the Internet connection for my apartment, because my cable is out. (which is another story, of course).

Simultaneously, my cellphone - which has its own GSM (wireless!) connection to T-Mobile - is connected to my Mac Mini via bluetooth (wireless!) because I have been sending mp3 files to it to use as ringtones, and also connected to my home network via wifi (wireless!) to provide it with a data connection to the outside world.

Additionally, I was just talking to Jenny on my nifty 5.8ghz cordless phone (wireless!) which is connected to the VOIP box (I use Vonage presently), which is connected via an actual ethernet cable to the Soekris box, which routes it out through my laptop’s cellular connection to the internet. That’s right, I’m using VOIP over cellular packet data, and it works just fine.

So, for the record, I’m sitting here on my couch in my living room using no fewer than nine radios simultaneously, and there are several more not currently active: the wifi card in my laptop, the wifi card in Jenny’s desktop computer, and the other cordless phone handset in the other room. Oh, and I suppose you can count the wireless Gamecube controller, which also uses RF, plus the PSP in the other room which has wifi, along with Jenny’s wifi-enabled laptop, the bluetooth dongle on my linux workstation, my wireless headphones and their ipod adapter, and of course I’m planning on getting a bluetooth earpiece for my cellphone (since putting something shaped like a poptart up to my face isn’t all that comfortable), for a grand total of at least 18 frequently-used radio devices in my little apartment. Note what’s not present in the list: any receive-only devices. I have an FM radio, but I really never use it.

So, I guess I’m slightly unusual in the amount of techno gadgetry that I have, but the only odd things I’m doing here are 1) using wifi on my cellphone, and 2) connecting to the internet via EVDO cellular. I’m sure plenty of people can top the number of concurrently-used radios, too. Can any of you? (hell, does anybody actually read this blog?) Please post a comment :)

Comments(0)

Apparently it’s not even remotely possible to convince Internet Explorer 7 to permanently accept an SSL cert signed by a certificate authority which it doesn’t ultimately trust. IE6 could do that just fine. Firefox can do that just fine - and its dialog box describing what’s going on is even decipherable by mere mortals. Pretty much every other web browser I’ve ever used can do it. But not IE7.

Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to import a new root certificate: just offer up your CA certificate (but not the key, duh) as a .crt file via http and load it up with the browser. It will offer to import it, along with plenty of warnings and whatnot. At least it works.

In case any of my loyal and happy users are reading this, here is my CA certificate for you to import. I’ll write up some more useful instructions at some point, such that when people invariably upgrade to IE7 and it starts giving them that very scary error message which strongly recommends that people stay the hell away from my web server because I am most likely some sort of computer terrorist because I haven’t paid for a legitimately signed SSL certificate, I can just point them to The Instructions and carry along my way.

If anyone wants to verify the certificate’s fingerprint out-of-band (ha! As if anyone is going to bother, much less understand what the point is…), go right ahead and email or IM or call me and I’d be happy to pass it along.

Oh, and here’s my actual preferred workaround: Use Firefox instead. Version 2.0 should even be released later today.

Comments(0)

OSNews has a neat article (posted a few days ago) (warning, possible obnoxious flash ads) about the GEOS operating system as implemented for the Commodore 64, which is one of those neat computing platforms from the 80s that becomes even more interesting (to me, anyway) in retrospect than it was at the time I was originally playing with them. I remember playing with GEOS on a C64 that belonged to a parent of one of my friends in the late 80s, maybe early 90s, and thinking that it was pretty neat.  Way cooler than what I could run on my Kaypro PC at home, where I was struggling to get DesqView to run.

A few years later, early- to mid-90s, I remember seriously wanting a copy of GeoWorks Ensemble (probably version 2, and later 3) to run on my Kaypro machine after I had hot-rodded it with a VGA card and a mouse.  Too bad I never convinced my parents to get me a copy of it, because I still think it would have been neat to use.

Cool things I learned from the OSNews article:

• Apple was considering using GEOS as the OS platform on their portable computers at one point.
• GEOS was way ahead of Windows 3 (released at least 4 years later) as far as font rendering was concerned.
• Microsoft wanted to buy GEOS and incorporate their technologies into Windows 3, and Ballmer warned them that they would be crushed if they did not sell.  They didn’t sell, and Ballmer was right.
• There are people insane enough to write web browsers and jpeg image viewers for the C64.

Neat stuff.  GeoWorks (the company that made GEOS) lives on, at least somewhat, in the form of Breadbox.  It sounds like they mostly write apps for cellphones and PDAs these days, but they will still sell you a copy of what they now call Breadbox Ensemble if you really want it.

Comments(0)