Category: Revelation

I’m used to UPS being incompetent fuckwads. So I’m a little surprised to find that of the three things I’ve ordered on-line recently, two of them came within 2 days of me placing the order even though they were sent “UPS We’ll Get To It When We Fucking Feel Like It” mode. I can only assume that they have a bunch of left over capacity from Christmas that they are waiting for the most inconvenient time to lay off or something.

I discovered a new monitor mode for the 24″ CRT that gives me even more screen real-estate. That’s nice.

I also managed to borrow a KVM from the lab downstairs so I can occasionally look in on my Linux box to see if I’ve got any new Lotus Notes “mail”. That’s nice.

Unfortunately the PS2 KVM doesn’t work well with my USB mouse – I have a USB to PS2 adaptor that I was using at one point, with the USB mouse going into the PS2 mouse adaptor, which was then going into my PS2 to USB adaptor. That was mostly a proof of concept (to make sure I could take the output of a PS2 KVM and plug it into my USB-only laptop), and also it made it easier to switch the PS2 keyboard and the USB mouse between my USB-only laptop and my PS2-and-USB Linux box. But plugging a USB mouse into a PS2 adaptor into a PS2 KVM didn’t work so well for the mouse. Every time I switched the KVM I had to reset the mouse by unplugging it and plugging it back in. Not good. So in the meantime I’m using the PS2 mouse that came with the computer instead of the USB mouse I brought from home, and it sucks. No wheel, and it uses a ball rather than optical. Oh, and it’s a Belkin, so it will probably fail in 5 minutes.

I’ve mentioned before that in order to help defray the costs of putting my stuff on a colo box, I partitioned the box in 3 Xen virtual machines, and rent two of them out. Well, yesterday one of the renters, Terry, asked for a bit of help with his Apache set up. Not knowing his root password, I mounted his hard drive in the “dom0” Xen controller, using “mount /dev/xen-space/xen2-disk /mnt” and started poking around. Well, evidently that managed to confuse ext2 because a few hours later he emailed me to say that his disk had gone “read-only”, and when he tried to reboot it didn’t come up.

Looking at my munin graphs, it appears that when he rebooted, it took down the whole box. I had to email the owner of the rack to power cycle my box, which he can do remotely. When it came back, 2 of the 3 virtual machines came up fine, but Terry’s was asking for a root password to run fsck. I shut down his virtual machine and did a fsck from within the dom0, and it found several things out of whack. But after those were fixed, I was able to restart Terry’s virtual machine.

So lesson learned. I’m not sure if things would have been happier if I’d mounted it read-only, but in the future if I need to mount one of the partitions in /dev/xen-space I’ll shut down the xen virtual machine instance first.

Below the cut is a highly illegal picture of my 17″ Powerbook G4 (1440×900 screen resolution) at work, connected up to my 24″ SGI/Sony GDM-90W11 CRT monitor (1600×1200 screen resolution), with the big screen being used for Eclipse, and the small screen showing my web browser open to Sun’s Java API documents, as well as a couple of convenient Terminal windows including one dedicated to pgsql.

The Safetype keyboard and mouse are also plugged into the Powerbook. All I really need now to make my work environment complete is a KVM so I can actually switch over to Linux and check my Lotus Notes and build in the dynamic vob.

So this is what I do now – I bring my laptop into work, hook it into the corporate network, and rsync my laptop’s /vob to my snapshot view on the Linux box. I run clearviewupdate on the snapshot view to get everything I’ve changed overnight checked into the vob, and then rsync it back so that everything that got checked in gets turned back to read-only. At that point, I’m good to go and I can plug the keyboard, video and mouse into the laptop and work. When I’m ready to leave at night, I unplug the laptop from the monitor and put the keyboard and mouse back on the Linux box, and run the same procedure all over again.

I also have a dynamic view of the same development stream, so I can build the bits of code that are actually working. (I can’t build in the snapshot view because you can’t make a snapshot view anchored at /vob, and far too many Makefiles have hard coded full paths instead of relative paths).

It’s all pretty sweet so far.

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