Category: Rant

Xen troubles

Yesterday I went out to the colo to put another hard drive in my 1U box. I’ve shut down my box about 3 times now, and one of the times the third domU got a corrupt disk and had to be wiped and reinstalled. That’s why I tried so hard to make sure that all the disks got mounted as ext3 (with journalling) instead of ext2 (no journalling). This time, just to make sure, I used the “xm shutdown [domU name]” on all three domUs before I shut down the box, just to make sure they shut down cleanly.

It took a bit of struggling to get the second drive working – I had to jumper the drives as master and slave instead of cable select, and the 80 pin cable I brought along didn’t quite stretch from one to the other so I had to stick with the existing 40 pin cable. But other than that, it seemed like everything went fine.

Until I got an email from the owner of the third domU. He couldn’t log in. So I tried the “xm console”, and saw

xm console xen3
attempt to access beyond end of device
hda1: rw=0, want=1357711368, limit=104857600
attempt to access beyond end of device
hda1: rw=0, want=18058643056, limit=104857600
attempt to access beyond end of device
hda1: rw=0, want=2123850752, limit=104857600
attempt to access beyond end of device

and then it would prompt for a userid but never prompt for a password.

I shut down his domU and did an fsck on his lv, and it reported dozens if not hundreds of errors. It boots now, but I’m scared that it’s going to do this again.

Gah! I used to do this for a living?

As part of my vacation recovery, I decided to submit a patch to make GPSBabel understand CoPilot version 4 files. I wrote the module for understanding CoPilot files back in 2002, but it only understood version 3. I decided to make it check the version number in the header and do the right thing for any version.

Now back in 2002, I cargo culted the existing GPSPilot code, and what I was doing wasn’t hugely different from what I already had there. But I haven’t written C code for a living since … (checking my resume) … 1994. Since that time, I’ve been coding in C++, Java, and perl. And I haven’t even done C++ since 2002. Grovelling along a “pointer to data” to try and extract some binary data into a format I can use is something that these days I’d do using pack/unpack in perl. C just seems so damn primitive now – almost like something that belongs in the last millenium. And it does. I was so impressed with it when I first started using it. But that was a lifetime ago.

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.

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.