Orb Designs

Category: Computers

  • 28 Aug 2016

    Well, another busy week gone.

    Sadly, I’m a cranky bastard today because they had a late-night party at the pool last night that ran until midnight (a bit later, actually) with loud music. It was a neighborhood-approved event, so I didn’t set the cops on them, but I’ll bitch about it to the management and the board. If they can’t control the volume, I don’t want my HOA fees going to that sort of event. The restless first part of the night leaves me feeling altogether unrested. Sigh. The good news is that next weekend is the last weekend for the pool season. Yay!

    Exercise for the week was acceptable – 5 days with more than 10K steps, 4 days with significant exercise including the normal stretching and calisthenics followed by 35-45 minutes on the elliptical. So I’ve got that going for me. It’s still quite warm and humid in these parts. I’m hoping that fades out over the next week. Where I exercise, in the top floor, has been pretty warm. It’s a good workout, but too draining.

    On the computing side of the ledger, I spent part of the weekend (for work) migrating a legacy system to a virtual environment, and patching another one. On the home front, I’ve got a test system with FreeBSD 11 RC2 installed and I’m doing some ports builds to exercise the OS. Since I use FreeBSD for both home and website, it seems fair that I not only kick the Project a few bucks a year (I do), but also test the latest and provide feedback as necessary, as a service to the OS and dev team that serves me well.

    I harvested half a basket of assorted bell peppers out of the garden today.

    *      *      *

    Our condolences to the family and friends of Staff Sgt. Matthew V. Thompson, 28, of Irvine, California, who died on Aug. 23 in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, of injuries caused by an improvised explosive device that detonated near his patrol while conducting dismounted operations.

  • 16 June 2016

    Friday last, while at the office, I patched and rebooted the server this site and others runs on. That’s not totally uncommon: unlike most of the servers I manage for work purposes, I had no remote console access to my server. And since $FIRM kindly gives me power and pipe for this place, that’s just fine. Sadly, upon reboot, I waited … and waited, and finally went into the data center and connected the crash cart to the system. Um, kernel panics and NMI (non-maskable interrupts) all over the screen – it appears I had a hardware problem. Finally the system finished booting, and surprisingly it was working. I didn’t, however, expect it to remain in that state for long.

    Come Monday, I went shopping in the recycle stack for a slightly newer retired server, finding a freshly-out-of-warranty R710, not much RAM, but two quad-core Xeons. Permission attained, I then racked the box, cabled it, and started thinking hard about how I was going to get everything migrated. I’ve done it before, but configuration from scratch is hard and prone to errors, since I don’t have this one artisanally crafted host under any sort of configuration management. Yes, yes, the cobbler’s child has no shoes, I understand. I have good backups, but I’d still rather not rebuild the whole system from scratch.

    And I shouldn’t have to. I’m using FreeBSD 10.x as my server OS, which brings me a couple of strong advantages: good support for server-grade hardware, and ZFS, the best filesystem on the planet. So I spent a little while poking around the Internet, and formulating a plan, which combined elements from these two sites:

    http://daemon-notes.com/articles/system/zfs-maintenance/clonezfs, courtesy of ‘ken’, and

    https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/49702/, thanks to Farioko and the FreeBSD forums.

    The former helped me get the initial copy over to the new system, and the latter provided guidance in properly configuring the second disk to mirror all that stuff over. Grand total of actual time working on the transfer and getting the mirrors setup: About 45 minutes. Then I had a full copy of the old machine’s system running on the new hardware. Finally, I moved the ethernet  cable over, and wiped the old system’s drives clean with DBAN.

    *      *      *

    Exercise:

    Monday – 80 sit-ups, 40 squats, 32 push-ups, assorted stretches, and 7000 strides on the elliptical in 50 minutes.

    Tuesday – Off. I pushed really hard Monday.

    Wednesday – 100 sit-ups, 50 squats, 40 push-ups, assorted stretches, and 6400 strides on the elliptical in 46 minutes.

    Thursday – I substituted yard work for exercise this evening, getting the lawn mowed before big rains move in tonight.

    Ciao!

  • 9 June 2016

    The weather has cooled dramatically, after a day of wind and a spot of rain yesterday. This morning it was 47° F during my drive in. Busy week, what with chores and a CALUG (Columbia-Area Linux Users Group) meeting last night.  The speaker was Eddie Roache, on the topic of Docker. That’s something I know very little about, which makes it fun! Now all I have to do is find time and resources to play with it…

    Exercise:

    Monday – 60 sit-ups, 40 squats, 24 push-ups, assorted stretches, and 6150 strides on the elliptical in 46 minutes.

    Tuesday – 48 sit-ups, 30 squats, 21 push-ups, assorted stretches, and 4100 strides on the elliptical in 32 minutes.

    Wednesday – 64 sit-ups, 40 squats, 28 push-ups, assorted stretches, and 6100 strides on the elliptical in 45 minutes.

  • 5 June 2016

    On the exercise front:

    Monday – Holiday.

    Tuesday – 75 sit-ups, 50 squats, 30 push-ups, assorted stretches, and 5100 strides on the elliptical in 38 minutes.

    Wednesday – 45 sit-ups, 30 squats, 18 push-ups, assorted stretches, and 6060 strides on the elliptical in 45 minutes.

    Thursday – 60 sit-ups, 40 squats, 24 push-ups, assorted stretches, and 6130 strides on the elliptical in 45 minutes.

    Friday – My back was wonky from a new addition to the “assorted stretches”, so I took the day off. I didn’t even get up to 10K steps (but close-ish at 8900).

    Saturday and Today – Yardwork counted by Fitbit as exercise to the tune of 3.5 hours and 30K steps. Good enough.

    *      *      *

    Yep, the lawns are edged and mowed. The veggie gardens are weeded. And I pulled out enough broccoli to provision three dinners for two. Tonight’s was brown rice cooked with chicken stock, chicken breasts braised in chardonnay and fresh chives, and … broccoli. I also added some chopped fresh chives from the yard to my rice.

    I spent some time in the woodshop working on a project for my dad, and that covers the non-working week.

    *      *      *

    I’m falling behind on my reading, though. There just aren’t enough hours and energy in these summer days.

    Ooooh, yeah. There was something else…

    I have a large primary UPS here in my home office, to run the always-on home server and assorted network gear, along with backing up a couple of other computers that are running from time to time (but I never like exposing a computer to line power). I’ve had it for several years now, and while the available run time has dropped off a bit, I never got a “replace battery warning”. Instead, at about 10 after 6 (AM) yesterday, it startled me out of sleep with a screeching alarm and an error code that didn’t make sense in context (overloaded). Hmmm. A bit of exploration online, and it seems that there’s something fundamentally off. More than just replacing the battery will fix, I’m sure. So instead I went down to Best Buy and picked up a replacement APC XS 1500 unit. On trying to shut down the old one a last time, I managed to elicit the same error that woke me in the morning. So it’s a good thing I replaced it.

    *      *      *

    DoD announced no new casualties in the last week.

  • 24 April 2016

    Another day, another birthday. And this one accompanied by a wonderful cake made by Marcia, with a decoration assist by Linda Rose:

    Occupationally appropriate birthday cake
     Job-appropriate birthday cake

    *      *      *

    I, of course, witnessed little of this activity, because I spent the weekend absorbing InfoSec goodness at BsidesCharm 2016. An excellent two day conference with interesting keynotes and talks. Because of the setup of Bsides, the sponsors don’t get the attendee lists, there are no scannable badges, and sponsors don’t automatically get speaker slots. Truth be told, in our area, the sponsors weren’t there to sell (mostly), they were there to recruit. As one of our keynotes mentioned, in the DC area, InfoSec is at negative three percent unemployment. There are Bsides events across the country – look for one near you at the SecurityBsides.com site. Highly recommended.

    *      *      *

    DoD announced no new casualties in the last week. That’s a good thing. Ciao!

  • 17 April 2016

    This was a good week. Not a great week – that would have required all seven days to have been above 32° F for the full 24 hours each. That only happened four times. That said, work was good and productive, including the weekend work that ate half of yesterday, as well as patching last night and this morning.

    The rest of the weekend was given to yard work of assorted types. I mostly did lawn care, but we did get a couple of new rose bushes for the front porch pots, a couple of herbs for the herb box in back, and I’ve stocked up on mulch (for yard bed dressing) and manure (for garden bed amendments). I’ll probably take a couple of days off this week to get the beds turned over and that manure turned in, so that it can rest for a week before I start planting veggies in the last week of April.

    Oooh. Marcia made a couple of superbly yummy apple pies yesterday. We might have completely demolished one of them already. I’m taking the second one to work, tomorrow.

    *      *      *

    Technology update: I’ve gotten OrbDesigns.com setup with SSL, finally. This long-overdue development is courtesy of letsencrypt.org: “Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority brought to you by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG).”

    I’d always been a bit of a cheapskate about SSL on the sites, mostly because I don’t do any financial or personal transactional business here. And an SSL certificate for  just orbdesigns.com would have cost me more than the annual domain registration fees. I’d been following the progress of Let’s Encrypt with some interest, and jumped on the bandwagon, totally by chance, the day after the public Beta ended. I’m pleased that the service is available, and that there’s a couple of options for FreeBSD. I took advantage of the directions on Bernard Spil’s blog on the topic at wiki.freebsd.org/BernardSpil/LetsEncrypt.

    I’ve still got to setup auto-deploy to accompany the automatic renewals that are already configured. And I’ve got certs for Marcia’s two main sites already: I just have to configure and deploy to those.

    *      *      *

    Our condolences to the family and friends of Airman First Class Nathaniel H. McDavitt, 22, of Glen Burnie, Maryland. He died on April 15 in Southwest Asia as a result of injuries sustained after extreme winds caused structural damage to the building in which the airman was working.

  • 10 April 2016

    A good week, overall. I was on-call for the first half, which is tiring, even when nothing happens. Yep, I sleep a lot more lightly when responsibility requires it. But one week out of every few weeks ain’t bad – and our monitoring and remediation are in a state of continuous improvement, so we get far fewer alerts and calls than in years past. All to the good.

    I also executed terminal retirement on a stack of former virtualization hosts. Spin down, uncable from last network connections and from the SAN, spin up again with a DBAN disk in the optical drive: boom. No more data. Some may be repurposed as a lab environment, but the decision hasn’t been taken yet.

    *      *      *

    It was a fairly relaxing weekend, since the house is fairly clean, and it’s too darn cold to do any yardwork … Hey, did I mention that we had sleet, graupel, and snow on Saturday morning? Did I also mention that four days in the last week started off below freezing? So much for Spring. It had been warming up, and everything started to bloom, then BOOM: be cold and die, little plants! Good thing I’d not planted any veg in the garden yet, eh?

    So we had Linda and Mike over to supper last night. Marcia made a wonderful, hearty, chicken stew, complemented by Asiago wheat bread and a green salad. Desert was a shortbread laden with blueberries. A good game of Ticket to Ride followed … good because against all odds, I won.

    Both weekend days, I gave a few hours to playtime in the world of The Talos Principle (which I finished), and the Road to Gehenna DLC (which I started). Fun puzzle game: Recommended.

    *      *      *

    I’m currently reading Cordwainer Smith’s The Rediscovery of Man collection, along with last month’s Strange Horizons. I finished up the April edition of Clarkesworld earlier in the week, too. And I’m continuing to work my way through Learning Ruby the Hard Way, 3E. I’ve been spending years getting just enough knowledge to get the job done, but I want some more depth on something, anything. So, before I work on a substantial project, best to begin at first principles. That’s what I’m doing.

    *      *      *

    DoD announced no new casualties in the last week, for which we are grateful. Ciao!

  • 20 March 2016

    It must be Spring. We’ve been in the 30’s all weekend, and it’s currently dropping what’s quaintly called a “wintery mix” on us from low, leaden skies. Bah!

    *      *      *

    We’ve lost a lot of the roadside trees in our neighborhood in the last couple of years. The HOA’s landscaping service took out a bunch this winter, and replaced them with … some other kind of tree, I’ll guess. They didn’t get all of the dead trees yet, and from the tracks on the barkless trunk, you can probably see the reason behind the death:

    Bug 1, Tree 0
    Bugs 1, Tree 0

    Yup, some kind of insect really loves the trees we’ve got in the upper part of the neighborhood. The lower is full of bradford pears, which are lovely in the spring, and as fragile as a vase, on a candlestick table, in a windstorm, on a concrete patio, surrounded by disturbed bison. The trees that are dying are less physically prone to splitting in half at the drop of a hat, but they’ve apparently appeared on the menu for some bug.

    *      *      *

    I got a variety of things done this weekend. After Marcia and I went up to Hobby Works this afternoon, I dug out the Hellcat model I’ve been working on for the last few years. Okay, I haven’t worked on it in a couple of years, but it’s still a fun project. I got the rest of the stringers laid onto the main part of the airframe today.

    Hellcat model
    Hellcat model in progress

    Next up: wings.

    *      *      *

    I did run into an interesting problem this weekend. Firefox was auto-updated to version 45.mumble, and when that was done, I could no longer browse to any site that wasn’t https. After a while trying to fix things with my existing profile, I threw in the towel and built a clean new profile, and migrated some of the key configurations from the old. All’s right with the world again, at least in Firefox, for the moment.

    *      *      *

    Our condolences to the family and friends of Staff Sgt. Louis F. Cardin, of Temecula, California, who died on Mar. 19 in northern Iraq, from wounds suffered when the enemy attacked his unit with rocket fire.

  • 9 Feb 2016

    Disappointing. Snow fell for about 18 hours, leaving a total accumulation of … nothing. A smattering on the grass, a damp road surface. It was just too darn warm coming into this event – the storm never had a chance. It didn’t even frighten the schools in my county into closing – and they frighten real easy!

    *      *      *

    A challenging day at work, with Internet issues external to our sphere of control, but massively annoying, taking center stage. That, plus a failed piece of hardware, made the first half of my day disappear. I’ll get caught up, somehow (although there’s a replacement piece of hardware that’s in flight and will need fettling and installation tomorrow).

    *      *      *

    I also finally figured out how to get the six tracks of AFP’s Strung Out in Heaven onto my iPhone. I’d had iTunes setup to do conversions to Apple’s lossless format, because why not? Well, why not appears to be: iTunes won’t transfer those tracks to the iPhone, being afraid I’ll be angry that they’re so big. So I dumped everything I did the other day, re-imported the WAV masters, then converted them to AAC format, which then synced to the iPhone just fine. I suppose I ought to figure out how many other things I’ve got sitting on this box in a frantically high bitrate. Just not tonight.

    *      *      *

    New Hampshire? #WTF

  • 21 Dec 2015

    A day late, and a vacation dollar short. Yep, vacation. I’m “off work” for the next two weeks, which means that I only keep an eye on email, and respond if SMS messages flow my way. But for the purposes of day-to-day operations, I’m offline. Yay!

    *      *      *

    In other good news, no vomiting in more than a week, so I’ve got that going for me.

    *      *      *

    Please note that policy requires the new disclaimer in the footer of this site. So noted.

    *      *      *

    The weekend flew by with assorted home-maintenance chores. They were mostly plumbing, which is mostly done – I still need a short length of 1-1/2″ pvc pipe, which I thought I had on-hand, but I was mistaken. So I also checked on my PVC cement, which I did have a can of … but it’s not a liquid as such, anymore. So that’s on the home center list, too.

    I also managed to take some time to decommission some old data drives. For tin-foil-hat-reasons, I don’t just throw disks away or recycle them. I electronically wipe them, then destroy their ability to be read. Here’s the end result of one such session with 6 disks:

    Data destroyed
    Data destroyed

    *      *      *

    Today I got my sump pit monitoring system back online. For a variety of reasons, I broke it a couple of months ago, and neglected for a long while to get it back online. Today, that is remediated. The sump pit monitoring setup is well documented by Al Audet on his Raspi-Sump page, so I would be too redundant to repeat it all here. But his code works, so get it and use it. Yes, you’ll need a Raspberry Pi, and some assorted other stuff along with a bit of soldering or breadboarding skills, but that’s not hard to come by, and none of the stuff is so expensive that you can’t replace the bit you break. Better yet, it’s MASSIVELY less expensive in both time and money than what you’ll go through if your sump pit overflows. There are commercial monitors available. Ones that will also send you text messages are heinously expensive. Try Raspi-Sump, you’ll like it.

    Side-note – I was introduced to Raspi-Sump on the pages of Linux Journal.

    *      *      *

    DoD announced no new casualties in the most recent week. Ciao!