Author: Paul Tomblin

Now I’ve *really* had it with this guy.

Back in June, I wrote about how the Maintenance Coordinator for the club’s Lance is downright secretive. Today, Vicki, Laura and I went confidently out to the airport for a flight we’d scheduled last week, taking the Lance out to Albany to spend Thanksgiving at Stevie’s new apartment. We loaded our luggage in the luggage compartment, and Vicki and Laura went back into the FBO while I preflighted. I open the front door and sit down, and there is a sign taped to the yoke saying the plane is grounded. Oh oh. I do a quick walk around and discover that the wingtip appears to have been scraped by somebody or something, and it’s taken off the navlight/strobe fixture, the guts of which are held in place by scotch tape.

Ok, now I’m mad, because when the plane is grounded, the Maintanance Coordinator is supposed to mark the plane as grounded in ScheduleMaster, our on-line scheduling system so that people don’t expect that they’re going to be able to use it for a trip and don’t find out until they get to the airport that there is a known problem with it.

I head back to the ops room to check ScheduleMaster to see if any of the other planes are available. That’s when I discover something that made me 300% madder still – the squawk list shows that this wing navlight/strobe was squawked on 10/8, over 6 weeks ago! The squawk says that the person reporting it immediately called the Maintenance Coordinator. But the Maintenance Coordinator has let this plane sit there grounded for 6 fucking weeks without letting anybody know!

I called the VP of Maintenance, and he didn’t know either. He says that when it happened, Bill, the Maintenance Coordinator, said he would get it fixed that very week, and he’d assumed Bill had done that. I told him that this is totally unacceptable, and either he removes Bill as Maintenance Coordinator, or I’m going to join Artisan club instead. He asked me if I wanted to “move up” to Maintenance Coordinator, and I said sure.

Meanwhile, none of the other club planes are booked for a long trip, just for a few hours here and there. I call the guy who has the Dakota booked for Friday morning when we are planning to return, and he says he is booked to have some instruction in it so he can’t easily reschedule. One of the Archers is free except that somebody has it right now and isn’t due to return for a few hours. So the choice is to wait three hours and then fly, or drive now. Both options won’t get us there until after dark. So we elect to drive.

I think it’s time to check out the costs at Artisan. I know they’re a smaller, more expensive club and I don’t like their fleet balance quite as much (other than a Lance, they’ve got a couple of Arrows and a Warrior, and an Arrow doesn’t haul anywhere near what a Dakota does), but they actually put money into their Lance (including a Garmin 530) and it gets flown.

Today’s fascinating discovery

I’ve mentioned already that I put a system on a local rack, and in order to cut costs I divided it up into three sections using Xen. Well, I had this annoying little problem that the “domU” (user domains – ie. the shares) weren’t able to use iptables. So I’ve gone back to the drawing board by slapping a couple of drives I have kicking around into my Windows box and trying various experiments.

First, I went back to the “step-by-step” how-tos that I’ve been using so far. They’ve updated it for Xen 3.0.3 (I actually installed Xen 3.0.2 using a how-to written for 3.0.1). So I ran through it – no joy. The domU boots, but mounts the ext3 file system as ext2 and won’t do iptables.

Tried again with their instructions on how to compile a kernel, except the instructions say to compile in iptables support, but don’t tell you how to compile in appropriate device driver support so I ended up with no network in my dom0 (the controller domain).

Then I found another “how-to”, this based on the fact that Xen is in the Debian “sid” (aka “unstable”) branch. Updated the test machine to “sid”, then went through the how-to. Initially, couldn’t get xend to start up, but then it turns out that I’d installed xen-hypervisor-3.0-unstable instead of xen-hypervisor-3.0.3. Got that installed, got the domU up and running, but DAMMIT, still the same problem. When I tried to do an “iptables -L”, it would tell me that “QM_MODULES: Function not supported”. Same if I did a “depmod -a” or “lsmod”.

While I was working this angle, I discovered that the Debian Backports project had backported Xen to “sarge”. Hmmm, I thought, if this works out I’ll have to try the Backport to see if I can do this on the rack with minimal hassle and without having to run “unstable” on a “production” server.

That’s when I discovered something interesting – modutils is old, and if you’re going to be using 2.6+ kernels only, people recommend you install module-init-tools instead. Since I’ve been installing Debian “sarge” (aka “stable”) in the domUs, and “sarge” is designed to support 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, it installs modutils instead. I installed module-init-tools, and suddenly everything worked.

Hey, I thought, maybe I don’t have to go through all this pain. I went to my real xen system, installed module-init-tools on the domU, and everything works! No need to go for the Backport. Maybe I will later, but for now I’ve got what I want, and I can install ssh-blacklist on my domU.

Email I just sent

Note: presidents.office is the President’s Office, yup.email.news is the Yale University Press, customer.care is their Customer Care contact email, and opa is the Office of Public Affairs


To: presidents.office@yale.edu
Cc: yup.email.news@yale.edu, customer.care@triliteral.org, opa@yale.edu
Subject: I'm sorry I'm going to have to do this...


The Yale University Press has taken to sending out "spam" (unsolicited commercial email) to email addresses trawled from web sites - I know because they hit addresses that never would have been used for conducting a business relationship. That behaviour is unconscionable. I have no alternative but to block all email from yale.edu to the domains under my control unless and until you cease this practice.


I'm sorry if that makes it harder for you to contact potential and current students, alumni and benefactors, but you should have thought about that before you decided to put the burden for your advertising budget on me and thousands of systems administrator like me instead of yourselves.

Ok admit it, the kayaking season is over

The temperature was forecast to go up to 63 degrees this afternoon. I thought I’d make one last attempt to get out for a final kayak trip and put it away. But when the peak temperature arrived, so did heavy rain and thunderstorms. A realistic assement of my clothing and ability followed, and I decided that the risk of getting hypothermia on a river that nobody else is using was just too high, and I called it off.

The temperature is going to be in the low 50s tomorrow, and down into the 40s all weekend, so I think this is it.

I think I’m going to put a “farmer john” style wet suit and a spray skirt on my Christmas list. Oh, and a paddle float so I can self rescue.

Discovering it all over again

Ok, I’m going to sound like a total Apple fan-boy with this, but I have to say it. Yesterday, my iPod fell out of it’s case. I picked it up and suddenly without the extra bulk of the case, I was once again struck by how utterly perfect it is. It’s small, it’s light, it’s beautiful, and the user interface is great. It feels good in your hand.

Ok, the screen is a bit scratched up, and so is the shiny back surface. But it’s still a wonder of modern industrial design.

And I look at the Zune, and I see an ugly brown brick, and I think “what the hell were they thinking?”

And before you write me off as a total Apple geek, I had the same feeling with my Treo when I used it for a day without the heavy magnesium innopocket.com case. Not as perfect as an iPod, but definitely smaller and sleeker than I normally think of it because I normally have it in that case.