Ottawa Valley SAGE

Archive for the ‘Blog’ Category

It’s amazing what you can fix by looking at a problem again after leaving it alone. After the server change, OS upgrade, new install, etc., one would think that everything would be simple. Well, it actually is. One of those odd little things that you need to do if you are using “pretty permalinks” is to fix the default apache configuration to allow overrides on file info. That was the whole issue. It made sense later when I remembered I had been running the old webserver and configuration for better than 10 years (with lots of changes).

Like I said. Amazing!

I’ve been delaying doing an upgrade to the latest-greatest until I had a few free hours. I made all the necessary backups, made a database backup and clicked on the upgrade button (This is a major revision upgrade). less than 2 minutes later, the whole upgrade is complete, the database has been upgraded and it looks like all the plugins are happy as well.

Another ringing endorsement for WordPress.

The presentation we had on a cloud-based virtual environment was quite interesting. We ended up going for just under two hours on the topic. Lots of technical discussion on how it works, the software choices and issues such as scalability, security, privacy, etc. all came up.

I may just have to sign up for a trial account just to see how it behaves. I’ve seen a number of environments that had this idea over the past 10 years, but this one may be “the one.” The concept is good, the timing is good and the implementation appears to be solid. It has pretty much anything you could want for a small virtual office and it offloads having a desktop support person on site. This is not to say there isn’t room for improvement and extra features, but the foundations appear to be solid and all of the basics are covered.

The URL is http://www.eseri.com/ and it is worth taking a look at.

Everything is based on open source software and it is all accessed via No Machine’s NX client. This provides a lightweight secure access method and the remote desktop is quite responsive. If I remember some tests I did a few years ago with a dial-up link, it was painful but usable at 9600, tolerable at 14.4 and worked pretty good above that.

For an interesting presentation on the complexity of e-mail check out the following presentation:

Until I saw this, I was unaware of how badly designed the current e-mail structure is, and how badly/incomplete the RFCs for e-mail are. Unfortunately the slides are blurry so you cannot see the examples very well but the talk alone is very informative.

We had an average turnout at the OCUUG meeting on Wednesday night. It was a good time and for those who do not know, it’s more of a social group than a technology group. Having said that, tech topics do come up. For those who were, Dru just launched her latest book: The Definitive Guide to PC-BSD. This one is published under the Apress banner.

There were copies for all at the meeting and DVDs to go with it.Of course, it’s not completely free, We are supposed to blog about it (notice I’m doing so now) and write a book review. I’m considering writing my BSDA at BSDCan 2010, so hopefully this will fill n the blanks for me. Either way, it’s an excuse to read a book, work through a new flavor of OS and take a certification exam.

I’ll bring my copy to the meeting so you can look at it. I’ll also have a few copies of PC-BSD 8.0 RC2 for anyone who wants one. These are 64 bit, but you will be able to run them under virtual box.

Well, not so much fun…

Tuesday last week, I guess there was a power bump or some such event and my main drive on my mac decided to take a nose dive. I should have expected this, as the power is not exactly the most stable in this neck of the woods. I do have backups, but I was lazy the past 2 months and didn’t do a backup. Time machine isn’t quite suitable (no real control) and I haven’t bothered anything beyond a full dump at intervals and that takes time.

The resulting sequence was interesting (yes, with all the connotations of interesting time):

• Screensaver is not responding, so power cycle the machine
• Get nice white OS X screen, no apple logo
• Repeat power cycle, same
• Remove power and wait a few, motherboard may be retaining some oddities
• Try again, logo and spinner this time… 5 minutes later, still spinning
• Remove USB hard drives. This has happened before after a power issue and it loses it’s brains on what drive to boot from.
• Try again… logo, spinner, 1 minute later, power off
• Odd… power on machine again, this time booting with the standard unix boot visible
• It shows a normal startup, an fsck and a couple of errors and then powers down
• Try again in single user mode and manually run fsck…
• Well, look at that, boot drive has 2 unrecoverable errors, recommend booting from OS DVD and running disk utility to clear errors
• Try booting from DVD and running utility
• Even better message, Not recoverable. Please back up all of your readable data from the suspect disk and repartition and install a new file system. Supposedly this will result in a usable disk.
• I don’t have any internal drives available that are the same size or larger to copy to, so I get a 1TB USB that I had some backup data on and start copying the 300GB of data in my account to the external drive.
• I don’t want to redo the drive until I am happy with the backup
• In the interest of getting things running, I grab a 400GB drive and use that for the OS and home directories.
• After that, I migrate the applications off of the old main drive and copy a reduced set of my data off the drive.
• All looks good so far
• Most things are working as expected and I haven’t lost my business info or my email. Life is reasonable.
• Now for slightly better response. Go out and get replacement drives for the 4 internals, just in case it’s a drive issue, as the 4 drives are in serial number.
• Hmm, 1.5TB drives are cheaper than the 500s I bought 2 years ago. I’ll go with that, 2TB are still a little expensive.
• Boot off the Install DVD again and this time take 2 drives and mirror them. No point in being screwed over a second time.
• After installation and reboot, I have a 1.5TB mirrored boot disk and 2 1.5TB data disks.
• Account migration, some application reinstallation and some recovery I’m back to a properly functioning system.

So at the end of the exercise, I’m in better shape, I need to keep a better backup regime and I think hard drives vs. tapes is probably my answer, as 1TB hard drives are under $100 and the tapes and tape drives I have are not near the same capacity as my my hard drives and tapes are not “live” file systems, allowing for easier recovery and viewing. This could have been much worse.

I think it’s bacula time and time to put in a somewhat power efficient NAS. I have enough SATA drives and a hardware RAID controller to do this, I can backup sets to USB drive from the NAS, and I can store the drives in a protected environment. I have no desire to get a cheap NAS appliance, I’ve tried that and they are not suitable for my needs. Time to create either an OpenFiler or a FreeNAS box. This will probably be a topic for after the current care and feeding of a virtual Linux box practical exercise we are doing.

Anybody want an ethernet enabled hard drive enclosure? It also does USB 2.o

I have a friend who has decided to get a new computer. The old one just doesn’t seem to be able to handle the load on it.

This is rather amusing, as the “load” is the use of a web browser. I asked and that is pretty much the sum of the computer use. I guess there may be a game of solitaire in there somewhere, but that is supposedly the entire sum of the computer’s existence.

This article is called “opportunity” and I decided to take the opportunity to take them down a different path. Linux Mint. This is a Ubuntu based distro that goes out of it’s way to be a desktop OS. It’s clean, simply laid out and I have to admin, relatively pretty. The green scheme doesn’t really do it for me, but that is my problem. I know I could have tried PC-BSD or Ubuntu or some other item, maybe even puppy , but I wanted this to be painless and easy to keep up to date. They will be taking the machine this weekend and I’m hoping they won’t even realize it’s another OS until a little later. If you have the opportunity to get someone else over to the Linux side, this may be the distribution you want to use. The URL is linuxmint.com.

Matt Simmons sent a tweet this morning regarding today’s xkcd comic. His observation was that it would make a large number of sysadmin blogs and I’d have to agree. The rest of his commentary from his blog is also quite apt. I remember having this discussion at the LISA conference multiple times, specifically the hero complex and how dangerous it is to stability and reliability for all the reasons listed.

In our profession (yes, it is one), invisibility is the name of the game. This unfortunately has the side effect of no one really understanding what you do or why they employ you. If you are good, there are no problems, so why do they need you? On the other hand, you get the person who isn’t as experienced yet and who runs around fixing the symptoms rather than the problem and, due to the visible results, gets praised. This leads into the hero complex and it’s a difficult thing to turn around, as everyone likes to know they are doing a good job.

It is quite the set of standards we have:

• We only get a call when something is wrong
• Few people know what we do
• If we are doing a good job, we mustn’t be working
• If we are doing a bad job (not sufficiently experienced), we are praised for fixing the problems, as they had risen to a noticeable level
• The better we get, the less recognition we get
• As time goes on, we become better generalists, rather than specialists

The real problem is more along the lines of promoting the idea that if all is quiet, we are working effectively and if all is chaos we are not. From an external point of view, the apparent effort is inverse to the actual situation which is counter intuitive to most people. This problem is exacerbated with the convention that people expect computers to have problems, so outages are the norm, not the exception. Realistically, we should be handling exceptions to the norm, rather than our visibility being the norm.

So far the only thing that comes to mind is a set of shameless self-promotion items which show that the work we do is affecting the bottom line by avoiding problems rather than trying to correct them as they happen. It’s kind of like the Y2K issue – perception is that nothing happened, so we wasted all that effort on nothing. The real statement should be that we had minimal issues because we fixed the problems before they hit. I know I spent a lot of time in advance patching machines and installing new versions of software in a controlled manner in the months leading up to Y2K. Personally I’d prefer to have fixed it all in advance rather then be scrambling after the fact. I guess I’m just lazy.

Comments are welcome.