Author: Paul Tomblin

A new start

I decided I needed some more room on my home Linux box, so I bought a couple of 2TB disks. I also decided it was time to do a wipe and re-install because the box has been upgraded many times and there are several things that just don’t work right any more. So I burned a bunch of different distros onto CDs and experimented with them, and decided that Kubuntu is the best combination of beauty and power. None of the other distros except Debian allows you to set up lvm on RAID-1 while installing, and Debian looks like a bit of a dogs breakfast compared to Kubuntu, even in KDE.

The two new disks are so big that as it is, I’m only using them for the new installation, so the I can mount the old system under /old_system and I can compare everything to make sure I haven’t lost any important configuration. But eventually I’ll be able to delete those partitions and add them back to the free pool in the LV and use them to expand any of the actual in-use partitions. I love lvm.

Installation has gone ok, I’ve got about 3/4s of the things I need to get working again working again, but I’ve hit the usual string of snags. The biggest is that one of the two new disks keeps dropping out of the RAID1, so I have to keep adding it back in. I’ve rejiggered all the cables as best as I can, and hopefully it will rebuild overnight and it will be ok. Fingers crossed, I’m off to bed.

Is this even possible?

Ok, here is the current situation: My machine has two identical 500Gb drives, and two identical 1Tb drives. When I first set it up, with just the 500Gb drives, I was using a version of Linux that wouldn’t boot from mirrored lvm partitions, so I set it up

  • /dev/sda1 2Gb /boot
  • /dev/sdb1 2Gb /
  • /dev/sda2 2Gb swap
  • /dev/sdb2 2Gb swap
  • /dev/sda3 and /dev/sdb3 – turned to a mirror, /dev/md0 and then created a
    pv and a vg.

That was working fine for a number of years, and then I added the two 1Tb drives, which I created as a mirror /dev/md1 and added it to the vg.

At this time, I have more more than 500Gb free space in the vg, so I definitely could pvmove and vgreduce and get rid of that. I’d also like to somehow fix it so that / and /boot and swap are on lv and just boot from the two 1Tb drives. The reason I’d like to do that is that

  • a) It’s been bugging me for years that I’m still using physical partitions
    for / and /boot, so I can’t resize them and
  • b) I have two 2Tb disks sitting on my desk that I’d like to add, and I
    don’t think I have enough SATA ports for 6 disks and
  • c) these two 500Gb drives are ancient – they just hit their 5th birthday a
    few weeks ago.

So would it be possible to migrate everything off of /dev/sda and /dev/sdb without major surgery? Or am I going to have to bite the bullet and re-install everything?

Probably time to throw in the towel on the waypoint generators

For years now I’ve been providing aeronautical data for various programs – The Wayback Machine shows it existing in 2001, but I’m pretty sure I was running it before then. The site hasn’t changed much visually since then, since I concentrated on providing good data rather than prettying up the site. But I thought I was providing a good free service and it was worth it to people. I didn’t really push it hard, but I did politely ask for donations, through Paypal and at one time through the “Amazon Honor System” until Amazon killed that. And for a long time, I made about 1/4 to 1/2 as much through that as it cost me in hosting and data costs. But that hasn’t been true for a long time. I just looked at my Paypal history for the last 12 months, and I got two donations of $25 each, one of $3.32 and one of $1.13 (yeah, go figure). $54.45 in a year. That’s it. That doesn’t keep me in thumb drives.

Add on to that the fact that my source of world-wide data, the DAFIF file, hasn’t been updated since 2006 and it’s increasingly been a “US data plus some airport data from here and there”, and I’m worried about presenting this to the world as useful data for anything. I’ve always staunchly maintained that this is just to save you from a bit of data entry for flight planning and not a substitute for official data sources, but it’s just embarrassing to think somebody is going to be looking for navaids and waypoints in Europe, say, and not finding anything that’s still in use. At least airports don’t tend to move around much.

And because the data I have is getting stale, I keep hoping that people would provide feedback on the data I have, offering to provide data for their area or just letting me know if something is wrong. At one time I had a couple of people sending me their data sets which I incorporated into the database. (Although I did have one set of data for Australia where all the airports had the sign of their longitude reversed – I’m pretty sure I purged the last of that.) That was actually more important than the donations to me. It showed people were using the data, and cared when it was wrong.

So I guess what I’m saying is that I’m reconsidering if it’s worth doing this. I’ll still maintain the data for the CoPilot iOS app, that’s a separate database and thanks to Laurie Davis I get world wide data from Eurocontrol that that. But next time I get a data dump from the FAA (September 19th), I’m going to give some thought over whether to load it into both database, or just the CoPilot iOS one.

Thoughts on the Tour

When they initially announced the route of this year’s tour, I knew that Andy Schleck wouldn’t be winning it. That was before Nissan-Radio Shack-Trek turned out to be the biggest disappointment of the entire season, never really getting any good results through the spring. Other than Fabian Cancellara’s prologue and winning the team category, they’ve really been a team in complete disarray and it’s shown. I have heard rumours that they won’t be around next year, and that isn’t at all surprising after all the bickering and infighting in the team.

I don’t know if Frank Schleck’s positive test was some sort of sabotage, or just the fact that with Bryneel occupied elsewhere, they made a mistake in their doping program. Schleck’s team mate Chris Horner wrote that when you’re not the biggest team in the race or not one of the top contenders, you *do* sometimes end up drinking from those bottles that spectators try to hold out to the riders – the guys you see on TV sometimes take them and dump them over their heads to cool off, but they never drink them because you never know whether it’s fresh water or water from the streams beside the road, which are probably half beer fueled piss by the time the riders get up there. And as the tacks on the road proved, there are people out there willing to sabotage the race. I could easily see somebody putting drugs in their bottles and offering them to riders they dislike. On the other hand, as I see stages being won by men who’ve served two year suspensions for doping, I wonder if we’re even yet seeing a clean race. I want to see an end to doping, but I suspect while we’ve still got team managers who admitted that they doped when they rode in the tour, I don’t think it’s going to happen.

I’d hoped that Cadel Evans less than perfect showing in the Dauphine was just him getting into form to peak for the Tour, but it was obvious when the Tour hit the Alps that he just wasn’t as good as he was last year. I wanted to see him repeat, but that’s racing for you. If you’re not perfect at the Tour, you’ve going to get beaten by somebody who is.

Even before the Tour, Bradley Wiggens and Sky Team looked like a team dedicated to and perfectly capable of being as dominant in GC as they ended up being. But I really wondered why they wanted Mark Cavendish or why Mark Cavendish wanted to be on Sky. We knew he wouldn’t get the lead-out train like he had for his winning seasons at HTC Highroad/HTC Columbia. He proved early on he could win as a scrambler like a Robbie McEwan, and be he also proved that not being a priority for your team can end up with you being in a pile of riders in the road with a broken helmet. Fortunately his team decided they were comfortable enough on GC that they could give him a decent lead-out on Stages 18 and 20. But I wonder if his reason for joining Sky wasn’t more about the Olympics than the Tour? Certainly not being the focus of his team’s efforts meant he wasn’t expected to get the Green Jersey, and it gives him a chance to ride with other British riders who he’ll probably be riding with at the Olympics. Wiggens and Froome could very well end up leading him out to a sprint finish in the Olympic road race.

No offence to Wiggens and Froome, but I miss the slashing attacks and mountain top finishes of the Armstrong and Contador eras. This year seemed more like the Indurain era, where everything was predicated on not losing any time in the mountains in order to win it on the time trials, and I’m sorry, but time trials are boring. Maybe next year they’ll have more mountains, and it will be Froome’s turn to win?

I was disappointed that Ryder Hesjedahl crashed out of the Tour. Nobody is ever going to win the Tour and the Giro in the same year in this era, but it would have been great to see how he did against Nibali and the others who did both.

Sure, I’ll get right on that

A guy I know has started a new micropayments web site called “Kachingle”. It’s a pretty cool idea – you sign up and install a browser plug-in, and they use that plug-in to allow you to say you want to “kachingle” web sites that you think need some money, and once you’ve signed up to kachingle a site, they track how often you visit that site. At the end of the month, they take $5 out of your paypal account, and distribute it to the owners of the sites you’re kachingling, divided proportionally to the number of times you visit them. I have firmly believed for some time now that the web needs a micropayment scheme that works, and if this hits critical mass it would be an awesome way to do it.

However, right now it’s in the growing stages, and there aren’t very many people using it. Which means that sites like this blog don’t exactly make enough money to retire on it. Here’s my latest statement.

I have to love the juxtaposition of the amount ($0.08) and Paypal’s glowing description of what I can do with that 8 cents. “Spend the money online at thousands of stores that accept PayPal”? I bet not many of them sell things that are 8 cents including shipping and handling.