Matt D's Blog

After my main server decided to almost literally go up in flames (CPU burned itself up), and then moving everything to my desktop…Well, things just didn’t quite work out the way I would have liked.

Then I realized that I wanted to get back into the photography stuff more…And while it’s unfortunate, the reality is, color calibration, nor high-color-depth photo editing is not up to par when compared to platforms such as Apple or Microsoft Windows. So, what’s a good IT geek to do? Install OS X on his PC, of course. Problem: I had a AMD based machine. Solution: Buy a new motherboard and CPU. Moved my old board and some new RAM to a different case…Add in some more storage, and put Solaris with ZFS on it. This was great, got everything working.

Then I tried to enable the Sun Ray functionality. Full stop. This is definite show stopper on OpenSolaris 2008.05. There’s no documentation on how to get it to work, and quite frankly, I want everything to be fixed by now. So I downloaded Solaris Express (aka Nevada) Build 99, installed that…and everything works (had some networking issues, but I have a work-around). Installed Sun Ray software in under 5 minutes. I’m now using the terminal that is for my grandmother.

Here’s the cool part. I went to www.pandora.com and opened up my station, and my music started streaming to the terminal I’m at. NO CONFIGURATION. NONE. It’s clearly MUCH better integrated on Solaris then Linux. I’m very happy with this now.

Now I can clean my room. LOL.

Now, while I’ll preface this by saying that I think I will get all my data back, the fact that it doesn’t keep a backup copy of the metadata - that which describes the RAID array itself anywhere, is a joke.

I have to wait another 80 minutes or so to even find out if it’s OK, and I’m not sure what happened to screw it up in the first place.

I’m on the train coming back from the city and the S60 event. It was fun, and cool to meet some people that I’ve spoken with online, and to put some faces to names. I also got to meet Howard Chui of Howard Forums, who is real down to earth and fun to talk with. He was carrying THREE devices on him tonight, LOL.

It was cool talking with some of the S60 and Nokia guys…I got to meet Chance and Ira, who showed off what they were allowed to show off.

They had a giveaway of some Bluetooth headsets, some ear-pieces and 2 N95-3s.

They had a speech from the inventor of the Segway, talking about using technology to help those who are needy to get clean water and electricity. Very cool stuff.

They also talked about a developer’s site which I can’t remember the name of at the second..Giving away money to a good developer…

In the past 6.5 months or so, we’ve had 8 outages. 6 of them weren’t so bad 20-40 mins here and there. Wel, the past two, one of which was a week or so ago, lasted 4 hours of which were totally unusable. They have not said how much money they are giving us back becuase it was such a widespread problem. Well, for most of yesterday, and again today, RPC over HTTP is down, which means only webmail works for us. Again, totally unacceptable. This is why I will be administrating an Exchange server soon.

I read up on HowardForums that there is a S60 event in NYC coming up tomorrow night at th Nokia Experience store, so I registered and will be there. It should be fun, and kinda cool to meet some of the people that I’ve seen on the board.

Nokia will be hearing my comments about the N95, that’s for certain.

See everyone there!

So I was investigating using smart cards for authentication..I’ve got a reader, I’ve got cards from the SunRay. I’ve got the American Express Blue card when it had a chip on it, instead of RFID.

Unfortunately, only the reader was compatible with Linux. I can’t get any information off the Sun card (which apparently has a whopping 1K of memory, useless for certificate based authentication), nor the Amex card.

So then I decided to play guitar, which I haven’t done in a long time, and I realized…I’ve forgotten a lot of the old songs I knew and / or came up with. So I
looked on the sounds section of this site and listened to some of it..Most of it is 7 years old or more. It made me feel OLD. I also realized that it will take
a bit of practice to get back to, and exceed the level of ability that I had 7 years ago…

Oh yeah, and don’t install esound on Ubuntu 8.04. Bad things happen, like real weird stuff, and no mention of it in syslog…

Finally! I have gotten everything online and uploaded to both Adorama for printing, and to here for viewing.

Simply go to the gallery to get viewing!

I got my car on the 27th, registered it no problem. Stupid DMV took over an hour, and I got a parking ticket as a result. The good news is that the car looks to be in very good shape, aside from a few minor scratches, and a couple of nicks here and there. The interior is very clean. The downsides are that both front window regulators are shot - the driver side is worse then the passenger, but they both need to be replaced. They’re $140 each. The rear tires need replacing (already known), and the outside temperature sensor reads either -40 or 122 degrees F (that I knew about too). The upside is that I have an iPod integration kit for the radio, and a factory alarm on the vehicle, so I don’t have to buy either of those.

Speaking of the iPod, I’m rescuing the one Leon gave me when it died on him - the HD is shot on it, but some ingenious people have found a way to put a CompactFlash memory card inside it. So I bought a 32 GB card, and the adapter, and they should be here by the end of the week. No more lugging CDs around with me.

With regards to the SunRay situation, as it turns out, the beta of 4.1 includes 64 bit PAM (authentication) modules, thus negating 75% of my problems with installation on this setup. Ah well. It’s still not perfect, but it is usable as it is.

In other news, my 330 SMG sedan is finally in NJ, and should be ready for pickup shortly. FINALLY. It shipped from CA on the 1st of August. Totally ridiculous amount of time. Dependable Auto Shippers, they are not. I highly recommend staying away from them, as they’re overpriced and under-deliver. I hard from a co-worker they stole his extra keys, and his floor mats on his 350Z.

The LS has finally succumbed to the radiator leaking. It needs a new one. I am going 50/50 with Paul on it cause he’s using it until I sell it, so that makes it worth while fixing…

Yikes.. So, originally I had the Sun Ray Server Software (SRSS) on one of my servers…Unfortunately for me it decided to cook the CPU, and there went that. So I moved it to Xen, and then to VMWare. Xen is nice but too much of a hassle to get working right, the performance is better then VMWare server, but one of the major benefits - any OS that’s Xen compatible for your “host” OS is negated by the fact that if you add anything that’s outside of a normal server piece of hardware, you jeopardize the stability of the system - ie my video capture card for HDTV, as well as my IDE controller were causing Xen to be unstable. So thats why I moved it to VMWare, which was fine except I started having some issues related to the clock. So I decided it was time to re-do my desktop.

I decided that I would take advantage of my CPU and make it 64-bit. What I did not realize was how much it was going to complicate the install of SRSS on my machine.

Here’s what you need to do:

Follow this guide:

http://wiki.sun-rays.org/index.php/Installing_Sun_Ray_Server_on_Debian

But all of the packages instead of just using “alien -d” to convert from RPM to Deb need to be unpackaged, the “Architecture” line changed from “i386” to “i386 amd64” and packaged back up.

Then you need to install libgdbm from the 32 bit distro into /usr/lib32. Finally, you need to install the PAM modules into /lib32/security. This gets you a working set up for the most part. My sound isn’t quite right, I don’t have the SUN variables on the Sun Rays, and session locking is broken.

Other then that, I have a faster desktop, and Sun Rays running off them.

Sun has this really cool Thin-Client solution - big server in background, small, efficient devices at the desk.




In this pic you can see the Sun Ray 150 which I’m working on at this moment, and the Sun Ray 1 sitting next to it… $60 for the Sun Ray 1 (got another for $20), and $75 for the Sun Ray 150. Oh, and that’s a smart card that’s sticking out of it. I pull that out, and my session suspends. Then my grandmother can put her card in, and her session comes up with all her applications running. Pretty cool, eh?

Oh, and it supports sound. Both ways. And it dynamically changes the quality depending on how much bandwidth you have. Really cool stuff.

Will resize pic soon. Sorry about mess, too.

Money. In my limited experience with the business world, I can say without hesitation that however lucrative it may seem, if the job is not one that you enjoy, and in fact, grow to despise, then that job is not worth the money.

Over the course of time at my job at Mophap, there have been times where I have thought it sucked and was not worth the stress. To be honest, most of the stress stems from our CEO, who has totally unrealistic expectations, and wants everything yesterday.

After having to come in on Saturday due to a hardware issue - we think it was a disk controller that was very sensative to heat - he takes myself and my boss into the conference room (which is a crappy one because of the rediculous echo, but that’s another issue) and proceeds to tell us that the cabling in the office is a mess and that peoples desk look horrible like they are, and we should clean them up. One of the first things my old boss and I warned him when were looking at this place was that cabling was going to be a mess. This is because everything is against the wall, and some of the desks are in the middle of the room.

I finished getting the servers mostly put together today…our box of RAM got lost in shipping, they’re sending out another tomorrow. Aside from that, I got the hard disks installed in the 7 servers….HP sends EVERYTHING not in their ‘smart buy’ setup separately..so I had 7 servers, 4 network cards, 2 CPUs, and something like 26 hard disks.

As a result, the gym has been neglected tonight and last night, but I’m definitely going tomorrow night. I’m just gonna relax a little, watch some TV, and maybe play some more Mario Galaxy.

When I get a chance, I have to re-do my MythTV setup, and start actually watching some of what I’ve recorded. I think I’m going to dedicate 1 night a week to just watching TV and playing the Wii. Monday or Tuesday sounds like good nights - depending upon when I go to the gym…If I do Mon/Wed/Fri, then Tuesday. If I do Tu/Th/Sat, then Monday…

I swear, one more screw up, and I’m gonna start escalating this. At this point, it was fixed at 10 AM or so when I checked, and I’m at home now, and I put myself back on Verizon, and it seems to be working just fine. So I’ve got Voice, Video, and Data. Yay. Sorry for the lack of enthusiasm. I’m going to leave everything as-is for a few days, then call in and ask when I’d be getting my first bill, and ensuring they got all the discounts in place.

I was happy..I had phone, Internet, and video on 3 TVs (one with a dual-tuner HD Tivo!!).

And then they de-provisioned my Internet.

What the hell?

And now, Mom’s like - where’s the sleep function?

Answer: There is none

Ho-ly-crap.