For those of you think the economic sky is falling, I’d like to offer a little reminder.
I first mentioned this in 2002 (I think) on sheer.us – but, basically, if you look at a long term graph of the DJIND, you can pretty clearly see that it went nonlinear in a big, and kind of insane, way. Below is a 30 year graph of the DJIND, courtesy of e*trade – anything strike any of you as, um, funny?
So, today I had another experience in the vein of the ‘CalPop = worst ISP ever’ post. I haven’t been writing all of these up – a few months ago we couldn’t get into our cabinet for over a hour because no one knew where the key was, for example – I finally had to take the doors of the cabinet off their hinges. But today’s was a crowning CalPop moment – worthy even of some of the things we used to do at Epoch. And I’ve carefully avoided explaining about the day I showed up to install and discovered there wasn’t a drop and no one knew what a crossover cable was. Today’s was a totally different experience, though.
I arrived with 3 more servers to be installed in our quarter cabinet. Since the cabinet is empty except for us and two other servers, both fairly low powered machines, and this would make a total of 5 servers for us, it didn’t occur to me to worry about power issues – so I happily plugged in and turned on. Things looked like they were going well until I plugged in the monitor from the crash cart, and then suddenly the entire rack went dark. Hm, thought I, and I checked the powerstrip breaker. Nope, closed. Then I went over and asked CalPop to reset the feeder breaker. Turns out they can’t – because we’re in the side that they lease from XO – and no one is answering the door at XO, or the phone. So no reset. They move us to a new circuit – at which point I discover why all the trouble. It wasn’t just us on that circuit – it was us and the cabinet next door – 10 1U servers, among other things. 😉
Now, you could make a good case that all of this could happen to anyone, and I agree with that. I even remember once at Epoch where we had a power outage caused by a cleaning lady vacuuming the server room. (Yes, I’m sure this happens all the time). But it still has this sort of feel of we’re not quite sure what we’re doing to it 😉
Kayti points out that I haven’t really posted anything about my life in several months. There isn’t really a lot new to mention – I’m still trying to get MetricMind to get me a replacement cable for my EV (apparently the company that made the original cables has been bought out, which caused all sorts of confusion). We’re thinking of moving in May or June to someplace slightly cheaper – or at least someplace that has central air. My court case finally resolved.. I’m pretty sure that I’m out a significant chunk of money even if I don’t need any further physical therapy, but for a wide variety of reasons that I will document at some later date, my lawyer thought that probably the settlement I got was about as good as I was going to do. I hate insurance companies, I hate the U.S. legal system. Nothing new there, though.
I’m moderately hopeful that the current economic collapse will help bring us one step closer to a world with a more sensible way of handling resource allocation. I still hate money. I still like Barrack, although I still can’t pronounce his name right and probably just mispelled it. I still love my cat, Allie, and he’s still adorable and (unfortunately) very sharp and a destruct-o-matic kitten-47. I’m still working on a web 2.0 application for a startup, and getting very close to beta on it. I’ve only got two clients (as opposed to five a few months ago) so I’m looking for some more peicemeil work to fill in the holes. I am still hopeful that sometime in the near future I can get a job writing software for EVs or AFVs. I’m still trying to get up the energy to drag the rack of recording gear (A/D converters, tube preamps, and the like) to the living room where all the rest of the music gear has gone so I can start recording. I’m hoping sometime soon to buy a friend’s x86 mac and move my music recording software to x86 mac as it’s looking increasingly likely that the x86 macs are more reliable than their G4 cousins.
Hm. I’m not sure what else to say. Me and Kayti keep discussing our wedding plans, off and on, and while I sometimes feel like I can’t breathe whenever we talk about such planning, I’m starting to look forward to it. I think. I’m slowly financially recovering from the last 3 months of 2008.
I’m hoping to have paid off all my credit cards in June of ’09. I’m trying to decide between several excessive expendatures to do after having done so 😉
I haven’t been tracking the social internet as well as I’d like.. it’s been weeks since I’ve read my LJ friends page – although I’ve been doing moderately good at watching facebook. I’m developing sort of a love-hate relationship with facebook – I love the people that the site has attracted – many friends from a wide variety of my life – but I pretty much hate what the site itself does. 😉 I wish I could get the same people in a livejournal feed. Actually what I want is something halfway in between the many paragraphs of LJ and the single-line updates of facebook – and with better privacy controls than facebook has – and less confusing ones.
I also want a world in which people don’t get fired for what their facebook photos show. I think it’s pathetic that anyone would be fired because facebook showed them naked in a hot tub or smoking a bong. Part of what’s wrong with this universe in my opinion.
I’m dreading my taxes, but I’ve started the process of calculating them already. Also, I dread them less than last year’s, because I think Barrack is likely to do more things I *agree* with with the money. Less machines for killing people, more machines for making people’s lives easy and wonderful. 😉
(if you’re looking for updates about my life, just ignore this geek article mostly posted so people googling for help on a subject I recently had trouble with will find their answer)
Just thought I’d post, in case anyone out there in google-land has a Thunder K8S motherboard and large (>500GB) hard disks, that flashing a new BIOS (3.09) image (see ftp://ftp.tyan.com/bios/2882_309.zip and flashing utility ftp://ftp.tyan.com/bios/flash/s2707/AMIFLASH.COM) will allow you to access those large drives without hanging on boot because of a bug in the SATALink bios. One interesting cavaet: you *must* clear the BIOS memory after flashing, or the system will not boot. Also, on my systems, after clearing the BIOS, I needed to load defaults (F2 at the ‘press F1 to run setup, or F2 to load defaults’) before I could go into setup and fix things – *anything* I did once in setup would just return me to being unable to boot. Clearing the BIOS is a matter of moving JP8 to the other two pins (it’s on the lower lefthand corner of the board, right next to the IDE sockets – see the manual at www.tyan.com. I *strongly* suggest writing the bios boot block as part of the flashing operation.
If anyone is trying to flash the BIOS from a USB CDROM, I suggest booting using the OpenDOS image on the ultimate boot CD (http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/) – choose option 3 immediately after booting, because you do not want EMM386 as it doesn’t play nice with SMP on this motherboard – and then burning the files above on a seperate CD and exchanging the ultimate boot CD for it. Or something.
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2005/04/21/win32ole.html
I know. It’s been around forever.. the elephant lurking in the corner. Two technologies that I’ve used extensively on their own, but somehow never mixed.
Until today. 😉
I only publish the link because I’m sure a lot of my three readers are perlsters, and perhaps have never thought about how powerful a tool perl can be in win32 land. I first noticed some of it’s capabilities when writing a perl script to do symlink management for my girlfrancée. It’s capable of automating filesystem manipulation in ways that aren’t even easy – or obvious – in MFC or .NET. Yes, the digital duct tape language knows no bounderies. (Thanks, in part, to the good people over at ActiveState)
So, me and Kayti have decided on 6-06-10 as the date that we will be married. Mark your calandars 😉
here is a palm-based smartphone. Well, sort of. Apparently the OS is ‘all-new’. I cringe a little bit, but then I remember that nothing could be worse than windows CE and that I really like my current PalmOS Treo, so one would hope that they put some of the same stability into WebOS. Not that I’m saying my Treo never crashes, but I think I average about one crash a week, and they’re nearly always when I’m starting up the ssh client – and I have to admit, a ssh client is a pretty hairy thing to be running on a cell phone.
I’m currently trying to economize my life in general.. I actually had to debate with myself for several days before buying the Strong Bad video game
I have a number of criticisms of the current economic system, as many of you know. I pretty much hate money, and think everyone should have access to unlimited resources. Haven’t figured out how to implement that one yet.. 😉
Anyway, one of my criticisms of the stock market is of margin accounts. I have a margin account – I don’t remember what feature I needed that the regular account didn’t offer, but there was something having nothing to do with what I’d normally think of as margin that I couldn’t do unless I switched to a margin account. I’ve purchased on margin a few times, and I’ve had to answer a margin call once. I was able to.. but I’m not criticizing it because of me.
Instead, I’m criticizing it because of the people who can’t make their margin call. Not, as you might think, because I feel sorry for them – although I do – but because I feel sorry for the whole system. It’s *got* to be dynamically unstable.
Here’s the problem. If you can’t answer a margin call, your broker sells off your assets to pay back your margin debt. Now, if this were a isolated system and you were the only user of it, this would work fine. However, you’re *not* the only user – and selling off your assets lowers the price of those assets for everyone else. Maybe only fractions of a penny for each individual margin call – but multiply that by 10,000 or 100,000, and you’re starting to talk about some pretty serious wampum. Now, one side effect of lowering the price of those assets is that it makes other people’s margin ceiling *lower*, because your margin purchasing power is based on the value of the assets you hold. So, it can result in other people getting margin calls – which some of them will be unable to pay – and the result is kind of a domino effect which only starts to be really apparent in a prolonged bear market.
Who would design such a thing? I nominate Bloody Stupid Johnson, from Discworld. It has his flavor to it.
I should mention that I’m not in fact a financial guru, and there might be some really well designed effect that counteracts what I’ve just described. Feel free to comment.
So, I’m here today to tell you about a little adventure that I went on, and perhaps save you some headache if you happen to be trying to go on a similar adventure.
The beginning of our story: recent events caused me to reacquaint myself with Cisco’s layer 5 switches, also known as the Cisco CSS series. These were originally a product called Arrowpoint, made I think by a company of the same name, and when I first started playing with them around my Epoch Internet days, they were horribly expensive.
They’re not any more. You can find them on e-bay for $150-$300. They’re kind of nice, really – they’re capable of being regular layer 2 switches, layer 3 switches, or ‘content aware’ switches – so they can do NAT-style load balancing at wire speeds – as well as doing URL-aware traffic directing – which presumably means speeds approaching a gigabit since most of them have gigabit fiber ports, or at least spots for a fiber transceiver.
But, never mind the sales pitch – I presume if you’re reading this and you found it from Google, it’s because you have one of these things and you’d like to initially configure it, which requires a console cable. NOT, mind you, the standard Cisco blue console cable that we all carry around – nay, nor the 3Com nor Baytech console cables (which are also DB9-RJ45), nor any of the above with a null modem.. nor, amusingly enough, even the Official CSS-CONSOLE-KIT that one might order from any number of vendors and Cisco describes at http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/contnetw/ps789/products_tech_note09186a00800a3f28.shtml
At the point at which I discovered this – including ordering a $54 CSS-CONSOLE-KIT off ebay and a $74 CSS-CONSOLE-KIT from CablesAndKits.com and finding that neither one worked correctly – I was starting to wonder if I had somehow acquired not one, nor two, but three CSS boxes that didn’t work. It seemed unlikely.
Finally, I got frustrated, and did what I should have done several iterations earlier.. I made two RJ45 pigtails – one I marked TX, RX, and ground on (since it was connecting to a PC port through a standard Cisco console adapter, it was a known quantity) and the other one.. first I determined which pin was ground – pretty easy, just set voltmeter on continuity and measure with CSS turned off between CSS frame and pins. Then, I turned on the CSS and measured voltage between ground and various pins – it didn’t take long to determine that there were just two pins that were floating – one of which had to be RX. There were also only a couple of pins which had approximately the right voltage to be transmitting data. I toggled the power on the CSS while connecting each of them to RX on the PC – and before long, I had found my transmit pin. From there, finding my receive pin was just a matter of trying all the possibilities until something made the box start responding when I hit keys.
To get the resulting pinout, please paypal $5 to sheer@sheer.us… just kidding.
Seriously, the pinout is as follows:
Terminal side CSS side
3 2 6 3 5 1
Hopefully this information will save you some time.
To clarify, this pinout is for a adapter cable that will adapt a cisco blue console cable to a 11000 series CSS (but NOT a ArrowPoint branded CSS, I don’t think). I used phone tap splices to make mine, but you could also probably figure out how to correctly stick the li’l colored wires into a RJ-45 on each end to get this result. Then I used a RJ45 female-female to connect mine to a Cisco Blue console cable).
11500 CSSes use the standard cisco blue cable.
(p.s. Thanks to Kayti for correcting the most obvious of my spelling and grammar errors, and also holding a voltmeter probe on one of the RJ45 ends while I was reverse-engineering my handmade cable to write this note)
(p.p.s. Thanks to Allie for tangling his claws in the cable while I was trying to reverse engineer it by myself, reminding me that reverse engineering is best done as a social activity.. especially when you are reverse engineering your own work)
Just a reminder for you linux admins – chmod is not the end of file permissions in ext2/ext3. You also need to lsattr/chattr to cover all your file permission bases. Thanks to DoctorWho for the tip.