Rude Epiphany!

Someone stopped by the house awhile back and asked, “uh, Rob? Why do you have an axe by the (back) door?”

While the mind was racing for a snappy comeback, the mouth opened and said, “stump in the back yard.”

doh! Oh well, the truth is out, guess I’ll stick with it.

When I bought the house, there was a stump in the back yard near the driveway. (There’s a fence between the two, so you’ll not see my driveway in any of the pictures.) After mowing around it for many months, I finally decided to be rid of it. The “stump doctor”-family of services you see in the phone book want an insane amount of money to come out to your house and a minor investment for every stump they need to remove. That’s not practical for just one stump and I’d probably have to tear down a chunk of my fence anyway.

As much as my Tim Taylor roots wanted a power tool, I just couldn’t justify the $100 or more to buy a chainsaw for this specific project. On the other hand, $40 buys me a nice axe at Lowe’s and I can lumberjack my way through it, old-school. So I bought the axe and had at it.

The plan was simple — put time into it every weekend that I did yard work. I’d have to police up the wood chips and toss them into a bucket, no need to have the mower sling them into my (or neighbor’s) windows. When the bucket was full, that was a day’s worth of work.

The first week went slow, as expected. I took a small bit off of the Eastern edge and got down a couple of inches below the grass line.

The second week was a little more productive, I “got in there and got some!” as it were.

The third week was the magic moment, the stump was whittled down enough that I could break it loose.

Of course, I didn’t just let the wood chips go to the city. After each chopping session, I’d load up the chiminea and light it, and then light a cigar to savor the taste of victory.

No more stump!

I ran into an interesting problem while setting up cacti.

To start with, the Solaris-10 net-snmp in /usr/sfw will not report partition stats (used, max, free) for partitions that are not ufs. I noticed this a little while back with some vxfs filesystems at work but graphing them was filed as a low-priority project.

There is a workaround blogged at sysadmin.asyd.net where he indicates that you can have snmpd return disk percentages for zfs partitions.

After pondering that solution, I came to the conclusion that there are two issues not solved by this solution:

1. You can arbitrarily create filesystems in zfs. To monitor them in cacti, you need to hand-manage your filesystem list in /etc/init.d/sma/snmpd.conf. After that, you would need to manually add/remove them from your cacti configuration. If you have a dynamic system with a dozen or more filesystems, it would be annoying. At any scale of 1+N servers, this becomes a management nightmare.
2. You can only display %used in each filesystem. This figure can grow or shrink in a static filesystem via activity on other filesystems. Your filesystem availability is shared in a pool (zfs quota assignments minimize the fluctuations, but will not make them go away).

Given the zfs philosophy of “filesystems come and go”, it doesn’t make sense to try to plot all of them. If you have a home fileserver, you may have quite a few filesystems so that you can compartmentalize your data (as I have). Putting all of them into graphs in cacti will create a very busy page that’ll be mildly painful to scroll through.

The solution? Map the zpools instead — they’re (generally) tied to devices, so they’re less likely to be created and removed on a regular basis.

The concept is quite simple, take the output of something like this

: myserver; zpool list
NAME                    SIZE    USED   AVAIL    CAP  HEALTH     ALTROOT
data                   1.81T   1.74T   70.4G    96%  ONLINE     -
export                 38.8G   13.9G   24.8G    35%  ONLINE     -

and twiddle it so that snmpd will digest and spit it out.

First, a little shell scripting. We want raw numbers so that we can graph them, so we need to get rid of those pesky non-numeric characters. Something along the lines of this:

#!/bin/ksh
export PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib
zpool list -H -o capacity ${1} | sed -e 's/%//g'

Then we put this in /etc/sma/snmp/snmpd.conf:

exec zpool-list.ksh /etc/sma/snmp/zpool-list.ksh export
exec zpool-list.ksh /etc/sma/snmp/zpool-list.ksh data

Restart snmpd:

: myserver; sudo svcadm -v restart sma
Action restart set for svc:/application/management/sma:default.

We can use snmpwalk to verify our output:

: myserver; snmpwalk -v 2c -c public localhost .1.3.6.1.4.1.2021.8
UCD-SNMP-MIB::extIndex.1 = INTEGER: 1
UCD-SNMP-MIB::extIndex.2 = INTEGER: 2
UCD-SNMP-MIB::extNames.1 = STRING: zpool-list.ksh
UCD-SNMP-MIB::extNames.2 = STRING: zpool-list.ksh
UCD-SNMP-MIB::extCommand.1 = STRING: /etc/sma/snmp/zpool-list.ksh export
UCD-SNMP-MIB::extCommand.2 = STRING: /etc/sma/snmp/zpool-list.ksh data
UCD-SNMP-MIB::extResult.1 = INTEGER: 0
UCD-SNMP-MIB::extResult.2 = INTEGER: 0
UCD-SNMP-MIB::extOutput.1 = STRING: 35
UCD-SNMP-MIB::extOutput.2 = STRING: 96
UCD-SNMP-MIB::extErrFix.1 = INTEGER: 0
UCD-SNMP-MIB::extErrFix.2 = INTEGER: 0
UCD-SNMP-MIB::extErrFixCmd.1 = STRING:
UCD-SNMP-MIB::extErrFixCmd.2 = STRING:

If you notice in the above, we really only have one output line to work with. Therefore, I decided that %used of the zpool was sufficient, so long as I disabled autoscaling.

The cacti steps were fairly straightforward.

1. Create “Data Source(s)” using the “SNMP - Generic OID Template”
2. Create a “Graph Template” copying most settings from “Unix - Logged in Users”
3. Create “Graph Object(s)”
4. Associate (3) Graph Object(s) with your “Device”

Normally you can skip (2) and do (3) above using “SNMP - Generic OID Template”, but I ran into cacti bug 0001145 and had to create my own template. No sweat, really.

You can find the details to the above Cacti steps in forums.cacti.net.

So since I’ve been out of town for two weeks (yay employment), I missed a “signature required” package that FedEx Ground tried to deliver. I got a nice little card in the mail stating that I can call in to schedule a pick-up at the local shipping station.

All the steps executed, I ended up at the huge facility by Texas Stadium with a big security shack, trucks of all sizes rumbling in’n'out of the front gate, etc.

They have two security guards manning the shack. The entire time I’m there, employees are coming’n'going in a slow trickle (about one every 5min). All departing employees have to go through security much like airport security checkpoints — metal objects in dishes, all bags searched, a quick trip through the metal detector. The guards aren’t your run-of-the-mill TSA-esque trolls, these two (one male, one female) weren’t bodyguard material but they were fairly aware of their jobs, protocols, and what was happening around them.

So the routine for me to pick up my package goes as follows:
1) Security guard pages “QA, call [extension]”
2) when white phone in front of me rings, I get to pick it up and give the caller my tracking number
3) someone shows up in a golf cart with my package(s)
4) proper ID is given, paperwork is signed, and off I go with package(s)

It takes about 10min between phone conversation and someone shows up with my package. Just as the “QA” person appears, another non-employee walks in with a small slip of paper in-hand. Security looks at him and The New Guy says that he’s there to pick up a package. Security points at the QA guy, who’s filling out my paperwork, and declare that “he’s the man to talk to, he’ll take care of you. No point in calling since he’s here.”

The QA guy overhears this, looks up, and says, “just a second.”

I sign the paperwork. As I grab my package, the other non-employee hands Mr. QA the “door card.” He looks at it, looks up and says, “Xbox.”

The two security folks stop what they’re doing, look at Mr. QA and then look at Mr. Non-employee. He nods and smiles an affirmation, at which the security guy turns to Mr. QA and asks, “how did you know?”

“You see these tracking numbers, when they start with ‘769283′, they’re from Mexico or Taiwan or whatever, but they’re always Xboxes.”

I wasn’t paying much attention to this discussion, and at this point I hit the door and was heading to my car. The thing that idly popped into my head was “yeah, if you see enough of these, you’re bound to know the oddest details.”

About ten minutes later, as I’m driving down the road, I thought to myself, “he could identify the contents!?!”

(For those of you that do not know, I travel a little bit for work, usually about one week a month I’m not home.)

Baggage Claim Lottery (BCL) is a game you play with co-travelers at the luggage claim carousel. It is based on the relative arrival times of luggage compared to other participants. The game requires minimal preparation, which only involves agreeing on the rules and rewards/penalties. BCL can be initiated with any person at any time, until the first bag appears at the luggage claim.

Participants are categorized into two groups: Multiple-baggage players (MBPs) and Single-baggage players (SBPs). Score is tallied by counting the number of items that come out of baggage claim system ahead of all of the participants items.

MBPs are scored based on their worst score (when their last item was collected).

A score of 0 goes to the SBP who’s item was the first one out, also considered a “perfect hit.” By nature of the scoring system, MBPs can never receive a “perfect hit.”

If an item arrived on an earlier flight and is in the “baggage pen”, this item is not considered for scoring. If said item belongs to a SBP, this player neither receives a reward nor suffers a penalty.

A “crap-out” is when an item does not arrive and the player must speak to a human (employee of the airline) before leaving the airport.

If only one MBP draws a “crap-out”, this player is immediately the loser (regardless of SBP crap-outs). This is called the “mea culpa” rule.

If multiple MBPs draw a “crap-out”, these players share the “loser” penalty (again, regardless of SBP crap-outs).

If multiple SBPs draw a “crap-out” and no MBPs draw a “crap-out”, the scoring is reversed and the “winner” (with lowest score) becomes the “loser.” This is called the “poor saps” rule.

Prizes are flexible and should be determined in advance. We strongly recommend good sportsmanship — a loser due to a “crap-out” will not be in the mood to buy the first round of drinks once you reach a pub (for example). A recommended prize would be buying the “winner” the first round (cost distributed across other players).

Neurotics have problems, psychotics have solutions.

link: Hans Reiser: Once a Linux Visionary, Now Accused of Murder
link: 20/20 (abcnews) write-up

I worked with this guy back in ‘95-96 at Synopsys.com during the 13mo I was there. He was the “PC Systems Integrator” (evaluating new technology) and I was the “PC Systems Support” (Network, servers, desktops) by title — in reality I did both jobs because his mind was perpetually “elsewhere.” In short, we didn’t get along much at all.

I wouldn’t call him a “prodigy” as 20/20 did, but I will certainly give him credit for “extreme project focus.” He was fairly intelligent, which made our e-mail sparring interesting at times.

Online, I hear a bunch of comments like “he’s freaky looking, fry him!” Ironically, I bet they were the same folks that said “Scott Peterson looks handsome, fry him!” On the other side of the coin, a lot of Linux fanboys are wailing and lashing their own backs.

Let’s talk about the possibility… If he did it; there’s no body, no weapon, no (identified) crime scene, no witnesses, and no crying confession. Prosecution’s case is apparently based upon the following:

1. His car is missing the passenger car seat.
2. They found a trace of her blood on his car.
3. Their divorce was heated — it wasn’t looking good for him to keep the kids.
4. He acted strange once when they trailed him.
5. He’s intelligent.
6. He bought some books on murder investigations (receipt was dated after he found out she was deemed missing).
7. Her best friend said he obviously did it.

Erm, that’s it? WTF.

If we fired up the “wayback machine”, someone could quote me saying ill things about Hans and his health due to our differences at Synopsys. Let’s chalk that up to youth and impatience, as nowadays I’d rather not see a man beat to death over something that they (apparently) won’t be able to prove.

Here’s to you Hans, good luck.

Good lord, when will people ever learn?

I was poking around looking at motorcycle helmets. The one I currently have is a high-priced 2006 model from Arai. Since it’s fairly new, I’m not really shopping around but more “just browsing.”

What I have in mind is.. for my next helmet, buy a white model and then have a local airbrush artist apply my vision to it. This may seem a bit pricey, but consider that the price delta between “solid color” and “replica” helmets run up to $200. If I fork $200 to a local artist, he’s happy (money in his pocket) and I’m happy (I get my own design). Honestly, to get a unique helmet, I’d happily pay more. Lots more.

Just don’t tell the local artists, hehe.

Anyway, back on topic.. so since my helmet is an Arai Corsair, I entered “arai corsair” into google. First two hits are ebay.com, no surprise there. Next hit is motoliberty.com, a local (to DFW) retailer — I’ve purchased boots there before and a friend of mine works there. In my first page of google results, there is no mention of the manufacturer’s site. This is odd. I manually try http://www.arai.com, but it times out. Things are not looking up for Arai.

So let’s simplify the search — I entered “arai helmets” and that worked. The top result is http://www.araiamericas.com/ Upon clicking the google link, I am introduced to a page that is purely flash.

No text, just flash.

First off, my browser is configured to block flash a-la “flashblock” (best firefox plug-in, evah!). That returns a blank page with a simple “>” icon in the middle (click the icon to “accept” the flash activity). Ok, that’s me-specific (and.. “yay me!”) .

The real point of this rant is that a lot of companies with big-dollars floating around inside them can’t spend the 4-5-digits required to actually figure out that google (and other search engines) can’t crawl Macromedia (er.. I mean Adobe) Flash. They can crawl lots of other interesting formats.. PDF, MS Word, Sun “pkg” format, but not Flash.

Sheesh. If you’re gonna be on the Internet, learn how to Play The Game.

If they were a local company, I know someone who’s well-versed in the arts of ranking well in search engines. Ah well. Their loss.

A good friend of mine, let’s call him “skeek”, had an awesome idea some time ago. Here’s how it goes:

Picture a giant arena filled with combatants, every one of which is equipped with a chain saw. To make it exciting, all the chain saws are out of gas at the beginning, but there are thousands and thousands of thimbles, filled with gas, scattered around..

That may seem a bit morbid because, well, it is. Push the personal aspect back a level and picture it as a theme for one of today’s high-tech computer games. (There are much worse out there, you know.)

From a programming perspective, it is perfect. You have a goal, “environmental” constraints, and a fair number of non-obvious solutions. The solution you choose may not be the best at first, but can be reworked and experience will be critical in your end-goal success.

Happy chainsawing!

(filched from http://pic.bestpicever.com/piles/?s=airplanefactory)

“Hiding an Airplane Factory”

During World War II the Army Corps of Engineers needed to hide the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant to protect it from a Japanese air attack. They covered it with camouflage netting and trompe l’oeil to make it look like a rural subdivision from the air.

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) - Cite This Source ne·far·i·ous /nɪˈfɛəriəs/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[ni-fair-ee-uhs] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation –adjective extremely wicked or villainous; iniquitous: a nefarious plot.

I’ll give you an example: your wife of 10 years decides to learn to swim to participate in a triathlon, in Germany, with some bloke she met online.  Oh, and the husband isn’t invited.