Category: Job Experiences

Up and mostly running again

So after a titanic two day struggle, we’ve got my home account moved to a server with a slightly newer version of NFS, and I seem to be running again. Except I don’t have Lotus Notes or Microsoft Office. Which, unfortunately, I really need in spite of the horror of having to use them on a daily basis. It seems that when I decided to blow the machine away and re-install, I didn’t save a precious little “id” file that allows me to log into the Lotus Notes server. The help desk form for requesting help for Notes requires you to specify what your Notes server is, and shows you how you can find it on your Notes screen – which of course I can’t do because I can’t get into Notes without this id file. It also promised that they’ll get back to you within three business days. Rob has warned me that there will be two more hurdles:

  • First they will refuse to help me because they don’t support Linux, and/or because Notes doesn’t run under Linux. Evidently the fact that everybody in our office runs it under Crossover Office under Linux is just a figment of our imagination. Pointing out that this is just an authentication issue and not an OS issue evidently isn’t enough to get them to cough up this file without a fight.
  • Even after they relent and send you the file, they don’t actually send it to you, they send it to your boss. And since my boss never reads his email and his secretary can never be bothered to send me the information when I try to recover my Windows network password (too busy with eBay and Solitaire), I’m not holding out great hope of getting this either.

It’s the worst day since yesterday

(Apologies to Flogging Molly)

Spent the whole frigging day dealing with the problems I was having with my computer at work. I tried reinstalling the OS (CentOS 4.2) again. I tried replacing the hard drive that was giving errors. I tried installing it on a Dell 700 I had on my desk for testing purposes. Every time I got the same problem – I’d set up a Thunderbird or Evolution account, exit the program and come back in, and the program couldn’t find the Inbox file any more. Rob suggested the problem might be due to me having SELinux enabled, so I installed it without it enabled. Mike suggested that CentOS 4.3 just came out this weekend, so I tried that. Still no luck.

After a few attempts, I was looking for the Evolution configuration, but I got a weird error when I tried a “find . -type f -print” on my home directory. I didn’t get these errors on a local file system, or when doing it on my home directory on the NFS server. After a bit of messing around, we realized that the problem might be that CentOS is now using NFS v4, and might have obsoleted NFS v2. The server that has our home directories on them is an old SGI running IRIX 6.4 – it’s possible that it only does NFS v2. Tomorrow, Rob is going to look at moving our home directories to a machine running Solaris 9. Hopefully that will fix it.

Morning Rant #1: Work Frustrations

A couple of weeks ago, my work computer froze up hard while I was copying the source code tree to my thumb drive so I could do some work at home. (Yes, probably a gross violation of security rules, but it’s either that or do a lot less work.) Afterwards, I’ve had nothing but problems with ClearCase – I had to toss out a couple of the views I had, and make new ones, and even with those ones, about once every two days I’ll get some sort of I/O error and have to do a “ct recoverview -f -tag tomblin_DCOS6.0” to get it working again. There were other problems on that machine. Plus it’s running on a 2.4 Linux kernel and RedHat 8 and all our new stuff is being developed on 2.6 and CentOS 4.2.

I decided the time had come to reformat and reinstall CentOS. The install went relatively smoothly, except at one point in the sequence I saw a message about a problem on one of my hard disks flash by too fast for me to read. Of course now that I’ve got the OS installed, I have to find and install Clearcase, Java, Jikes, Eclipse, Crossover Office, Microsoft Office, and Notes. But first I want to test that drive. I told smartctl to start a long test on both drives. I got Clearcase, Java and Jikes installed (the others can wait) and tried to do some work. And found I couldn’t, because one of my cow-orkers, who loves to “refactor”, managed to refactor a couple of files out of existance, so I can’t do a top level build successfully.

While that was going on, I tried Firefox. The Firefox that CentOS installed was 1.07, rather than the 1.5 I had been using, and I got a strange thick gray bar at the bottom of the screen below the status bar. It’s about as thick as the navigation toolbar up top, with a tiny red caret on the left side, but nothing else. I can’t seem to get it to go away, even by switching themes.

Ok, next up was Thunderbird. It opened up, and for my normal mail account, it showed “Drafts”, “Sent” and “Trash”, but no “Inbox”. I checked in the directory, and there was definitely an Inbox there. I sent myself a test message, it sent, but still no Inbox. I tried “Create a new folder”, but it wouldn’t let me create an Inbox because one already existed. Ok, I said to myself, obviously Thunderbird is hosed. How about Evolution. I opened up Evolution, and set up an account. It showed a couple of folders, but no Inbox! So I said “to hell with this”, and exited Evolution. But when I tried to blow away my .evolution directory, I got a bunch of NFS errors and some of the files wouldn’t go away.

That’s when I chucked it all and went home. I figured somebody on Monday can help me, or get me new hardware.

Quiet is nice

In my continuing attempts to keep from killing the people around me, I’m trying another way to blot out the noise around me.

At the Apple Store before Christmas, I tried out the Bose noise cancelling headphones.  Just like their aviation headphones, they were awesome, light, and way too freaking expensive .  They’re around $300, which I suppose is a bargain compared to the Series X aviation headphones which are around $1000, and have been since they invented the concept of ANR (Automatic Noise Reduction) in aviation headphones.  The aviation ones haven’t budged in price in 10 years, so I don’t expect to see the music ones getting drastically reduced either.
So I compromised and bought myself a pair of Sony MDR-NC6 headphones.  These are semi-open like the original Walkman headphones, but with a battery compartment in the bow just above the right ear.

You put them on your head and flick the switch.  The first thing you notice is that you can no longer hear the air noise in the overhead HVAC system, nor the three computers sitting right behind your head on the desk behind you.  Then you turn on the iPod and find you can use a much lower volume setting.  Not sure if that’s because everything got quieter, or because the iPod got louder.  Even near-by conversations are muted.  Hey, I don’t feel like punching the guy using his speaker phone to check his voice mail.  Much.  This is good!  And no sore ear canal from ear buds that don’t fit very well.
There are a couple of downsides, though:

  • I don’t think the bass response is very good.
  • The battery compartment presses into my head annoyingly after a lot of hours of continuous use.
  • I don’t know how long the battery lasts yet – that might be an issue.
  • When you’re walking around, if you don’t turn off the noise cancelling you get a very loud wind noise in your ears.  I have no idea why.

If you don’t hear from me after today…

…it’s because I’ve had to commit Seppuku to appease our Japanese customers.

A few days ago, based on a code review (which I unfortunately did on our 5.0 code base instead of the 3.6 code that they are using) and an examination of the customer logs, I confidently said that this mysterious changing value that they are seeing is due to one of them mucking around with changing values in Webmin. I found at least one case where that had happened, and like House my default assumption is that the user is always lying, because that’s usually the case. My confidence was reported up the line by my boss, and from him to the Japanese support people, and from them to the customer.

So yesterday I was taking another look at the logs, and I found that as well as the case where they had messed around with the values themselves, I found another case where the values had changed “spontaneously”. Oh oh. And then I remembered the cache of these values I’d put in in 3.1, and how hard it had been to get everybody who used the cache to understand that if they used the cache they had to listen for a particular message, and when they got that message they had to call a method to flush and reload the cache, and how some of the other developers don’t seem to get the concept of Singletons and how something they call in one thread can affect something that happens after that thread is dead and another one spawned off, and because of that in 4.0 I’d gotten rid of the cache entirely.

After apologizing, I’m going to have some backporting to do.

Why is it that when called on to apologize to the touchy Japanese customers I feel this Basil Fawlty voice in the back of my mind saying “Don’t mention the war” over and over again? I have trouble reconciling the delicate sensibilities of the Japanese and with the brutal butchers who bayonetted Canadian nurses in Hong Kong at Christmas 1941 or who casually beheaded surrendered prisoners being force marched in Bataan. I guess that’s not very culturally sensitive of me.