Author: Paul Tomblin

And the productivity hits just keep on coming

Evidently it’s company policy that working at home must be requested 24 hours in advance, in writing. So if I find myself unable to come into work for some reason, they want me to stay home and do something else rather than doing useful work on our project. Well, I’ll miss the money, but I think they’re going to miss the work more.

Ice day

When this morning’s alarm clock went off, the radio was saying that Vicki’s place of work was closed because of an overnight ice storm. I looked outside and there was a good half-inch of clear ice on the trees, roads, and my car. And the local news web sites said that the state police were telling people not to drive if they could avoid it.

So I thought about what I’d be doing if I went to work, and it was just working on design documents. I have most of the documents I needed at home, so I thought “screw it” and decided to stay home.

I wanted to email people to tell them that I was going to do that, and I only had a few of their addresses. So I emailed the ones I had, and one of them emailed my new official direct supervisor (even though I really get my job assignments and direct supervision from somebody else, but she signs my time sheets).

She wrote me back. She’s evidently mad that I didn’t follow her new procedure, and phoned her for permission *before* I decided to stay home. In the past, I’ve always been trusted to work at home if I had work that could be done at home, so this seems like a real lack of trust on her part. But then again she’s new to the project and doesn’t know any of us that well – plus she has little to no day-to-day contact with us developers, so maybe she doesn’t know us well enough to know who to trust.

So instead of having a nice day at home where I could work productively but in a relaxed environment, I had to struggle to produce work while worrying if I’d just jeopardized my job.

Just for the record, I got more work done than I would have if I’d been at work.

My new colo box

It arrived last night. So of course I had to spend the whole damn night setting it up, in spite of the fact that the colo guys won’t be there to let me in for a few days.

Isn’t it pretty? As you can see, it’s a former Google Search Appliance, but without the Google software. Google evidently didn’t want anybody messing with it, and they even included a modem that you were supposed to connect to it in the case of problems so they could remotely diagnose and/or fix it. Which leads to problem number 1.

See that faceplate offset from the box in this picture? When it first came, that faceplate obscured access to the disk caddies, the floppy and the CD-ROM. Which would cause some difficulties installing new hard drives and booting from a CD to install the OS. The screws holding the faceplate on had had their (whatever you call the part the screwdriver goes in) rounded out so you couldn’t use a screwdriver to remove them. That necessitated solution number 1.

We ran out to the hardware store and bought a Dremel tool, and used that to cut grooves in the top of the screws so I could get them off. Once that was done, it was remarkably easy to get everything up and running. The drives are in caddies that slide out the front, and each drive is on a separate IDE controller – it appears that /dev/hda is the first disk, /dev/hdc is the second, /dev/hdd is the CD-ROM, /dev/hdc is the third disk. The only catches in the installation are:

  • There is a BIOS password that I don’t know – there is a jumper that says it will clear the CMOS, but I haven’t had the nerve to use it in case it clears something else that I don’t want cleared.
  • There are two ethernet jacks, and the one recognized by the Linux controller as eth0 is not the one you’d expect. Also, if you set the jumper to disable the ethernet controller, both seem to stop working. Either that, or the other one is a different type of ethernet controller that the Xen kernel can’t deal with.

I’d been using my Windows box as a sacrificial test machine with a couple of scratch disks to emulate what I have at the colo facility to play around. For the last couple of weeks, I’d been convinced that this was going to mean that I was going to have to take the box home to transfer the disks and install the latest Xen kernel, because I couldn’t get it to work consistently. But the new box has two things going for it – it has three disk slots, and the current colo boxes are using LVM. Experimenting with the new box showed that I could install a basic Debian Sarge on it, upgrade it to Debian Etch, use the Xen packages in Debian Etch to get up and running, and then slap the disks from my test machine in, and even though they’re on different devices than they were on the test machine, LVM automagically recognized them and I was able to mount the domU partitions exactly the same as I had in the test machine. From there, it was a simple matter to copy the new /lib/modules/2.6.18-3-xen-686 to the partitions, make a few small changes to the domU config files, and start them up.

This is great – it means that the way things are now, I can take the new box over to the colo, swap the hard drives over, and boot it up and it will be in a state that I can do the rest of the setup from home, with no data loss and only a few hours of downtime. That is currently scheduled for next Wednesday.

By all means, Paul, …

Yesterday I went to CompUSA to buy a new PCI IDE controller – one of my external USB drives that I bought to perform networked backups of my colo keeps losing its mind, and I was thinking that it might be that the USB controller (either the interface card or the one in the external box) isn’t up to heavy data transfer, so I thought it might be good to move it “indoors” as it were.

I installed the controller and a 250Gb hard drive. The system found it at /dev/hdg – I guess I put it in the second of the two IDE controllers on the card. I made /dev/hdg a physical volume (pv) under LVM2, made it a volume group (vg) and put a logical volume (lv) on it for my mp3 collection. After I moved my mp3s from where they’d lived before, on /dev/hdb, I wiped /dev/hdb and made it part of the vg, and made another vg for the colo backup. Yesterday I also discovered the “--link_dest” argument to rsync, so I can keep several days worth of backups in much less space.

Tonight I’m going to rip that hard disk out of the external USB drive and put it on my currently eviscerated Windows machine to see if IBM/Hitachi’s “DFT” drive function tester can find any problems with it. If not, I’ll add it to the vg and increase the size of the mp3 lv.

Tomorrow my new colo box should arrive, unless UPS does their customary screw-ups. I’m scheduled to go out to the colo facility on Thursday. I’m going to move the old drives to the new box, and upgrade to the newest version of Xen. I’ve practiced upgrading to the new Xen on my currently eviscerated Windows box (that’s why it’s eviscerated, I had to put scratch disks in it) and it didn’t go well, but I think I know what I did wrong. I also tried a full install of Debian on the dom0, and was able to save the domUs when I tried that.

If that goes well, I’ll be up again in a few hours. If it doesn’t go well, I’ll bring it home and work on it overnight, and I’m tentatively scheduled to go back to the colo on Friday.