The ravens are looking a bit sluggish. Tell Malcolm they need new batteries.
Friday, September 29
Meet Your Maker
This is interesting:
MakeVM. It's a little shareware utility that creates virtual machines - either blank ones or clones of existing disks - for VMWare.
This is great if you're running VMWare Player (which doesn't have the ability to create new virtual machines itself), or if you're running VMWare Server and want to migrate an existing Windows server to a virtual environment.
Costs $19.95 for the full version. The free download is limited to teeny-tiny VMs, so I'll need to buy it. I have a couple of Windows servers here at work that do almost nothing but which I can't actually unplug, because they only do almost nothing. Now I can finally get rid of the buggers.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Thursday, September 28
Well, That Was Fun
Had a little excitement at work today. Apparently several blocks of Sydney's CBD went dark, including, of course, our office. Our elderly UPS valiantly struggled along for nearly a minute before expiring; the blackout itself lasted about an hour and a half.
Then I had to fix pretty much everything. Crashed databases, lost routing tables, failed NFS mounts (the systems didn't neatly reboot in the required order), unending fscks (This volume has not been checked for 562 days* so I'm now going to scan every one of your seven million files and there's nothing you can do to stop me so nyah.), broken RAID sets, misconfigured network cards...
Ugh.
Knoppix was used. It would have been even more not fun without Knoppix.
* Actual number.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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1
I take it that no one was able to log out properly during the 1 minute the servers were still up ...
And of course, every temp fix that could not withstand a reboot blew up at once.
Posted by: Kristopher at Thursday, September 28 2006 10:52 AM (O5Ju8)
2
Is this why your site had an odd look to it last night? Or was that something else?
Posted by: Wonderduck at Thursday, September 28 2006 11:22 AM (6YRS5)
3
If you saw the forum-looking thing, that was a glitch in the Minx caching system.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 28 2006 10:22 PM (FRalS)
4
That's what it was, yep. "Dear
Forum... I'm a student at a small midwestern college, and I never thought..."
Posted by: Wonderduck at Thursday, September 28 2006 10:30 PM (6YRS5)
5
Wonderduck, any college student who never thinks might as well just drop out.
Posted by: triticale at Friday, September 29 2006 10:44 PM (IdwjX)
6
Hmmm... 10 points for triticale for ultimate truthiness, minus several million for completely whiffing on the joke.
To be fair, I don't know where in the world Trit is located, so it's certainly possible that he's not familiar with Penthouse magazine...
Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, September 30 2006 02:37 AM (CJ5+Y)
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Friday, September 22
VMWare Server
Rocks.
It's not perfect - see my difficulties with the clock under CentOS, for example - but I expect that sort of thing will become less common as OS developers take up VMWare as an important target platform. Linux is Linux, though, so for now it's enough to know that Fedora 5 works fine.
I needed a new Windows PC at work, and I needed at least two servers to test Minx, and I needed a replacement for our ancient development box* and thanks to Intel and VMWare Server I have them all parked neatly under my desk.
I'd be happier if I had 8GB of memory rather than 4GB, but that's still a bit pricey at the moment - and opens up the 64-bit can of worms, which I didn't feel like doing just yet.
* A Pentium III 550.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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I've recently become a big fan of VMWare too.
We're running a Sun 4200 with VMWare, which powers four Windows 2003 servers, a BSD Server and a Windows 2000 server.
The latest version, which we'll be upgrading to when we get another 4200 allows for load swapping between servers. If it works like they say it does it'll be sweet.
Posted by: phin at Saturday, September 23 2006 12:52 PM (WxMId)
2
Luogo interessante, buon disegno, lo gradisco, signore! =)
Posted by: Bimbo at Monday, November 06 2006 10:49 PM (jvPJz)
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Thursday, September 21
IJITS!
Fedora Core 5 has lost the convenient option to install everything. You have to select the various categories, select the various sub-categories, and then open a pop-up window to select the optional sub-components.
I selected all of the basic things, and selected sub-components until I ran out of patience.
This installed 4.6 gigabytes of stuff. It did not install iostat. Or sar.
Update: Updating Fedora is abysmally slow, as always. And while the update is running - which looks set to take several hours - you can't install anything. Bleh.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Last time I installed FC5 from the DVD, I was sure I'd clicked everything, but somehow I ended up without Emacs.
And for some reason it wanted to create one big file system spanned across all of my available drives.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, September 21 2006 10:59 AM (0/vcb)
2
Okay - now I know my brain is completely fried. Took me nearly an entire read-through of the top 2 posts before I remembered what Fedora was! Sheesh. And I really don't think I've been working as hard as you have Pixy. Somewhere along the line all of my working brain cells have gone into hibernation - either that or they've all given up the ghost.
Posted by: Teresa at Friday, September 22 2006 12:00 AM (jgXyO)
3
That "grab all HDs" behaviour reminds me of another OS's bad install behaviour ... SCO installs do the same damned thing ... and they don't bother to ask permission.
Posted by: Kristopher at Friday, September 22 2006 10:19 AM (O5Ju8)
4
I'm working with virtual machines at the moment, so I haven't experienced all the nuances of Fedora 5's install-time disk management. But from (painful) memory (from Red Hat 6.1 up through Fedora Core 4 beta 2) they somehow manage to select the worst possible behaviour for whatever your purpose and hardware configuration might be.
My favourite was where you had to deselect which drives it could create a particular partition on... on a system with ten disks. So for each element of a RAID array, you had to select nine of the disks and tell it that you
didn't want this partition placed there.
Actually, no, my favourite was when you got tired of doing that and double-clicked to auto-allocate the remainder of a particular drive to a new partition - and the installer crashed. After you'd spent an hour creating all those partitions. Now that was fun.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, September 22 2006 10:42 AM (0Lkqa)
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Wednesday, September 20
Will That Be Daylight Savings or Non-Daylight Savings?
I installed another virtual machine, this time running Fedora Core 5. The clock seems to work (yay!) and Python 2.4.2 runs my benchmark in 1.8 seconds, about 60% faster the new munu servers. On the other hand, I installed Python 2.5 on the new servers and it is 10%
slower than 2.4.3.
Meanwhile, my iPod has decided that my correct timezone is Abu Dhabi. I have no idea why.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Your iPod wants you to get and wear a burkha.
Posted by: Kristopher at Thursday, September 21 2006 10:34 AM (O5Ju8)
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Minus La Change
I'm setting up Kyon as a template so that I can copy it to create Yuki and Mikuru. Having installed the operating system (CentOS 4.4), I'm now installing all the bits and pieces that Minx relies on. Such as Python 2.5RC2.
I downloaded and configured it, and then ran make:
real 0m54.730s
user 0m39.567s
sys 0m13.762s
I wondered how that would compare with the new munu servers:
real 1m48.209s
user 1m41.037s
sys 0m6.834s
What the fnord?! That's one heck of a difference, particularly when you realise that Kyon is running under VMware. Same version of GCC, by the way.
Old server:
real 2m12.971s
user 2m2.240s
sys 0m5.932s
About what I'd expect - the new servers are a little faster than the old ones.
But Kyon just zooms along - if what you want to do is compile Python. It's kind of a slug for desktop use. How does it go for other server-type stuff?
Let's see. I have a little Python benchmark. Nothing complicated, but it gives the interpreter a little test. Old server, Python 2.4.2:
real 0m3.373s
user 0m3.284s
sys 0m0.028s
New server, Python 2.4.3:
real 0m3.028s
user 0m3.008s
sys 0m0.004s
Okay, slightly faster, as expected.
Kyon, Python 2.3.4 (which is what CentOS 4.4 comes with, the slackers):
real 0m0.919s
user 0m0.909s
sys 0m0.009s
Um. That's a pretty significant improvement.
Just one small problem:
It's lying.
The timer is off... Apparently by a factor of two, though it varies a bit. I increased the loop count by a factor of ten and hand-timed it. Computer says 9 seconds, I say 18.
That's gonna really suck for my development work.
Python under Cygwin gives 1.5 seconds for my benchmark, and I confirmed that (roughly) with hand-timing, so the Core 2 really is a lot faster for Python code. Just not quite as fast as Kyon wants me to believe.
Update: A bit of digging came up with this, which doesn't help much, because I've set Kyon up as a dual-processor machine. But it at least explains what's going on.
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Friday, September 15
Praising With Faint Damns
Found
on a customer review page for a memory card:
Cons: No built-in street-level GPS. No host-device-accessible cold fusion power unit. No antigravity or timetravel capabilities. That's pretty much it.
Also, Sandisk have announced a
4GB mini-SD card. That's a lot. And
here's a 2GB
micro-SD card. Now they're just being silly.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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They won't seem silly when everyone jumps from small digital cameras to small digital video cameras.
You can always find a way to abuse a bigger storage device.
Posted by: Kristopher at Saturday, September 16 2006 10:49 AM (O5Ju8)
2
Just picked up a 4Gb usb memory stick for $150.
My Nano cost e $360 the same time last year. The same vintage 512Mb stick cost about $80.
Whats not to like about the extra storage.
And yes. Once you go solid state storage for video then those big capacities are necessary. Still waiting on a 3 ccd memory card based video camera.
Posted by: Andrew at Monday, September 18 2006 07:51 PM (t8tOu)
3
Yeah. EYO have a 4GB SD card for $140 - but not all cameras support them.
And while you need a lot of storage for video, you don't really need it in something as tiny as mini-SD. We're going to end up with a great big lens, a sensor, and a tiny electronics package stuck to the back.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, September 18 2006 09:42 PM (FRalS)
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Wednesday, September 13
Architecture Wars
Seen yesterday:
ARM 86K
Guy can't make up his mind.
And today:
AWW 88K
Hate to tell him that it was discontinued in the early 90s.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, September 13 2006 08:59 AM (YWRlP)
2
Hmmm ... the spammers are targeting old posts for their comments.
Maybe freezing comments for posts over a week old would prevent this? It would also prevent some loony mission poster with a search engine from adding crap ...
Posted by: Kristopher at Wednesday, September 13 2006 10:20 AM (O5Ju8)
3
Kristopher - Yeah, I need to fix that.
Wonderduck - Geek joke. ;)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, September 13 2006 10:51 AM (0Lkqa)
4
Wasn't trying to backseat drive ... just thinking aloud ... considering options needed to make my own future blog easy to maintain.
I was considering starting a blog, but comments from other bloggers have put me off from using stuff like blogger.com.
Posted by: Kristopher at Wednesday, September 13 2006 12:24 PM (O5Ju8)
5
I comment on old posts sometimes, but I would not shed many tears if that were stopped. Many top of the line blogs have no comments whatsoever. Indeed, as someone said, "blogosphere is my comments board".
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Wednesday, September 13 2006 12:37 PM (9imyF)
6
Blogger sucks, or used to suck. They've been doing a lot of work on it lately.
I'm busy writing my own blogging system, which will go live later this year. It's pretty neat - even if it needs some better spam filtering tools. ;)
There will be both free/ad-supported and paid accounts available - the paid accounts will probably have more features available. And I'll have a certain number of free "pro" accounts to hand out as well, so just let me know if you're interested. :)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 14 2006 12:03 AM (FRalS)
7
I don't want to block off comments from old posts entirely, but what I may do (as soon as registration goes on-line) is require registration to comment on any posts older than, say, 14 days.
And honeypot them. For actual users, you won't see a comment form, so you can't comment. Spammers often just run through post numbers and hit them all in sequence - so anyone who tries to comment on a post that has comments disallowed is a spammer, and I can blacklist them automatically. Which makes me happy. :D
I enabled a simple honeypot the other day, and so far I've harvested 770 domains and 2200 IP addresses. Blocking IPs isn't worthwhile if it takes human intervention, but we already have 25 IPs that have sent us over 100 spams each, so it's working well. (And the spam block is very quick - a single indexed database lookup, and then increment the counter. Enormously faster than MT Blacklist.)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 14 2006 12:11 AM (FRalS)
8
I'm interested.
It's about time I stopped parasitizing other folks blogs ... ermmm, I meant, errrr .....
Posted by: Kristopher at Thursday, September 14 2006 01:36 PM (O5Ju8)
9
I'll move The Pond if you want me to, Pix ol' bean! I might be a good
guineapig duck. After all, I'm relatively clueless when it comes to the 'behind the scenes' part of blogging, so if I can make it churn, anybody could!
Posted by: Wonderduck at Thursday, September 14 2006 08:58 PM (YWRlP)
10
As a Munuvian, you're automatically eligible for a free unlimited account. :)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 14 2006 11:12 PM (FRalS)
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Monday, September 11
Repod
My iPod croaked again. But:
1. Toggle the Hold switch on and off. (Slide it to Hold, then turn it off again.)
2. Press and hold the Menu and Select buttons until the Apple logo appears, about 6 to 10 seconds. You may need to repeat this step.
Worked.
I think I must have done that by accident last time. When in doubt, mash the buttons.
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Wednesday, September 06
Meh
You may have a Core 2 Duo E6600; you may have 4GB of memory and a brand-new 320GB SATA-2 disk drive; but if you are running Windows XP you are running with memory management algorithms that don't appear to have been tuned since the release of NT 3.1.
Linux (2.6 kernel) has /proc/sys/vm/swappiness. For workstations, you really want this set to zero. Probably not for servers, but for workstations with plenty of memory, it's great.
Does anyone know if there is anything like that in XP?
Update: Jonathan Tappan says in comments:
My Computer
Advanced Tab
Performance Settings
Advanced Tab
Virtual Memory Change
Select "No Paging File"
Yep, that'll do it.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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1
This may help: right-click "My Computer", select "properties".
Select the "Advanced" tab and press the performance "settings" button.
In the popup, select "Advanced", and for "Memory Usage" select "Programs" instead of "System Cache". (You have to be administrator to muck with these settings.)
When it's set to "system cache" it tries to swap out code as much as it possibly can.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wednesday, September 06 2006 10:54 PM (+rSRq)
2
*points* What he said. I had just worked out the step-by-step to get you to the right place, but SDB beat me to it.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, September 06 2006 11:13 PM (CJ5+Y)
3
Oh, yes. I forgot about that, but it was already set properly anyway.
The thing is, under Linux I can say,
do not swap out my programs in favour of disk cache, ever.Under Windows, all I can say is,
if it isn't too much trouble, please try to keep my programs in memory. And of course, it swaps all your programs out the first chance it gets.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 07 2006 12:54 AM (FRalS)
4
I have a vague memory that there was another place where you could tell it the general kind of usage of your system and based on that it would retune its memory management strategy. A couple of the choices were "server" and "workstation". But I may be thinking of something from Win2K, not WinXP.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thursday, September 07 2006 02:32 AM (+rSRq)
5
I remember that too, and I think it was in Win2K.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 07 2006 08:07 AM (oFrbW)
6
Have you tried this?
My Computer
Advanced Tab
Performance Settings
Advanced Tab
Virtual Memory Change
Select "No Paging File"
Set
OK OK OK
Posted by: Jonathan Tappan at Thursday, September 07 2006 08:13 PM (wqCJb)
7
Heh. :D
I did just that on my notebook when the paging file got corrupted.
I have 4GB of memory. What the heck do I need a paging file for? Die, paging file, die!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 07 2006 09:42 PM (FRalS)
8
I have 4GB of memory. What the heck do I need a paging file for?
You'll need it for the next service patch microsoft releases, when they decide nobody will ever need over 1GB of memory on their machines.
Posted by: phin at Thursday, September 07 2006 11:04 PM (9Vcb6)
Posted by: Kristopher at Saturday, September 09 2006 10:26 AM (O5Ju8)
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