Okay, for those of you curious about such things, we are back safely in the U.S., having visited numerous internet peoples, the Edinburgh fringe festival, Swindon, London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow, and driven around through northern Scotland. The last week feels like about a day to me, and as you can tell from me being awake at 8:22 am, I’m somewhat jet-lagged. But I will manage.
Pictures soon..
1) My web page front (www.sheer.us) still pulls from livejournal.com – so as a result, this post will ping-pong from my wordpress, to LJ, to my homepage. Maybe somewhat wasteful, but oh well.
2) I prefer not to think of it as death, but rather as logging out. Given infinity and eternity, chances are we’ll all get together again somewhere, sometime. (Or, as Manaj said.. sometime, when it’s the right party..)
3) I know I said 2. But I need to find a party with obscenely loud anthem trance. If none are forthcoming… (looks towards his garage and snickers) – ten friends, a generator, a car full of speakers, and all of the Great California Desert. Just have to wait a few more months for it to get cool enough.
4) Obviously I don’t know when to stop. Yesterday was a friend’s 5th anniversary of not smoking. I wish I could remember when I stopped, so I could have some clue what anniversary I’m on. I’m pretty sure I’ve stopped for good, because the smell of smoke now makes me unhappy, and even when peer pressured I don’t light up. No big loss – it sucked money out of my bank account, made me feel miserable in the mornings, and wasn’t as effective as coffee in making me alert. And I’ve learned that it’s acceptable to wander around talking to coworkers *without* anything burning
5) In other, less exciting news, 210 days.
6) I hate money. I hate corporations that care more about money than the well being of their employees or customers. I hate that anyone should go to sleep in a gutter, or have no food, because of stupid little pieces of green paper. I feel guilty that I appear to have drawn one of the longer straws, and that I don’t do as much as I should – but I also feel like I will be able to do more if I get out of debt before I start seriously looking for places to spend my money that will help feed the dogs, cats, and humans of the world. I also hate that donating anything results in many organizations sending flurries of letters your way – which makes one wonder if donations aren’t counterproductive because the energy you send in just gets used to send letters to more people
Hm. I’m not in the best of moods this morning. I think I’ll go back to coding.
I have observed in a system of mine a phenomenon that I’m hesitant to even try and classify.
This system is a older AMD64.
I can run a certain very-high-cpu-using process at nice 0 (normal priority) and the system core will rapidly heat up to 64 degrees C (it used to go considerably hotter and then go into thermal shutdown, but I put it in a case with a obscene number of fans, and even added a couple of extra well-placed CPU fans, and now it stops at 64).
Or, I can run the same process at nice 19 – getting almost the same amount of work done – the process still gets 96% of the CPU, and still performs it’s task at very close to the same rate (maybe 15% slower) – and have the CPU sit at 40 degrees C just as it does when the system is idle.
Can anyone explain this? Does that last 15% really cost that much?
I think one of my major failings as a person is that I spend entirely too much time thinking about the past and the future, and not nearly enough time thinking about the present.
I don’t really understand how I got to be this way, but I think it’s a source of a lot of unhappiness for me. Among other things, a lot of my thoughts of the future are in the format “when I ….. then I’ll be happy”, where … can be replaced with get out of debt, figure out how to make N work correctly, etc. And, of course, I get whatever it is accomplished, and then I come up with some new value for …
As far as looking towards the past, I think of things and people long gone – in some cases, dead – and miss them, and feel sad. I think a little bit of this is normal and even positive, but I think I take it entirely too far.
The past is gone, and I should look towards tomorrow not in a planning sense, or in the sense of being worried or fearful about what could come, but in a sense of being excited about what the future could bring.
I sound like chicken soup for the soul or something.. yeesh…
root@peterbilt:/# tw_cli
//peterbilt> info c4
Unit UnitType Status %Cmpl Stripe Size(GB) Cache AVerify IgnECC
——————————————————————————
u0 RAID-50 OK – 256K 1676.32 ON OFF OFF
Port Status Unit Size Blocks Serial
—————————————————————
p0 OK u0 298.09 GB 625142448 9QF1ZFXB
p1 OK u0 298.09 GB 625142448 9QF1ZCFP
p2 OK u0 279.46 GB 586072368 4NF1V1WY
p3 OK u0 279.46 GB 586072368 4NF1ZDHK
p4 OK u0 279.46 GB 586072368 3NF1HAD5
p5 OK u0 279.46 GB 586072368 4NF1V2M2
p6 OK u0 279.46 GB 586072368 4NF1RWDA
p7 OK u0 279.46 GB 586072368 4NF1V2JD
//peterbilt>
So, peterbilt’s RAID finally formatted out 100% good.
We’ve learned many things from this adventure:
1) PCI-X and PCIe are NOT the same connector
2) When partitioning RAID devices, aligning to a 1 megabyte sector boundery helps (use 32768s in parted)
3) parted is much easier to use than fdisk for certain things
4) msdos disklabels are no good for volumes bigger than 2T. Use gpt disklabel instead
5) onboard RAID controllers on motherboards (i.e. ‘fakeraid’) and ubuntu do not get along very well
6) The RocketRaid products are not very good either although they at least work albiet very slooowly
7) Do not ignore warnings about RAID arrays lest they become more serious warnings about RAID arrays
8) mke2fs has -T largefile for files that contain mostly huge files. Saves time, makes less inodes
9) -E stride=N – N is your RAID card’s stripe / 4. Does help. I knew this before, but was good to be reminded.
10) parted needs better error checking on msdos filesystem for sector counts that wrap
11) raid 50 is *incredibly* forgiving.
12) On thermaltake cases, DO NOT LEAVE THE SIDE PANELS OFF! They keep drives cool to the touch when the panels are on*.. or will burn you when they are off. I figure i hastened at least two drives to their graves. I feel vaugely bad about doing a RMA on them… but why doesn’t SMART *report* that they’re overheating? Good equipment shuts itself down and lives on to fight another day, IMHO..
13) Ultimately, the last ditch backup strategy that worked was to go buy a couple of 1T external disks and manually weed the directories out into <1T chunks, then pass some –exclude= lines into tar. Many many higher tech things were tried first, all failed. [But someday soon I will have one heck of a backup server. Yes, backups have now progressed in my life to where they warrent their very own server]
14) Certain unnamed people were extrordinarily helpful in retaining my sanity, and were pillars of strength..
15) I need to get some kind of psychological help – when the thought of losing a terabyte and a third of data is this traumatic.. I mean, literally, I haven’t slept well since this thing started.
In the course of a long life, a man must be willing to abandon his baggage many times. (probably misquoted) –Lazarus Long
I can’t even abandon my data..
* = in peterbilt’s configuration, which is eight SATA disks in 5.25″ removable caddies with individual fans
Does anyone have any suggestions for tools to aggregate a bunch of RSS pages together to form something like LJ’s friends page, but spanning several different blog sites?
By the way – and I know most of you already know how to do this and wouldn’t need my help – but, if any of my friends want help migrating their LJ to WordPress – including free hosting if necessary, or hints as to how to set up your own server – let me know.
(No, I still have not forgiven LJ for their ToS)
So, I was pondering operating systems recently..
Of the machines currently connected to the net at our house (note that many of these are turned off – recently, in order to save power, I decided to start using wake-on-LAN and managed powerstrips..) here is a breakdown by operating system
1) Ubuntu: the.edge, peterbilt, qm
2) WinXP: vm, ivy, jam, media
3) Win2003: p2p
4) Win2K: gamer
5) AIX: aixer
6) BSD: beastie
7) RaQ linux: ns2
8) OSX: music
9) RedHat: gateway
Unix-based: 8
Windows: 6
Also, we have two ‘guest’ computers:
nonmundane.org: bsd
kanvas-staging: ubuntu
And, two in the process of being built:
Ubuntu: underdog, halcyon
Other computers that aren’t currently unpacked but could be:
*) Sparc 5
*) DEC Multia (2x)
*) AlphaStation LX433
*) Amiga2000 (x2), 4000 (x1) – I actually even found ethernet cards for them!
So, as most of you know, I got a sDSL 1.5 megabit symetrical line. What you may not know is – it’s not enough..
So, today, theoretically, AT&T is supposed to come deliver a 3.0/512k asymetrical line which I am going to configure such that all of our web browsing goes through it, leaving the 1.5 megabit circuit for the server segment.
Ah, if only FIOS came here.