Month: April 2013

Man, that felt good

[dciframe]http://connect.garmin.com:80/activity/embed/304908243,500,550,0,auto,border:1px solid blue;align:left;[/dciframe]

So in the last week I’ve paddled three times with other people, for a total of 15 miles. That’s probably more than I paddled the entire month of August last year. And it felt so good. Not just to be out paddling, but to paddle with friends and re-experience the camaraderie and fun.

My shoulder is pretty sore after each paddle, but the recovery the next day is pretty encouraging. Yesterday Dan and I worked on a change to my technique that kept my hands lower to keep pressure off my shoulder – it used different muscles in my core, and they hurt while I was paddling and they feel quite tired today. I’m going to keep at this to see if it helps.

Something strange is going on…

There is something strange going on with my colo box. I tried to reboot it last month and it didn’t come up – I had to call my provider and get them to power cycle it. Nothing useful in the logs.

Yesterday I had to install a security update to the xen hypervisor, but I didn’t reboot. This morning, I discovered that the websites working on the xen guest (the domU in xen parlance) were not working. So I tried to log in, or ping, and discovered it wasn’t talking to the network. Fortunately the xen host (aka dom0) was working – I could log into it, then use xm console xen1 to log into the guest. Couldn’t find anything wrong, except it’s not talking to the network. Even “ifdown eth0; ifup eth0” doesn’t cure it. So I tried to reboot the guest, but it didn’t seem to come back up. I wondered if the hypervisor update I installed yesterday was the problem, so then I rebooted the whole computer, and it didn’t come back up either.

I drove down to the colo facility, and connected a monitor and keyboard, but nothing showed up. On the front panel, there are a couple of blinking lights. I power cycled. It came up just fine. Logged into the host, xm consoled into the guest, verified that I could ssh out, and from my home computer I could wget a few web pages from it. Issued a reboot command, and it booted just fine. Poked around the BIOS settings to see if there was something about not booting if there wasn’t a keyboard or something stupid like that, but couldn’t find anything. Booted, verified once more, and came home.

Until the next time, I guess.

A month with ownCloud, and I’m out

I really wanted to like ownCloud, the “Dropbox you host yourself” (my description, not theirs). It seemed so promising – I could have as much space as I wanted, it would be more private, etc etc etc. But I’ve had it installed for over a month now, and seen numerous upgrades to both the client and the server, and I’m ready to uninstall.

  • The 64 bit Linux client crashes and dies constantly. I’m actually somewhat surprised on the rare mornings when I wake up and discover it hasn’t crashed overnight. Yes, it crashes when nobody is modifying any of the files on any of the systems that share those files, sometimes multiple times a day when I can be bothered to restart it.
  • All the clients continually put up an error indicator at random times and then clear up at other random times. Again, usually when nothing is happening.
  • While it offers CalDav sync and I was able to add the calendar to my phone, iPad, and laptop calendars, I wasn’t able to use it to break free of the Google Calendar hegemony because I share calendars with other people and I couldn’t very well ask them to convert as well. They had a web based calendar of their own, but it is incredibly basic compared to say, Google Calendar or iCloud calendar.
  • Similar problem with the contact syncing.

Frankly I would have put up with all the other problems if the 64 bit Linux client wasn’t such a flakey piece of shit. But I see no reason to keep going with this if I’m getting no synchronization between my main desktop and my other computers.