An audience of two

Tuesday October 17, 2006

Ginormabytes - for real

A week ago I mentioned the new Sun viral marketing videos, including one called Ginormabytes. In it, in order to increase capacity they were stacking what looked like shipping containers with EMC logos one on top of another.

Well it turns out it wasn't such a joke after all. We are actually doing that. A complete datacentre in a standard shipping container - 8 racks, with all the wiring and liquid cooling. And everything is fully serviceable. The density is amazing; they showed us a prototype stocked with SunFire V20z systems, but can you imagine if that thing was full of Thumpers?

Short of space? Park one in the car park. I joked with Ben that you could even use these things like Lego bricks and literally build your office with them.

But I do have to question the logic of the non-physicists in Marketing who, having heard that the project was codenamed "blackbox" decided it would be cool (yes, pun intended) if it was painted black. White would be much more practical. Or as Dave Walker suggests, it might work well in military green, or camouflage.

And what's with the dayglo logo? Yuck!

Business Week article on Analog Devices Inc.

Business Week has published an article on dodgy accounting practices by Analog Devices Inc. The first practice highlighted was accelerated vesting.

Last October, Analog speed-vested options valued at $188 million, which pumped up its 2005 aftertax income by $134 million. Only Viacom Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc. boosted earnings more from accelerated vesting, according to Jack T. Ciesielski, publisher of The Analyst's Accounting Observer.

Sounds like Sun's been doing something iffy too, right? What they actually did was to vest only the outstanding stock options that were so far underwater they would expire before they were ever worth anything again. I think the cut-off point was above $10. Personally I've got some options price at $56 and even though I'm confident that Sun is heading in the right direction I'm not dumb enough to think that they'll ever make me anything other than bitter.

So yeah, Sun avoided taking an artificial accounting hit for something that was totally worthless. Bite us.

Tuesday October 10, 2006

Wrestling with jumpstart

I spent way too long yesterday debugging trivial jumpstart issues. When I first booted the client it would download the boot image via TFTP, then hang. So naturally my first reaction was to snoop the connection to see what was happening. This is what I saw:

client -> server    TFTP Ack  block 419
server -> client    TFTP Data block 420 (352 bytes) (last block)
client -> server    TFTP Ack  block 420
client -> BROADCAST BIFF R port=111
server -> client    BIFF C port=32771
client -> server    WHO R port=32777
server -> client    WHO C port=32777
client -> server    SYSLOG R port=32777
server -> client    SYSLOG C port=32777 BAD.FMT:

I googled "SYSLOG" and "BAD.FMT:" together with all kinds of other keywords, but couldn't find an answer. The clue finally came when I noticed that in the jumpstart window it was trying to resolve "127.0.0.1" - aha! I found the following entries in /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1 localhost server
10.1.2.3 server server-alias server.fulldomain.com

This fixed the first problem and it booted OK. However it then appeared to be finding but ignoring the sysidcfg file:

Beginning system identification...
Searching for configuration file(s)...
Using sysid configuration file server:/boot_server/sysidcfg
Search complete.
Discovering additional network configuration...
Completing system identification...
Starting remote procedure call (RPC) services:
─ The Solaris Installation Program ─────────────────────────────────────────────

  The Solaris installation program is divided into a series of short sections
  where you'll be prompted to provide information for the installation. 

It would then enter the interactive mode. Now I knew that the format of the sysidcfg was good as I'd copied it from another jumpstart server that was working. Once again, Google showed lots of people having the same issue, but no solutions.

So what was different betwen the two servers? After more headscratching I realised that this new system wasn't in the naming service yet. I'd manually added it to /etc/hosts and /etc/ethers on the jumpstart server, but neither NIS nor DNS could resolve client correctly. Fortunately there was a DNS entry for the IP address of the form dummy_10_1_2_4 so I updated /etc/ethers on the server and re-ran addinstall-client with the new hostname - Bingo.

Friday September 29, 2006

Protesting 101
Driving home this evening I passed a group of demonstrators at the corner of Mowry and Fremont, protesting about immigration. Or at least I assume that's what they were doing. For all I know it could have been Improv Everywhere having a laugh.

I saw several US flags and a banner of some kind. There were placards on which the only words I could read were "Legal" and "Immigrant" plus another that was partly folded over and so all I read was "HONK IF YOU ... ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS".

From this I deduced that these people were passionately concerned with the issue of immigration. However it wasn't clear to me what their position was - whether they were for or against it.

It seems to me that if you're going to get a group of people out on the streets on a Friday evening to protest an issue, you really owe it to all of us to make some damn sense. Judging by all the Vote Frederick Maria Truong-Katzenovic For Senior Deputy District Undersupervisor posters it's election time, so presumably you want me to go out and vote for something. Or against it. Or maybe you want me to abstain. Frankly I've got no idea. And until I understand your position, I'm not honking.

As for voting - can't help you there. I don't get a vote. I'm an immigrant.

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Thursday September 28, 2006

Another question answered
thanks to googlefight Permalink | | | | Comments [0]
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Tuesday August 29, 2006

Colbert + iPod
If - like me - you're a big fan of The Colbert Report you probably saw Stephen Colbert prancing around in front of a green screen recently. Several people on the net took that footage and did various interesting things with it. Here's my personal favourite so far
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Wednesday August 23, 2006

Enabling automout in CentOS

It was really bugging me that the automounter wouldn't access my home directory, so I spent a bit of time digging around. When I restarted autofs it complained that it couldn't find a map for auto.home. However ypcat auto_master showed an auto_home entry, so why wasn't it picking that up? I hunted around for a file containing a regerence to auto.home, but no joy.

Eventually I used strace, the Linux equivalent of truss, to see what it was doing. I found that it was reading a file called /etc/sysconfig/autofs. This isn't documented in the man page for autofs or automount but it contains a few configuration values that really should be listed. In particular the option UNDERSCORETODOT=1 looked suspicious. That was causing it to change auto_host to auto.host (What a kludge. What's that about?). I commented it out, only to find that 1 is the default value. Setting it to 0 fixed the problem

So what about /net? Clearly there was an entry in the auto_master:

# ypcat auto_master
auto_home -intr,nosuid,retrans=10,retry=3,nobrowse
-hosts -intr,nosuid,retrans=10,retry=3,nobrowse
. . .

but it wasn't showing up under mount. After a few blind alleys and a bit of googling I found this titbit. /etc/auto.net already exists, so all you need to do is edit the file /etc/rc.d/init.d/autofs and make this change:

getrawmounts | (
while read dir map options
do
# These checks screen out duplicates and skip over directories
# where the map is '-'.
# We can't do empty or direct host maps, so don't bother trying.

# Strip trailing slashes from the dir line if it exists to aid
# in checking for duplicate maps
dir=`echo "$dir" | sed -e "s/\/*$//"`

if [ ! -z "$map" -a "$map" = "-hosts" ] ; then
# START EDIT
if [ -x '/etc/auto.net' ]; then
map='/etc/auto.net'
else
continue
fi
# END EDIT
fi
if [ $DISABLE_DIRECT -eq 1 \
-a x`echo $dir | grep -E "^/-"` != 'x' ]
then
continue
fi


Then restart the automounter with /etc/rc.d/init.d/autofs restart and you're away.

That strace thing annoys me too. Half the problem of working with Linux is that the dialect difference. Most of the time for every Solaris command there's an equivalent Linux command, it's just finding it. Now I'm not saying that either side is "right" or "wrong" here, but it would be nice if there was a set of pseudo Solaris man pages, so for example if I typed "man truss" it would say "use strace" and would say what the equivalent commonly used flags are.

Another project for my copious free time I suppose.

Friday August 18, 2006

BrandZ: Two for the price of none

It's not often that I get the urge to blog something positive. I mean, by nature I'm a fairly cynical bugger. But yesterday I discovered something so unbelievably "wicked cool" as the locals say that I just had to say something.

Right now I've got a Linux system on my desktop. It's running CentOS, which is free. (Free as in beer, not as in regime change.) But what's so amazing is that it's running in its own zone on my AMD box which is in turn running Solaris. Which is also free, or at least it can be if you want it to be.

I was amazed how easy it was to set up. I was understandably nervous about trashing my system so first off I took a flash archive of my existing setup (cheers Ben). Then (and this was the trickiest bit) I set up a seperate machine as a boot server (PXE is a bitch when you're used to the Open Boot Prom) so that I could install the latest Nevada build and then go back to my old setup if I wanted to without hunting around for a boot DVD.

I wanted to re-install the box anyway as when I originally set it up I created a Windows partition so that the system could be dual-bootable. But since I've never had the urge or need to boot it in Windows mode I figured I may as well just reclaim the space. Installing Nevada was a doddle; the only downside is that I was running in dual screen mode and I've forgotten what I did to get that to work.

So then I came to install the Linux zone. I've played with zones before - they are an incredibly useful way to test installation of software since you can just trash a zone and rebuild it in a few minutes - so I already understood that part of the process. Installing BrandZ was a bit more worrying as it involves BFU and I don't like BFU, but the instructions are very clear and it all went smoothly.

So now I've got one free OS running inside of another free OS. How cool is that?

Friday June 23, 2006

First law of thermonynamics has been repealed!
Found this clip of someone who claims to have a way to use water as fuel. It must be true, it was on FOX NEWS. Sheesh. Don't they teach physics in schools any more? Permalink | | | | Comments [1]
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Tuesday March 21, 2006

Death to PDF!
According to Jonathan's Blog Customers appreciate choice. Here's proof: in less than a year, developers have requested nearly 4 million Solaris licenses - and 65% of the downloads are running on non-Sun hardware. By non-sun hardware I presume he means X86. After all, not many people have a Tadpole at home. So where the smeg is Acrobat Reader for Solaris X86? If you hunt around the net long enough you can find an old copy of the Version 4. But now it's at Version 7. I've been using the gnone PDF viewer (which is OK in a pinch) or xpdf from blastwave.org (which is better).

But how hard can it be for Adobe to recompile their reader for Solaris X86? Is it really so incredibly badly written that it's not just a trivial recompile? I'm guessing so - I've had this system for 4 months and I'm still waiting. How long does a port take?

The problem is that people are treating PDF as a standard. It's not. It's a proprietary format controlled by a corporation who are neglecting a significant number of users. I'm sick of having to switch to a different system just to open a file that someone has sent to me. Jonathan is quick to complain about sites requiring Microsoft products - well why are Adobe products any better? I'm calling for a company-wide boycott of Adobe and PDF until they commit to supporting Solaris X86 on an equal footing with Sparc and Linux.

Who's with me? Permalink | | | | Comments [5]
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Friday December 02, 2005

Fun with X64
I recently got a new desktop - a shiny new W2100Z AMD based workstation. Not that there's anything wrong with my old SunBlade (apart from its single CPU) but these days we have to ensure that our stuff works with X64 Solaris just as well as on Sparc. And someone has to be the guinea pig. And I asked first :D

So far, all well and good. It took me a while to get it up and running because I wasn't familiar with the way an X64 box jumpstarts; these days it uses the GRUB bootloader with its own menu, so configuration info that used to go in /etc/bootparams now goes somewhere else. In the end I just burned a DVD and booted from that until I'd ironed out the glitches.

First impressions are that it's pretty damn fast. How fast? It can execute an infinite loop in under 30 minutes. I haven't worked out how to enable the second display output yet - I enabled TwinView mode according to the instructions on NVIDIA's web site, but there's still something preventing me from logging in with TwinView enabled and I don't know what it is yet.

Also some web sites are getting on my nerves. I've downloaded the Shockwave plug-in and installed it; Mozilla sees it, but every time I go to a web site that uses Shockwave I get an annoying popup and I can't seem to figure out how to either get it to use the plug-in or to QUIT BUGGING ME ABOUT IT.

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