This blog is being continued at http://blogs.sigle.com

A few weeks ago while stopping by the drive up ATM my daughter noticed something that I never saw or really thought about.

The decal affixed to the machine says it all.

My daughter then went on to ask, what if the "visually impaired" person can't see the sign. I went to say, that's why it also includes the braille.

I know, maybe not a politically correct blog, but makes you wonder.

As Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols point out in his eWeek article yesterday, you do have an alternative to shelling out some bucks for the new Microsoft Office 2008 upgrade, due out the next couple of weeks.

If you get a chance, try out NeoOffice, now version 2.2.2. This is a Mac OS X version, of the popular OpenOffice.org suite. It uses the Mac OS X Aqua interface as opposed to the X11 requirements of OpenOffice.

Although I have Microsoft Office 2004 on my Macs and agree that it's one of the better running apps on my Mac, I honestly haven't used it since I've installed NeoOffice over 2 years ago. Yes, NeoOffice is a bit slower, yes, it is a bit buggy, but I can edit any Microsoft Office document, presentation or spreadsheet all for the price of $0.

So, before you shell out $150-$300 for Microsoft Office 2008, just give NeoOffice 2.2.2 a test drive. It might surprise you.

Technorati Tags: NeoOffice, OpenOffice

Meet Ollie!  He's a new addition to our family, mostly black lab with something else mixed in.

 
We adopted Ollie from the SPCA Animal Shelter of McKinney, TX last week and he's been great.  Depending on who you talk to he's anywhere from 8 moths to 2 years.  During the weekend, we took him to the dog part in Plano, TX and he had a blast playing and running with the other dogs. 

It is our first dog, so we've got a lot to learn from Ollie.

Tonight, I found out an easy way to allow a non-root user to bind to a privileged port (<1024) on Solaris 10.  I've done this before with RBAC (i.e. exec_attr, prof_attr), but knew there was an easy one line command to provide this privilege to a non-root user.

Here's the simple command.  You must run it as root. 

  # usermod -K defaultpriv=basic,net_privaddr tomcat

Now the user tomcat can run applications that need to bind to privileged ports (i.e. port 80).  For those taking notes, this addes a line into the /etc/user_attr file:

  tomcat::::type=normal;defaultpriv=basic,net_privaddr

Hope this might help another basic Solaris user out there like me.  If an expert Solaris user has a different opinion, please comment.

When was the last time someone sent your newspaper clipping in the postal mail?  I had this happen to me last week.  While reading a New York Times article about SSN's and peoples identities, a Sun colleague (past manager) took the time to cut out an article, fold it up, stick it on an envelope, address the envelope, put a stamp on it and send it to me over the Postal Mail.  First of all, it's nice to see that there are others out there that still read traditional print media.

But more importantly, when I received this, it had a much higher level of importance.  It wasn't just another forward of a URL that I filed away in some mail folder.  This person had made an effort to send me some info and that effort increased the level of importance on that information.

For those interested in the article, here's the URL.  ;-)

    Think Your Social Security Number Is Secure?  Think Again
 

This blog entry discusses the steps that I went through to get a combination of RAID and ZFS to run on a SunFire X2100.  My goal is to have a simple web/mail server with 2 mirrored disks.  This way, the unit is self contained with a complete mirror of everything.  This way if a disk goes bad, it's a simple trip to Fry's and $150 later, the machine is running fine, with no lost data.  At least that's my theory.  This blog admits that I'm not taking a larger disaster recovery into account.  That's performed with other data backups to an offsite location.

I would love to have used only ZFS to perform this task, however the current version of Solaris (update 3) won't allow for the root filesystem to be part of a ZFS pool.  When this does occur, ZFS will be responsible for all the RAID and metadbs, etc...  So, I'm using a combination of Solaris RAID and ZFS.

RAID will mirror the root, swap and a couple of metadb partitions.  The larger data partition will be mirrored using ZFS.  Below are the high level steps that used.  They aren't intended to be 100% complete, but should offer a brief set of steps for others to use.

1. Setting up partition scheme to use (Performed during my Solaris installation)
   
   I used a Seagate 500GB SATA drive.  The partition table looks like:
   
   

   Partition	Tag	Size	Description
   0	root	20 GB	/ partition. Solaris 10 install
   1	swap	4 GB	Normal swap
   2	backup	465 GB	Entire Drive Not Used
   3	unassigned	40 MB	meta-db
   4	unassigned	422 GB	Data Partition (used by ZFS later)
   5	unassigned	20 GB	/ partition. Used for future live update
   6	unassigned	40 MB	meta-db
   7

   
   A few comments about this scheme.  It's been recommended from a few resources to seperate the two meta-db's from each other in case of bad drive blocks forming.  We don't want to have both corrupted in the case that the machine needs to reboot to the other drive.
   
   
2. Format the 2nd drive with the same partition layout as the first
   
       $ prtvtoc /dev/rdsk/c1d0s2 | fmthard -s - /dev/rdsk/c2d0s2
   
   If you are runnig this on an x86 machine, first ensure that the fdisk partitions on the second disk match the first.  You can get the fdisk info with the command:
   
       $ fdisk /dev/rdsk/c1d0p0    # first disk
       $ fdisk /dev/rdsk/c2d0p0    # second disk
   
   
3. Setup the metadb's on the disks
   
       $ metadb -af -c 2 c1d0s3 c1d0s6
       $ metadb -af -c 2 c2d0s3 c2d0s6
   
   
4. Initialize the metadb's on the disks
   
   Next step is to initialize the metadb's created from the previous step.  This setups the mirror from the root partition over to each metadb.  For the purposes, the RAID 1 mirrored volumes in this example will be setup as:
   
   

   RAID Volume	Partition	Description
   d0		/ mirror
   d10	c1d0s0	/
   d20	c2d0s0	/
   d1		swap mirror
   d11	d1d0s1	swap
   d21	c2d0s1	swap

   
       $ metainit -f d10 1 1 c1d0s0
       $ metainit -f d20 1 1 c2d0s0
       $ metainit d0 -m d10
   
       $ metainit -f d11 1 1 c1d0s1
       $ metainit -f d21 1 1 c2d0s1
       $ metainit d1 -m d11
   
   
5. Setup /etc/vfstab with new mirror mount point
   
   Use a helpful Solaris script to setup your root filesystem in vfstab.
   
       $ metaroot d0
   
   Then, edit your /etc/vfstab and make similar changes to your swap partition.
   
   
6. Reboot your system to use new vfstab definition
   
       $ reboot
   
   
7. Attach the 2nd drive RAID to the first
   
       $ metattach d0 d20
       $ metattach d1 d21
   
   You can view the status of the syncing of d10 to d20 and d11 to d21
   
       $ metastat -c
   
   
8. Install grub on 2nd drive
   
   Install grub on the second drive in case the first one fails.  This will allow the system to boot up.  It's important to note that it will boot up in single user mode.  You must use metadb to fix the meta database for the lost disk.  See notes down below.
   
   $ installgrub /boot/grub/stage1 /boot/grub/stage2 /dev/rdsk/c2d0s0
   
   
9. Create the ZFS Pool
   
   Now, we want to create a zfs pool with mirroring on the two partitions designated for zfs.
   
   $ zpool create pool mirror /dev/dsk/c1d0s4 /dev/dsk/c2d0s4
   
   
10. Create the ZFS Mount Point
    
    Create whatever mountpoints and customize zfs to your hearts content.  An example of creating a mountpoint for /foo might look like:
    
    $ zfs create pool/foo
    $ zfs set mountpoint=/foo pool/foo
    
    
11. Done!
    
    

A couple of other notes:

1. During some testing, I pulled out drive 2 while the server was up and running.  I believe the SunFire X2100 doesn't support hot swapping, as the OS started to send errors to console.  I ended up rebooting the box just to see what would happen.  Upon reboot, the metastat -c command told me that d20 was in maint mode, meaning there was a problem.  I ran the command to rebuild that mirror:
   

   $ metareplace -e d0 c2d0s0
   

2. If a drive fails, upon reboot the system should boot up into single user mode.  It's up to the system administrator to delete any meta mirrors off of the bad drive from the metadb.  This is done with a combination of metadb -d commands.  See the Sun doc notes at:
   
      Recovering from failed disk
   

I was amazed to see a report today on FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) and the impact it is having on businesses in Europe.  The report also discusses case studies around the use of FLOSS and cost savings.

Check out page 51 of the report where it estimates the FLOSS code contributed by firms.  Out of 986 firms and 31.2 million lines of code the estimated effort is 16,444 person years or a cost of 1.2 billion Euro.

I was especially pleased to see that Sun Microsystems, Inc. topped the list of contributing firms at:

    51,372 person months or 4,281 person years

And this more tripled the contributions of the 2nd place firm.

The devices that promoted the Boston bomb scares yesterday reminded me of a story that happened just about month ago in Murphy, TX.  A colleague of mine blogged about a similiar incident a month ago when a Geocache article was termed as a "Suspecious Device".

As I listen to all the flap about this latest incident, it's hard to determine where the line is in all of this. One one hand I'm hearing numbers like, 1/2 million was spent on this latest scare and the person planting the devices is responsible.  Are they going overboard on this?  Some would say, no way, especially in light of 9/11.  Others would argue that we are going a bit overboad.

Back to Geocaching.  The premise of geocaching is to hide some items, record the location with GPS coordinates, post that information at Geocaching.com and allow weekend warriors to find the items.  It's a healthy fun activity for families to do on a weekend day.  Our family will take a picnic and make a great day out of it.  The kids get exercise and lean some new things.  A lot of times, these items are hidden in ammo containers (to keep out the elements), often with cammo aound it to help hide it.  To the unsuspecting individual, it may appear threatning.  That's why it's important to always follow the rules if you ever decide to hide or re-hide a geocache.

 With more of these incidents happening, I'm getting concerned about something like a fun harmless Geocache object implying the wrong thing and landing someone in jail or with a hefty fine.  Hopefully Geocachine doesn't become a thing of the past.


 

If anyone has recommendations of other IPMI tools for Mac, I'd be interested, as most of my work is done on a iMac.

The options/assumptions that I'm sending the ipmitool in these alias shortcuts are:

ipmitool parameter	Description and Example
-A password	Forces authtype to be password
-H foo.example.com	Hostname of the SMDC card
-U Admin	Use the Admin account on the SMDC card
-I lan	Use the LAN interface to access the SMDC card

Generic ipmitool command
Represents the common parameters used by all ipmitool commads.

	alias ipmi=”/opt/ipmitool/bin/ipmitool \
				-A password \
				-H foo.example.com \
				-U Admin \
				-I lan”

	alias impi-power=”ipmi power”

Console in the X2100

	alias impi-console=”ipmi tsol”

Status of the X2100

	alias impi-status=”ipmi chassis status”