Lesson Learned from Experience

Just a little tip for all you present and future System Administrators out there. Do not
set heavy equipment on top of things mounted in a rack. The rails for most equipment are designed to hold only the weight of that equipment. What can happen if this advice is not taken? Well here is a little story for you.

A previous sysadmin at my current job set a large (about 60 pounds) Dell PowerEdge server on top of a rack mount tape library. In an effort to correct some problems with said tape library, I remove the PowerEdge server and slide the tape library out of the rack on the rails. As the library (which itself weighs about 50 pounds with the tape magazines out of it) got to the end of the rails it fell out of one. Lucky for me it was only a couple of inches off the ground, but I did have to fight it pretty hard to get it out of the other rail due to the angle that it was at now. Once I got the library out of the rails I started working on it, when I noticed a small metal bracket and ball bearings on the floor. It turns out that the stress of the added weight of the server bent the retaining bracket for the bearings. Now I have to find all the ball bearings, because the scattered and figure out how to put the rail back together.

I hope that this information will be helpful to others, even though it is pure common sense.

How to un-destroy your hard drive

So, a few days ago I was performing a highly unauthorized, extremely warranty-voiding, amazingly license-violating installation of Mac OS X on my very non-Mac desktop, primarily because I could. I have a rather complex partition structure, involving three primary partitions and four logical ones, to allow me to keep my old Windows partitions around and upgrade my Ubuntu Linux installation safely.

Now, Mac OS and Windows have something in common: they're both attention-seeking brats. Whereas Linux is a good citizen and allows itself to be installed onto any partition, both Mac OS and Windows insist on having primary partitions. (To be fair, Linux has its own flaw--its partitioning tools tend to produce labyrinth partition tables that confuse other operating systems.) As a result, I had to shuffle my partitions around to free up hda2, where my home directory had been, for Mac OS. I used my Ubuntu Live CD to rearrange things, then booted into the Mac OS installer, used the Disk Utility to format the primary partition I had vacated, and installed Mac OS, which went smoothly. I tried to boot my new operating system, but got an error almost immediately:

"GRUB Error 22"

I looked it up on my laptop. Error 22 means that the partition GRUB was on has vanished into thin air.

Uh-oh.

Booted the Live CD again and, sure enough, my root directory and secondary Linux data partitions were gone; Disk Utility had truncated my whole extended partition. Apparently the drivers for my chipset weren't so hot. Fortunately, there's a simple trick to deal with this problem.

A partition table is basically just a table of contents for a disk. When a partition disappears, it hasn't really been deleted; only its entry in the partition table has. If you can recreate the partition table precisely as it once was, you can restore the partitions. Since I had just rearranged everything, and since I always size partitions in multiples of 1 GB (I'm anal), I knew exactly how the disk was laid out, so I put it back to rights, being careful to keep gparted from formatting the "new" partitions. I fsck'd the partitions, which fixed a few errors, and then rebooted.

No Error 17. I booted into Linux--no problem there; it hummed along as if nothing had happened.

I rebooted into Mac OS and got a black screen with only a cursor. It wasn't very happy with my graphics card.

Oh well. There's no such thing as a panacea.

Does Amazon have this?

Those automated advertisement systems are interesting. We've all encountered them, where a bit of JavaScript scans through a page randomly blessing some random word with a link to some commercial site offering to sell whatever that word happens to be. Occasionally this is even useful; I've found products this way before going off to real online stores to make sure I'm really looking at what I think I am and so I can buy from someone I trust. Sometimes, though, I really have to wonder if they should blacklist an additional word or two:

Find Murders
Shop and compare great deals on murders and other related products at ...

Water computer

Paulo Blikstein of MIT has created a simple computer that is run not by electricity, but by water. Made out of just acrylic and a LEGO support board and fed with a water jet, the device can do basic Boolean calculations. I'm pretty sure some wise-acre will have Linux ported to this by the end of the week.

Pictures of the device and background on the theory behind it, fluidics, can be found in the link below. Enjoy!

Further Information:

• The water computer project
  

This Old Interface

There are times where I wonder why it is that I can't bring myself to like the things that the rest of the world seems to. For all that people adore it, I'm not a fan of the Mac interface. For all the improvements they've done to it, I can't say that I like the Windows interface all that much more than I did in 1995. Despite all my amusement that Linux actually beat Microsoft to releasing an accelerated 3D environment, I haven't successfully changed window managers in several years.

It's hard to argue against the fact that we're living in an increasingly media rich world. As people have become more used to seeing pictures instead of words, the push has generally come for even more pictures. Without a doubt, interpreting symbols is much more native to the human experience than reading -- cave paintings predate written language, after all. But then I end up somewhat getting stuck, "If a picture is worth a thousand words, but I can say what I want to do in three, isn't the latter more efficient?"

That's where I end up departing with conventional wisdom in interface design. After using Linux for as long as I have, I've managed to build up a pretty extensive collection of keyboard shortcuts. Four virtual desktops allow me to switch seamlessly between applications with a single hand gesture, every window creating program I regularly launch has its own keystroke, and even my tabbed programs behave nicely without my hands ever needing to leave the keyboard. I can windows-t ls some/dir<tab>/or/other faster than I could ever do the same with Windows Explorer.

Keyboards need love, too.

New Nintendo Wii channel: Everyone Votes

In an update that may come as a surprise to many Wii gamers, Nintendo has released a quirky new channel where Wii users can cast votes on various questions.

The Everyone Votes Channel can be downloaded free of charge from the Wii Ware section of the Wii Shop Channel. A small system update is required, however, before you can get started. Once everything is downloaded and up to date, setup is just a matter of choosing your region and assigning a Mii avatar to cast your votes with.

When casting your vote on a given poll, you can also predict which choice will be the most popular. As the current polls draw to a close, you can check the Voter Data menu to keep up with all your personal stats. There you can see how accurate you've been in your predictions, how "in tune" you are with the rest of the voting populace, and you can see how far you are geographically from the most popular opinions.

The polls currently available to vote in are amusing, if a little silly. One such poll from my region is "Which century would you prefer to live in?", the choices being the 19th century or the 22nd century. (I picked the 22nd century. The 19th just doesn't do anything for me. But I digress.) In addition to regional polls, there are worldwide polls in which everyone can cast a vote. If none of the polls interest you, you can submit a question of your own to Nintendo for possible inclusion in the channel. Nifty!

As things stand now, the Everyone Votes Channel is a fun gimmick worth putting at least a few minutes into. But with any luck, perhaps Nintendo will use it as a simple-yet-powerful feedback tool to bring us better content and games in the future.

Further Information:

• YouTube video of the Everyone Votes Channel in action
  

A few things about Vista

First of all, don't think I'm flaming Vista or trying to degrade it in any way. I actually run Vista Ultimate on my own machine at home. I would just like to point out a few, quirks as you might say, of the OS.

1) Driver support is lackluster at best. The change from XP to Vista is much greater than that of 2000 to XP, so expect an even rougher transition compatibility wise. The only good side to this is that Vista does have a compatibility mode for tricking games to run as if the OS was 95, 98, 2000, XP, etc...

2) Vista claims a lot of security benefits. For the most part, this is true. However, there are a lot of breaches to this security. One of the most famous is the "speech command" exploit. In order for this exploit to work, you have to have speech recognition enabled(come on... how many of us use that?). Now, if for some reason you're in the 0.01% of the world that uses that, and you have your speakers on, AND you're away from the computer, some remote system(such as a website or someone that's already inside your system) could play sounds through your speaker and gain a small amount of control for your system. However, they still would be unable to perform UAC commands... they could only do simple commands such as shut down your computer, delete non-OS essential files, etc... Most of the criticisms about Vista's security is from otherOS-fanbois who would rather spend 10 hours doing something in -insert OS here- than 1 hour doing it in Windows, just to say their OS could do the task. However there are some legitimate security issues, so just examine the sources and see how significant the issues are.

3) "Games run slower in Vista than XP". Well, I'll just point you to this site: http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=354&type=expert . One interesting fact that most people know by now is that DirectX10 will only be released for the Vista platform. So if you want to play the latest games with ease, you'll need to eventually upgrade to Vista. However, Vista has no OpenGL support, and expect OpenGL games to only run at around 1/4 the speed of XP. I'm hiding my remarks on this marketing strategy by Microsoft.

4) Aeroglass. It is nifty and pretty. That's pretty much all I have to say about it, because that's all there really is to it. It's a shiny and is impressive to Windows-tab through during presentations.

5) Imaging. If you do ANY kind of system imaging, whether it be from removeable media, or a push from a server, you do not want to go with Vista. With all of the ACPI tables, BIOS strings, and SLIP, imaging is nigh impossible. It's a good thing Vista has sysprep.exe installed by default. In order to bypass Windows hardware change safety feature, you must do the following to save an image that will function correctly with pushed or copied to another machine:

• a) Copy all drivers to the computer and create a batch file that will install drivers automatically and/or silently
  
• b) Install all programs and setup the machine for imaging.
  
• c) Run sysprep.exe from the machine you are getting the image from. You must select Generalize! Generalizing the image removes all drivers, and thus bypassing any hardware detection.
  
• d) Create your ISO file after the system reboots, using Ghost or Windows PE or whatever your flavor is.
  
• e) After you copy the image to the new machine, it should boot up into the OOBE, or "Welcome to Windows Vista" screen. Press Ctrl-Shift-F3, and this will send you to Audit mode again.
  
• f) Inside audit mode, run your batch file to install all drivers, then reboot.
  
• g) Reboot the machine, and all drivers, programs, and other settings should match the original perfectly.

Ok, that is enough about Vista for now.

Things to do while waiting for a 0.5TB SCSI SAN over 1Gb FC to format

Let me explain the title first for people who might not be quite the server geek.
0.5TB=500GB (Think big hard drive)
SCSI=Small Computing Standard Interface (This is a type of connection for a hard drive, most commonly seen in server applications)
SAN=Storage Area Network (This is a private network for intercommunication between servers and their storage devices)
1Gb=1 Gigabit (This is a measure of speed, for a network connection 1Gb is pretty fast, for a storage device it is on the slow end)
FC=Fiber Channel (This is a type of network connection using fiber optics)

Ok here is a list of things to do while you wait for this very long process to complete, most of these things have been tested to be appropriate time wasters for waiting on your SAN to format.

• Play 1024 games of solitare
• Read all of a new web comic
• Play 1048576 games of minesweeper
• Stare at your lame matrix screen saver so long yours eyes bleed
• Get your hands dusty while helping repair a co-workers personal computer. (Either because they are nice/cute or because you can't come up with a creative way to tell them that you would rather get your testicles ran over by an ice cream truck
• Write this blog entry
• Write some other blog entry
• Start writing random things in this blog entry because you are running out of ideas
• Create a drive image of a computer that the client is having to send back for repairs
• Remote into the machine that is next to you to copy pictures off of a floppy disk, because you disconnected the mouse to use on the computer that you are making a drive image for
• Walk randomly around the halls at your office quacking at anyone you pass
• Work on tweaking out your level 7 Gestalt Dungeons and Dragons character so that you have the most broken combat monster ever without even taking any levels of Swashbuckler.
  
• Calculate the remaining time of the format by timing how long it takes to complete 1% then multiply by 100, do this 5 times to make sure that you don't have an anomaly and then be saddened because you still have several hours to wait

And once you have done all of this go ahead and do it all 1 more time since you have checked and noticed that you are only 50% done with the format.

Well I think that is enough ideas for this topic. If you have any new ones feel free to put them in a comment to this post.

Good day and happy geeking,
sTimPY