Everything I used to bore people on newsgroups and mailing lists with, now in one inconvenient place.
I know I’m supposed to be saving money until I get a new job, but I’ve ordered my ticket to the StackOverflow Dev Day in Toronto. Right now my only question is how late to wait before ordering my SO Reputation t-shirt so my rep is in the right ballpark when I wear it there.
I think the networking opportunities there will be awesome. I wonder if I should print out a bunch of resumes?
Last week some time some people on the LUGOR (Linux Users Group Of Rochester) mailing list were discussing Time Warner’s new tiered bandwidth pricing plan and naturally the question came up “how do I measure the bandwidth I’m using if I have multiple computers behind my router”. Somebody mentioned the “Tomato” firmware for Linksys WRT54G routers as having some nifty functionality, including graphs of bandwidth use, so I thought I’d give it a go.
Last Wednesday I downloaded the firmware and attempted to install it, but each time I got a message telling me that the firmware upload had failed. So I thought nothing of it. Sunday, my router rebooted because of UPS problems. Monday, I noticed that I couldn’t reach my home web server. So Monday night when I got home from kayaking I logged into the admin console for my router, only to find it’s now running Tomato. Tomato evidently managed to grab all my settings from the old firmware except the port forwarding. But I quickly fixed that, and now I’m getting nifty graphs of bandwidth use. Nifty.
Last night was the third Sunday in four where my UPS has woken me up with beeping. Each time, it seems to suddenly decide that while the load is unchanged, and the charge percentage is unchanged, the projected lifetime in the event of a power loss has suddenly changed from 100 minutes to 0 minutes. This is more than likely an indication that the batteries are failing, and it’s time to replace them. The UPS does some sort of self test once a week, and evidently this one does these tests at 1:30am on Sundays. There doesn’t seem to be any way to turn off these tests or reschedule them.
I spent a hell of a lot on this UPS, wanting one with a lot of capacity and which had replaceable batteries, because my previous one hadn’t let me know that the batteries were getting old until our power went out one day and the charge hadn’t lasted long enough to get down to the computer room to shut down my servers. I can’t remember what I paid for it, but the current equivalent model retails for around $600, so it was probably up in that range. Replacement batteries seem to be around $50 with $20 shipping, and plus then I’d have three small lead acid batteries to dispose of somehow.
On the other hand, I’ve migrated a lot of the things I wanted a Linux server for from my home to my colo box. I’m starting to question if I even need a 24×7 server in the home. Maybe rather than spending all that money on a UPS, I should just move the last remaining things (the mail server and the personal web pages) to the colo box and shut down my home server. It’s a shame to trash a $600 UPS for want for $60 in batteries, but maybe I can eBay it.
Last night, my UPS started beeping in the middle of the night. This happened once before recently, and that time I just pushed the button on the front to see if it would reset the problem, but it turned the power completely off. That time, after my linux box booted, the two external USB backup drives came up really slow, which caused the hourly rsync backups to take more than an hour, which caused all sorts of hilarity. So this time I decided to shut everything down gracefully before I reset. And yet, this morning I got up to find that four hourly backups are still running.
I killed all the backups, unmounted the usb drives, ran fsck (which didn’t do anything because it said they were clean), powered them off, powered them on, made sure it said they were “high speed” rather than “full speed”, and mounted them. And yet when I did an ls on each one, it hung for over a minute, and then had a message in the log about resetting the USB controller, and then it was fine. I’ve started an hourly backup, and it’s taken 15 minutes or more already and it’s still on the first drive. That’s not good. I wish I knew what was going wrong there.
My first order of business is probably to order new batteries for the UPS. Each time it starts beeping in the middle of the night, munin tells me that the “charge percent” has stayed at 100%, but the runtime in minutes has dropped to zero. Very odd.
I’m what you would call the last of the hold-outs. Until a year or so ago, I read my email almost exclusively with the command line/curses client “mutt”. I’d been using mutt since transitioning from the previous reigning command line/curses mail client “elm” around 1998 or so. I stubbornly continued using mutt for several reasons, not least of which was that I could ssh home and read my email on my own account on my own server, and have the same user experience whether I was home or at work. A year or so ago, work cut off my ability to ssh home.
I settled on a bizarre combination to replace it: I have a GMail account I can access at work. My home email is accessable through IMAP, and I read it at home with Thunderbird on my laptop, and on the go with SnapperMail on my Treo. I subscribed to all my high traffic mailing lists using my GMail account so I can read them when I’m at work. But because I’m stubborn, I’ve refused to unsubscribe them at home, and so-far have insisted on reading them with Thunderbird. Which leads to vast amounts of wibbling about trying to keep the two accounts synchronized – mostly by using my Treo to mark as read and deleted all the articles that I’d already read on my GMail account and the like.
But this is starting to drive me crazy. So as of today, I’m reluctantly giving up and unsubscribing my xcski.com accont from the mailing lists. I’m going to read them on GMail whether I’m home or at work. All that remains to be seen is:
If I take the last option, it would be sad to shut down my mail server. I’ve been doing mail service for a long long time and I was proud of how well it worked and how well the spam protection worked. Plus I’m not sure how the various daemons on my system that send email will work with GMail. Oh well, at least my mailing list mail server will continue to run.