Category Archives: Computers

Travels done

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And we’re back!

Nine days in California and in the air are done: We flew out to SFO on the 22nd, and flew back through DFW on the 30th. We visited with my folks for about three days, then headed over to SF and stayed there while I attended VMworld 2013. I attended three general sessions and 19 technical sessions in four and one-half days … my brain nearly exploded. I watched countless demos, met many wonderful and smart people, and acquired enough t-shirts to last me until the next millennium. The weather was lovely, and Marcia split her time between the City and learning some design software.

While in the air, I was reading a couple of Liaden Universe novels by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. Agent of Change and Fledgling are both available for free at both the Baen Free Library and on Kindle for the time being. You can consider those to works to be a gateway drug, since the writing is wonderful. You’ll spend some more of your time and money on their books, because you should. Learn more at http://korval.com/.

I’m not sure, but I’d guess that the authors get more of your money if you purchase through Baen … you can always ask them. It’s certainly worth encouraging the Baen Free Library when you buy from Baen, too.

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Our condolences to the families, friends, and units of these fallen warriors:

  • 1st Lt. Jason Togi, 24, of Pago Pago, American Samoa, died Aug. 26, in Hasan Karez, Afghanistan, of injuries sustained when enemy forces attacked his vehicle with an improvised explosive device.
  • Sgt. 1st Class Ricardo D. Young, 34, of Rosston, Arkansas, died Aug. 28, in Ghazni Province, Afghanistan, of wounds sustained when insurgents attacked his unit with small arms fire.
  • Staff Sgt. Michael H. Ollis, 24, of Staten Island, New York, died Aug. 28, in Ghazni Province, Afghanistan, of wounds sustained when insurgents attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device, small arms and indirect fire.
  • Staff Sgt. Joshua J. Bowden, 28, of Villa Rica, Georgia, died Aug. 31, in Ghazni, Afghanistan, of injuries sustained when enemy forces attacked his unit with small arms fire while on dismounted patrol.

Dan steps up

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A big shout-out to Dan Seto, of Misc. Ramblings fame. He’s one of the infamous Daynotes Gang, joining (being joined? forced into Internet servitude?) the group shortly after I did, back in the earliest days of the new millenium (or possibly at the end of the last, I don’t have a precise record at hand). Dan stepped up to the plate and covered Daynotes.com‘s registration for the next couple of years, so we’re good most of the way through 2015! Thanks, Dan!

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I was amused to note that NetSol will let you spend nearly 3300$US online to “renew” a domain for an additional 100 year term. If you’re taking the long view, either personally or corporately, that might be a really good financial move. Gandi’s registration fees for the common TLDs are less than half what NetSol charges, but online you can only go up to 8 years for $124. GoDaddy runs just under 15$US per annum for renewal fees.

I bring up Gandi in that list above because I freed myself from GoDaddy’s increasingly interesting perspectives and issues. My biggest gripe with them was their support for Disney’s lobbying efforts on behalf of the MAFIAA’s legislative agenda, explicitly last year’s SOPA bill. It’s taken me a while to find the time to undertake the changes necessary, but I completed that journey yesterday, migrating the last of the domains to Gandi. The web interface is much more pleasant, and when whois privacy and domain list selling opt-outs are factored in, they’re cheaper than GoDaddy, too.

Whoops! Time to walk the mutt. Ciao!

Finishing a cabinet; Ch-ch-ch-changes a’coming.

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Finishing the corner cabinet

Finishing the corner cabinet

 

I’m making progress, as you can see. This cabinet may be upstairs as early as Wednesday of the upcoming week. Depends if I can get enough coats of poly on the doors and shelves. Pictured above, I’m at the poly stage for the face and insides – the dark teal sides are already three coats and cured. After supper, I took those down, laid out the doors and shelves, and first-coated the backs. Tomorrow, a quick sanding and I’ll get the second coat on.

*      *      *

While I am not going to have the liberty to host sites that aren’t mine, I’m migrating back to a personally administered system. $FIRM has graciously allowed me some bandwith, 1RU of rack space, and an old R410. I’ ve got Scientific Linux (the high-energy physics respin of RHEL) I’m doing this for reasons. REASONS, I tell you. Well, I’m not telling you, not now, anyway. There are likely to be format changes, too, though I’m going to maintain the blog format for convenience. But it may not be the front-line landing page anymore. What I do will be clear and documented, though.

This site is running from the new box, as are Daynotes.com and Daynotes.net. Speaking of the former, Daynotes.com is still “owned” by Tom Syroid. But since Tom appears to be staying offline, there’s no way to transfer ownership. If anyone wants to pick up the ball this year and give Network Solutions some money to renew Daynotes.com before the site expires in mid-September, that’d be awesome. You don’t need to have any formal access to renew (spend money) at NetSol, at least you didn’t last time I did it myself. I’ve renewed it several times personally, but it’d be nice if someone has found it useful steps up for a year or two. Let me know if you do, and you’ll get public thanks, here and elsewhere.

Depending on the gardening potential tomorrow, I’m going to try to get Marcia’s sites migrated to the new box before the new week gets rolling. Now to walk the mutt in between rain bursts and then do a bit of remote system administration for work. Ciao!

LOPSA-East #FTW

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I got back this morning at about 11:30 following a fantastic LOPSA-East conference. I entertained such subjects as Tom Limoncelli’s Evil Genius 101, Kyle Fulton’s Automation in the Cloud with Puppet, Shumon Huque’s Using and Migrating to IPv6, and Matt Simmons’s Intro to SSDs. The Friday night keynote was delivered by Marcus Ranum of varied and interesting fame – his talk was funny, accurate, and depressing as hell. Just sayin’.

The New Brunswick Hyatt is venue for the conference, and it was excellent. The food was superb (in general, not just in the context of a tech conference), and the training rooms were well equipped. The LOPSA organizers are all awesome. #HighFives, y’all.

The 325i was a fine place to spend a few hours in driving up on Thursday afternoon, and back this morning. Four hundred miles round trip, and I got over 37 MPG. Wow!

*      *      *

Our condolences to the families, friends, and units of these fallen warriors:

  • Staff Sgt. Michael H. Simpson, 30, of San Antonio, Texas, died May 1 in Landstuhl, Germany, of wounds sustained when insurgents attacked his unit on April 27, with an improvised explosive device in Arian, Afghanistan.
  • Spc. Trinidad Santiago Jr., 25, of San Diego, California, died May 2, in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, of injuries sustained in a vehicle accident.
  • Pfc. Charles P. McClure, 21, of Stratford, Oklahoma, died May 2, in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, of injuries sustained in a vehicle accident.
  • Capt. Mark T. Voss, 27, of Colorado Springs, Colorado, died May 3, near Chon-Aryk, Kyrgyzstan, in the crash of a KC-135 aircraft.
  • Capt. Victoria A. Pinckney, 27, of Palmdale, California, died May 3, near Chon-Aryk, Kyrgyzstan, in the crash of a KC-135 aircraft.
  • Tech Sgt. Herman Mackey III, 30, of Bakersfield, California, died May 3, near Chon-Aryk, Kyrgyzstan, in the crash of a KC-135 aircraft.

Eeek! It’s Monday!

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The weekend was given over to spring cleaning, and moving bits of furniture about. I was in another world last night –  a world of pain. So sorry to have given the mostly-regular Sunday post a miss.

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Top Tech Tip – You should have on-premise Tier 1 timekeepers – NTP out in the world is a scary place (search on “ntp vulnerabilites” for more information). Used to be, you could either cobble something that worked out of an old bit of Garmin gear, or spent 2-3K$ on a “proper” rack-mounted GPS unit. It’s not good to have single points of failure, though, so either more cobbling, or more likely a second expensive bit of kit.

Now, though, there’s the Time Server, from Time Machines. When I say “now,” I’ve no idea how long these things have been on market. The Internet Archive first noticed this product in late 2011, so it’s been a year and a half, at least. The products are inexpensive, well built, and do precisely what is described. And at $600 for a pair of them, redundancy is a no brainer. Highly recommended.

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Our condolences to the families, friends, and units of these fallen warriors:

  • Chief Warrant Officer Curtis S. Reagan, 43, of Summerville, South Carolina, died March 29 in Kandahar, Afghanistan, from a non-combat related illness.
  • Capt. James Michael Steel, 29, of Tampa, Florida, died April 3 in the crash of an F-16 near Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan.

Moving right along

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First, for US visitors, Happy Thanksgiving. A weird holiday, to be sure, but it’s always good to be thankful for life, family, friends, and first world problems.

*      *      *

I’m posting from Linux again, for the first time in a long while. I’d been trying a variety of solutions for storage here, answers that didn’t involve running a full-size system 24×7. I couldn’t do it. You see, it isn’t good enough to just back stuff up here at home. I’m not going to backup home data on a cloud somewhere on the Internet – our friendly government doesn’t appear to respect the Fourth Amendment when it comes to online resources. So I don’t keep email online. Well, I try not to, but I’ll bet Google has it all anyway. But there are files and work I do here that I’m not willing to trust to another administrator and their devotion to security. So while I backup online stuff here, and I backup the home systems here, I need to get a copy of those backups offsite. Fire, theft, and other quirks of life are risks that need to be managed.

So, a weekly copy of the local backup, written to an encrypted disk, and driven to work … that’s a good answer. But when I stood down Slartibartfast, the old Linux server, and replaced him with a dLink NAS box … well, some things didn’t happen anymore. Automated backups of online properties – not happening. Trivially easy local and encrypted backups: neither trivial nor easy anymore. But I kept after it for a while, so that local systems could spin down, data could flow to the storage when it was available, and … I’d figure something out about the offsite.

That didn’t happen. Finally, I broke down a few months back and installed FreeNAS 8.mumble on one of the towers. Key needs: local AFP, SMB/CIFS, and NFS service. Scheduled tasks to pull backups from out in the world, so that problems there don’t kill our data forever. And encrypted backups to removable storage. Seems easy, right? And a dedicated local storage server STILL seemed like a better idea than toying with using a workstation ALSO as the storage server. Feh!

FreeNAS eventually solved everything but the removable storage problem … and the AFP service. The latter problem first: Apple presents a fast moving target for their file services, and I want a networked Time Machine target. Could not get it working with the latest FreeNAS, so the dLink kept spinning. Formerly, and more importantly, while I could plug in a USB disk, write an encrypted ZFS file system to it, create the walkabout tertiary backup, and take the drive to the office … I could only do that once per boot. That is, to get FreeNAS to recognize a drive reinserted into the USB or the eSATA connections, I had to reboot. Probably a failing of the non-enterprise support for hotplug … but a failing all the same.

This week, a “vacation” week for me, I’d had enough. I installed Scientific Linux 6.3, and got all of the above stuff working properly in less than a day. The ONLY thing I miss from FreeNAS (and this was a big driver for me) is ZFS. I *love* ZFS. Filesystem and volume management done properly, with superb snapshot capabilities – I LOVE ZFS. But I can’t have that, and everything else I want, so I’ve solved my problem.

Serenity boots and runs from a ~160GB SSD, and I have three 1TB drives in a software RAID5 serving as the data partition. It’s all formatted EXT4. I have a SATA slide-in slot on the front of the system, I can slot in a hard disk, give the crypto password, and have my offsite storage accessible for updating using rsync. Everything is working again. I can spin down that dLink, and decide what it’s fate is, one of these days. I also don’t need Dortmunder, the Raspberry Pi, running as my SSH and IRSSI landing “box” anymore. That I will find another use for – I can play with it now. And I’ll cautiously update and maintain this system. Frankly, I happier with it running Scientific Linux – the stability of a RHEL derivative is good.

Now to figure out why I can’t get my external SSH port open again… Thanks, Netgear, for giving me one more problem to solve on my “vacation.”

Oh, and finally: a good disk management GUI for a Linux:

Gnome Disk Utility

Gnome Disk Utility

Gnome Disk Utility – I don’t often prefer a GUI, but managing complex storage, which may involve hardware or software RAID, LVM, encryption, and more … well, the visibility of this utility makes me happy. Thanks to Red Hat for writing it.

Marcia’s back (again) & Linux reloaded

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Today, I relaxed a bit. Shopping in the morning, a bit of Top Gear UK during the day, and I picked Marcia up at BWI around 1500 EST. Happy dog is happy, and so am I. The holiday bird is in the fridge, I’ve got a tray of mac-n-cheese ready, and … we’ll see how the table ends up.

Tonight, I blew out the FreeNAS installation, and installed Scientific Linux 6.3 x64 on the box still known as Serenity. I had a lot of trouble getting things working right, and there are issues with offsite backups that are much more easily solved with a Linux at the helm. Instead of returning to the Ubuntu way, I figured one of the RHEL retreads would be a good way to go – I’ve got to re-certify in the next few months, and more practice is good.

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Our condolences to the families, friends, and units of these fallen warriors:

  • Capt. James D. Nehl, 37, of Gardiner, Oregon, died Nov. 9, in Ghazni Province, Afghanistan, from small arms fire while on patrol during combat operations.
  • Sgt. Matthew H. Stiltz, 26, of Spokane, Washington, died Nov. 12, at Zerok, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when insurgents attacked his unit with indirect fire.
  • Staff Sgt. Rayvon Battle Jr., 25, of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, died Nov. 13, in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan.
  • Sgt. Channing B. Hicks, 24, of Greer, South Carolina, died Nov. 16, in Paktika province, Afghanistan, from injuries suffered when enemy forces attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device and small arms fire.
  • Spc. Joseph A. Richardson, 23, of Booneville, Arkansas, died Nov. 16, in Paktika province, Afghanistan, from injuries suffered when enemy forces attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device and small arms fire.

Update: Dortmunder

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Anthony commented on one of the early pictures of Dortmunder, asking “How does your new computer behave?”

Unremarkably is perhaps the best answer – in that there’s nothing to remark on, it just keeps ticking on. It’s currently acting as my home IMAPS server (dovecot), as well as an IRC (irssi) launching spot that stays connected in a screen session.

Agog:~ bilbrey$ ssh dortmunder
Last login: Thu Aug  9 17:40:36 2012 from 192.168.1.100
[bilbrey@dortmunder ~]$ w
 17:41:11 up 25 days, 20:38,  1 user,  load average: 0.11, 0.04, 0.05
USER     TTY        LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT
bilbrey  pts/3     17:41    0.00s  0.15s  0.04s w
...
[root@dortmunder pacman.d]# pacman -Qu | wc -l
68

And given that Arch is a rolling-release Linux distro, I’m not surprised that there are 68 packages awaiting update. But not right now. Now it’s time to feed the mutt.

Fuzzy? Mac Air MiniDP/HDMI vs. Samsung Syncmaster P2770HD

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What a lovely lead, eh? But I had a heck of a time finding my answer, and while I never did find precisely what I wanted via search engines, I did get enough of a hint that I finally figured it out.

I have Agog, this Mac Air. It’s got Thunderbolt/Mini Display Port output and I’ve got a MiniDP-to-HDMI adapter. I also have this 27″ HDMI + DVI Samsung Syncmaster P2770HD display. Here’s the problem: When I connected the Air to the Syncmaster at full resolution, the screen image was displayed with about “half an inch” missing at the top and bottom. To get the whole screen displayed, I had to muck with the over/underscan setting in the Display Settings dialog. That would get me to where I could see the menu bar and the whole doc, but at far too great a cost: fuzzy, fuzzy display. Hinky for pictures, awful for text.

There was lots of griping in the assorted forums that I found talking about this issue, but no one had the right answer. Some extremely helpful folks said, “Well, it works for me!” Isn’t that special!

But someone was writing about menu settings … on the display. I had tried and failed with Auto Adjustment – it appears not to have any effect for the digital input modes on this monitor. However, I found the fix: Menu -> Size & Position -> Image Size. It was set to 16:9. When I changed it to “Screen Fit”, the magic happened. Now I have the Air happily displaying crisp text and images on this big screen, which is a good thing.

Hopefully this helps someone else down the road. Ciao!

SuperDuper! to the rescue!

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Today, I changed the password on my Mac Air, Agog. I then cooked dinner, and watched a couple of episodes of Poirot. I came upstairs … and I don’t remember the password I set. It was a good one. I have backups a couple of different ways, but neither of them seemed to be immediately accessible to me. In order to recover from the Time Machine backups, I need WiFi configured *and* I need to mount the volume that has that sparse image on it. That path seemed blocked to me. But there’s a better way!

I make periodic backups of my system using a program called SuperDuper! Among other lesser capabilities, it duplicates the whole system onto another (external) disc, and makes that bootable. Except that when I booted while pressing the Option key … the USB external drive wasn’t being presented to me as a boot option, as the documentation says it should. Sigh.

After spelunking around in Recovery mode (hold Command-R while booting) for a while, and taking a break to walk the dog, I came back, and FINALLY, in Disk Utility , the Apple menu offered me the option to set the boot disk. I selected the AirDuper disk I’d refreshed just last weekend, and that’s what I’m booted into now. I’m using that to restore Agog’s internal flash drive, which is happening in the background as I write this.

Whew!

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Our condolences to the families, friends, and units of these fallen warriors:

  • Staff Sgt. Carl E. Hammar, 24, of Lake Havasu City, Arizona, died July 14, in Khost province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered from enemy small arms fire.
  • Sgt. Erik N. May, 26, of Independence, Kansas, died July 14, in Ghazni province, Afghanistan.
  • Spc. Sergio E. Perez Jr., 21, of Crown Point, Indiana, died July 16, in Wali Kot District, Afghanistan, from injuries suffered when his vehicle was struck by enemy rocket propelled grenades.
  • Spc. Nicholas A. Taylor, 20, of Berne, Indiana, died July 16, in Wali Kot District, Afghanistan, from injuries suffered when his vehicle was struck by enemy rocket propelled grenades.
  • Sgt. Daniel A. Rodriguez, 28, of Baltimore, Maryland, died July 18, in Ghazni City, Afghanistan, when his vehicle was struck by an enemy improvised explosive device.
  • Sgt. Jose J. Reyes, 24, San Lorenzo, Puerto Rico, died July 18, in Ghazni City, Afghanistan, when his vehicle was struck by an enemy improvised explosive device.
  • Cpl. Joshua R. Ashley, 23, of Rancho Cucamonga, California, died July 19 while conducting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan.
  • Spc. Krystal M. Fitts, 26, of Houston, Texas, died July 17 in Kandahar, Afghanistan, from injuries suffered from indirect fire.
  • Senior Chief Aviation Warfare Systems Operator Sean P. Sullivan, 40, of St. Louis, Missouri, died in a helicopter crash July 19 in Oman.
  • Naval Aircrewman (Helicopter) Second Class Joseph P. Fitzmorris, 31, of West Monroe, Louisiana, died in a helicopter crash July 19 in Oman.
  • Pfc. Jeffrey L. Rice, 24, of Troy, Ohio, died July 19, in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
  • Spc. Darrion T. Hicks, 21, of Raleigh, North Carolina, died July 19 in Ghazni, Afghanistan, from injuries sustained from an enemy improvised explosive device.