Month: October 2006

And this morning’s lesson is…

Let’s say that around 8pm you noticed that your linode is suffering from a lack of memory. And so you decide that the Mailman processes have gotten bloated and need to be restarted. So you do an /etc/init.d/mailman restart. And let’s further say that as you’re heading off to bed 2 hours later, you still haven’t gotten any messages from any of the mailing lists on that server.

Do you

  1. Assume that everybody suddenly got real quiet, and head off to bed without a second thought? or
  2. Assume that the restart didn’t actually restart, and send a test message to one of the list-request addresses, and when it doesn’t come back, do another mailman restart?

Because last night, I did the first one, and didn’t do the second one until this morning. Which is why on these graphs you’ll see no activity for 11 hours, and then suddenly a big spike.

Sorry, people.

In other news, today I’m wearing my Enemy Combatant t-shirt to mark the death of American democracy. Well, it was nice while it lasted.

It’s here!

My “new” used 1U server is here. It’s a 1U VA Linux 1220 with two 1GHz Pentium IIIs, and 1Gb of RAM.
VA Linux 1220VA Linux 1220 (2)

It only has a 20Gb IDE drive, but I have a 250Gb IDE drive on order from NewEgg which should be here soon. (It also has a built in SCSI controller, if I ever decide I have more money than brains.) The built in CD-ROM doesn’t seem to work – the BIOS recognizes it, but it won’t boot from it. And after I installed using another CD-ROM (which doesn’t fit in the case properly), it won’t mount drives in the built-in CD-ROM. I’ve emailed the vendor asking if he can send me a working CD-ROM – I won’t write his feedback until that’s resolved. Another weird thing, it won’t boot if I have my KVM plugged into the USB port. But that’s not a great hardship.

It’s also really, really noisy. Can’t wait to send it off to a nice rack space somewhere.

I’ve got a Debian 3.1 base system installed on it already. Now to get Xen installed.

AOPA Online – Enough is enough

Phil Boyer, president of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) has a great response to the latest fear-mongering over the Liddle crash. It’s addressed mostly at Mayor Dailey in Chicago, but also takes swipes at other General Aviation (GA) bashers like Hillary Clinton.

AOPA Online – Enough is enough

You know, for a Republican, New York’s Mayor Bloomberg is a pretty good guy. And he’s also a pilot with more ratings and experience than me. When he says that GA is not a threat to his city, why can’t other people, especially New York Senators and Congresscritters listen to him?

Leaf Peeping Flight

One of the things that Vicki and I have never done is go up and look at the fall colours from the air. Today was a wonderful day, severe clear and not very windy. The leaves aren’t at their peak yet, but we’re there, the plane is there, and we don’t have anything else to do. So when we got back from Buttonville and cleared customs, we headed off again.

I wanted to stay low to get a better view, unlike the flight across the lake, where we kept very high for a smoother ride and better glide distance while over the lake. That made it a bit bumpy. But not unbearably so.

We left Rochester airspace going south at 2500 feet. As soon as we got out of the airspace, I punched my user waypoint for the local wind farm into my GPS, and we headed out to look at the windmills. Not only are the windmills scenic themselves, but they’re near a nice valley. That was good. Then I headed towards Letchworth Canyon and cruised along it down to the famous Upper and Lower Falls and railway trestle.

After that, we cruised back up the canyon in the other direction. Then Vicki had a nifty idea – to go fly over our house. The Rochester airport hadn’t been too busy when we’d come in – they’d cleared me to land while I was still 15 miles out. So I figured what the hell, I’ll ask for it.

First thing is to try to find something that the controller would recognize. I zoomed in the hand-held GPS to try to find a waypoint near our house – I had an idea that we were near the outer marker for the ILS 28 approach. But I couldn’t find anything. So I told him that we weren’t too far south of the southern tip of the Irondequoit Bay – I figured they’d know where where that is because of the seaplane operations there. The controller approved our request, so I descended to pattern altitude, because I knew it would put us below where the airplanes on ILS 28 would be at that point. Vicki spotted our house, and I did a steep turn around it so we could get a good view. After our turn, I thanked Rochester Approach and they cleared me for a straight in to runway 25.

That was really nice. I hope we can do that again some time.