Meet you back here in half an hour.
What are you going to do?
What I always do - stay out of trouble... Badly.

What The Hell, Dell?

I was looking at server pricing to see what it would cost to buy some sizeable web/database servers outright. Answer is: Not that much. A Dell dual quad-core Nehalem server with 72GB of RAM runs about $5600. But the drive prices!

1TB 7.2K RPM SATA 3.5" Hot Plug Hard Drive [$579]

That's some markup you've got there, Mr Dell. A 1TB Seagate desktop drive costs $90; the server version (which is  the same hardware, but different firmware) costs $160. Dell's storage prices are pretty much a deal breaker. But at some point I ended up on Dell's Australian site, where the exact same server gives me this option:

1TB 7.2K RPM SATA 3.5 " Hot Plug Hard Drive [$311.30]

Wait, what? I know that the Aussie dollar has strengthened against the US dollar of late, but not that much.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:30 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Voltaire May Be Dead...

But as far as I know, the First Amendment* has not been repealed.

One of the most** enjoyable parts of my hobby (and would-be business) is waking up in the morning and checking my mail (e- or snail-) to find that someone wants to sue me for something one of my bloggers has said or done.

Citing "hate speech" laws* of some city***, as though the internet were a local newspaper, just adds to the piquancy.

* Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It's not complicated, people.

** As in, least.

*** The Fourteenth Amendment reads in part:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:41 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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We Hates Them

Aargh.  Computers.  We hates them.  We hates them.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:05 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Stop Changing Stuff!!

Sony are discontinuing Cinescore - the program I used to mix my three recent albums.  They say they're working on something new, but no word as to what or when; Cinescore and its content packs will cease to be as of 1 January 2010.

If you're interested in a high-level musical paint program, I can recommend it, particularly since it's 60% off until it expires.  The download version comes with 20 themes and costs $45.98.  (I paid $110 or so; it originally sold for around $400, I think.)

Meanwhile, the video player I licensed for integration with Minx has a new version - with a new license, which has no "unrestricted" level; it's all per-site.  Shades of Movable Type and the 3.0 debacle.

I can still integrate the old version, which works perfectly well.  The new version ratchets up the fees dramatically, to the point where the cost/benefit just doesn't make sense...  Just like MT 3.  And we all know how that turned out.

Anyway, just randomly ranting because one of the work servers suffered a RAID explosion yet agan and turned a simple half-hour task into four hours of scrambling.  I hate Adaptec.

Update: The video player people are being reasonable.  They do want more for the upgrade than it cost me for the original license, but it's still cheap for an unrestricted license for this sort of application.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:41 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Shoot Me Now

Linux gets the job done.  It may not be actually good in comparison with what is possible, with what has been achieved in the past (and indeed the present) in some minicomputer and mainframe operating systems.  But it turns inexpensive commodity hardware into a powerful and flexible computing platform.

And it doesn't require a reboot to change the hostname.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:53 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Dear Fedora People, You Suck

If you install Fedora 12 with /boot on a RAID array - either as its own partition or as part of a root partition that is on a RAID array - and also install the bootloader to that partition rather than to the system MBR, the partition will not be marked as bootable, as it should be. This renders the installed Fedora unbootable. To work around this issue, you must manually mark the appropriate partition as bootable with a tool such as fdisk.

Yeah, I NOTICED.

Of course, this is the default behaviour.  Nice testing there.

Yeah, I know, open source, plenty of betas etc etc.  But you'd think someone would have bothered to actually install it at some point.

Update: Oops, I'm wrong.  The default behaviour is to install the bootloader to the MBR.  However, that doesn't work either.  I'm now trying it with the bootloader actually on the RAID array.  If that doesn't work, I'll try fdisking it with the rescue CD.  If that doesn't work, then screw it, I'll run an un-RAIDed boot partition.  Of course, by that point I will have installed it SEVEN TIMES.

Update: The Fedora installer is a blight.

Apart from being entirely unable to set up a proper software RAID boot partition (something Linux has supported for years), it crashed twice during disk partitioning,* once skipped the package selection stage entirely, and once failed to load the video driver.  Oh, and once it just failed in the middle of the install process with a read error, though that's not necessarily its fault.

On top of that, the install menu doesn't support my keyboard.  The keyboard works in BIOS, works after the install menu, but won't work in the menu itself.  I had the exact same problem in openSUSE, though...  Actually, openSUSE also failed to boot after installation just like Fedora.

Anyway, what with three failed attempts to get a working RAID /boot, one trial of a non-raid /boot, one trip into rescue land, one read error, and four outright installer failures, it's taken me ten tries to do a fairly simple install of a modern version of Linux.  And that's ignoring the failure with openSUSE.  And I'm hardly an inexperienced user; I've been using Linux continuously since RedHat 6.1.

This is just crap.

* Not an outright crash, but the installer's error handling is basically nil.  At the first sign of trouble, you get a dialog box that allows you to reboot.  No options, just reboot.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:38 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Blub

Got it to partition my disks the way I want them without crashing.

Go it to install.

I suppose that asking it to boot is too much?

My other two Linux boxes are running Fedora 8, which is getting on a bit, but which actually works.  This is my first time with Fedora 11, and so far I'm not all that impressed.

I'll try a minimal install with a plain boot partition* and see how that goes.  I can always take a backup and rebuild using a rescue CD if need be.

Update: Okay, that worked.  In fact, it worked very well.  Fedora 11 is fast and clean and the video driver problems that plagued 9 and 10 seem to be all gone.  The weird thing is that it wanted to boot from /dev/sde, which is not at all where I put the boot volume originally.  So let me try that again with RAID.

Update: And this is why I tell people to buy a small NAS...

Update: Working now.  Once I moved the boot volume to sde/sdf it worked fine, so that was a BIOS issue and nothing to do with Fedora.  Currently installing 1.5GB of patches, then I'll install OpenVZ and see where that takes me...

Update: OpenVZ is a no-go.  Fedora 11's new video drivers - which actually work - require a 2.6.29 kernel.  Stable OpenVZ is on 2.6.18; the latest release is on 2.6.27.  Since I want this to be a stable file server / dev & test server, and I want OpenVZ so it can be the same as production, that means I need to go back to CentOS.  So off I go.

Update: So Haruhi will be the new 2008 Server server, and Yurie can be my Linux desktop or whatever.  That can wait for Fedora 12.

* Rather than RAID-1.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:50 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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AGGAEGRWEFKHW$FKH!!@#$*&!@#$!@!

Did I mention that I hate the Fedora disk partitioning tool?

'Cause I do.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:37 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Aaaargh!

Are Fedora ever going to fix that piece-of-shit partitioning tool?

Version 11 of Fedora after 9 major releases of RedHat and it still blows dead goats.

They've fixed it so that it no longer requires you to unselect all the drives you don't want it to create a partition on.  (Yeah, that was lots of fun when you had eight or ten drives to set up.)

Now it just immediately forgets what drive a partition is supposed to be on, and won't let you clone layouts from one drive to another because of that.

And the old favourite, go back and try to edit your layout because it's randomly numbered your partitions yet again and it decides there's no room for your new partition and crashes.

I hate this thing.

Yeah, I know that I could grab a copy of the source tree and submit a patch or fifteen.  But they change it in every release, and in every release something different is broken - or the same thing is broken in new and wonderful ways.  As well as the things that have always been broken.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:01 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Bum

And a network configuration goof which took us offline again.  I thought we'd had another crash, but no, it was just that the IP addresses for the virtual machines come unbound if you restart the network stack without rebooting.

Eesh.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:35 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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