Yearly Archives: 2006

06/18/06

Murphy is my hero

I’m a big believer in Murphy’s Law… especially when it comes to computers. If you work with computers long enough, you learn to expect the unexpected.

Case in point:

My company has a server. It’s got a crappy Adaptec RAID card which is smart enough to tell me that one of the four drives has a problem, but not WHICH drive. The only solution was to get four new drives, replace all the existing drives and get rid of the crappy Adaptec card.

Problems:

  • RAID controller doesn’t seem to like a mix of the old SATA1 and the new SATA2 drives. It picks a random number of drives (0-4) to marked as failed during boot. About 5-10 reboots are required before it decides all the drives are good. Since the system takes forever to initialize it’s BIOS and the BIOS of the card, that’s about 7-15min.
  • RAID controller won’t allow the OS to see the individual drives unless it’s a part of a RAID array. Reboot 10 more times after marking the four drives as “raw volumes”.
  • During the coping of files from the old RAID array to the new software RAID array, a drive fails in the original array which slows down the copy.
  • Grub segfaults when trying to write the MBR to the new drives.
  • My CD copy of Recovery is Possible is apparently too scrached up to be useful. Must re-download/burn an ISO.
  • This whole process was supposed to take about 7hrs max. Heh.
  • A 2nd drive has failed from the original array. It is now completely failed and all data on it unrecoverable. I no longer have a fail-safe plan.
  • The Marvell SATA chipset on the motherboard isn’t supported by my kernel. I have to keep using the crappy Adaptec SATA RAID card (w/o the raid).
  • Oh, looks like I’m going to miss a party since this is taking so long.
  • Yep missing the party. Also apparently CentOS 4.1’s initrd doesn’t support root on LVM2. This is bad since my root partition is on RAID5/LVM2.
  • Of course it helps if you install the GRUB boot loader in the MBR not a partition. Doh.

Final (temporary) solution:

  • Put one of the old drives back in the system. Yes, this causes disk detection errors at boot, but I need another disk.
  • Make this new disk the boot/root filesystem disk.
  • This allows me to boot off the harddrives (yea!) and get a root filesystem running in order to start LVM2 and mount /home and /var
  • At some point in time, the software raid got confused and marked one partition offline for each of a raid1 and raid5 array. Now I get to resync them (should only take about 500minutes according to /proc/mdstat).

Total time: 10am-5pm, 7-10pm on Sat. 9am-6pm on Sun.

06/15/06

This is my badge…

I came across a fun email from an ex-coworker and friend at a privious company shortly after that company changed it’s badge policy to be, shall we say, “more strict”.

mercy!!! have mercy on me!!! i wore my badge in the *shower* this morning!

I AM A MAN!!!! I AM NOT A NUMBER!!! I AM MORE THAN MY PLASTIC CARD!!!

[sounds of scuffle and beatings]

[electro-shock therapy]

[nine-hours of charlie **** harranguing and multiple e-mails later]

     ...i will wear my badge with pride...

This is my badge.
There are many like it, but this one is MINE.
My badge is my best friend. It is my life.
I must master it as I must master my life.
My badge without me is useless. Without my badge, I am useless.
I must swipe my badge true.
I must wear this badge straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me.
I must prove my identity before he assumes mine. I will..
My badge and myself know that what counts in war is not who we claim to be, 
the quality of our work, nor the meeting we call,
We know it is the counter hits that count. We will hit...
My badge is human, even as I, because it is my life.
Thus, I will learn it as a brother.
I will learn its weaknesses, its strengths, its parts, its accessories, its tag, and its lanyard.
I will ever guard it against the ravages of weather and damage.
I will keep my badge clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready.
We will become part of each other. We will...
Before God I swear this creed.
My badge and myself are the defenders of my country.
We are the masters of our enemy.
We are the saviors of my life.
So be it, until there is no enemy, but PEACE.

06/13/06

More site news

Well looks like Speakeasy had about a 2hr DSL outtage at my POP so my site went down. Doh. Oh well things are back up and everything seems grand.

On a completely unrelated note, I’ve just re-enabled Project Honeypot for synfin.net. If you haven’t setup a honey pot MX record or added some hidden links to your site, take a few minutes and start netting some spammers.

Also, I’ve made it easier to leave a comment by removing the captcha and switching to Askimet to filter spam. So far it’s caught 24 out of 24 comment spams attempted on the site, so I’m pretty happy with it.

06/12/06

DHS: So glad they’re on our side!

Let’s see, a guy walks into the DHS HQ with a fake Mexican ID which even if it was real wasn’t considered valid identification. So what do the rocket scientists for security do? Why they let him in of course!

Now of course, the fake ID was really good. You’d have to be a real expert to pick up on subtle mistakes like stating Tijuana is in Brittish Columbia (B.C.), claiming to live on “123 Fraud Blvd.” and misspelling “Staton Island, N.Y.”. Yep, I can really understand how the crack DHS security force could let such an well forged ID through the front door.

The good news? “DHS is following up on these allegations and will take necessary actions to ensure there is not another occurrence of this type”. I know I’ll sure sleep better knowing they’re on the case!

06/11/06

Making progress

Woot. Actually making progress with the tcpedit libraryization. The API is finally coming together and seems usable. One of these days, I should make libtcpedit a plugin chain rather then a bunch of static code, but that’s like a 4.0 feature. :)

Anyways, hopefully in a couple of weeks beta8 will be ready to go. I don’t think tcpbridge will be working, but that can come later.

06/10/06

Tcpreplay News moves to my blog

I’ve come to the realization that my blog is a much better way of reporting of what’s going on with tcpreplay then the news section, so I’ve decided to move to using the blog for now on.

Anyways, with that said, tcpreplay is still in active development as I have time. I know it’s been a long long time since the last 3.0beta release, but since then I’ve doing a major rewrite to clean up the code. Like most rewrites I’m sure it’ll pay off dividends in the long run, but it’s taking longer then I had hoped. Once the rewrite is complete, I’ll move towards a release early, release often methodology.

I’m also still in the process of updating all the docs so that people can be more familar with the features in the Tcpreplay suite- lately I’ve met a lot of people who don’t know that tcpreplay can edit packets or supports splitting traffic between two interfaces.

06/9/06

Site news

Well let’s see…

  • I upgraded WordPress to 2.0.3.
  • Enabled mod_deflate to apache so that pages should load faster.
  • Added some pics from my latest track day at Thunderhill Raceway.
  • I’ve significantly improved the docs for tcpreplay

Anyways, right now, my main goal is to learn ruby and rails so that I can use it for work and some side projects I have in mind.

06/5/06

Great quote

I have a poorly maintained hobby of keeping track of great quotes. Just recently I read another great quote which I found very timely considering what is going on in the world and the US of late:

As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an
evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil
that they set out to destroy.
                     - Christopher Dawson, The Judgment of Nations

05/27/06

Why the NSA spying on Americans isn’t helping

I don’t usually think of Computerworld as a particularlly great place to read Op-Ed pieces, but this article by Ira Winkler, an ex-NSA analyst explains why not only is the NSA warrentless spying on American’s phone records is illegal (duh) but counter-productive as well if your goal is to stop terrorisim.

While I agree with almost everything Ira had to say, I don’t think comparing the NSA actions to Stalin and Hitler is useful. The quickest way to send a discussion to hell is start comparing people to Nazi’s or people like Stalin- not only an emotionally charged issue, but most Americans think what happened in places like Germany and Russia could never happen here.

But of course we now know that the U.S. Government has a history of spying and persecuting people (remember what happed to Martin Luther King Jr. and during McCarthyism in the 1950’s). And I can guarantee you that at some point in time in your life, your perspective will not be in line with the political powers that be. So maybe you should worry after all.

05/24/06

Is the US really behind in creating engineers?

I dunno, but this Washington Post article shows that it’s not a slam dunk that the US is really so far behind India and China creating engineers as common knowledge would have us believe. Turns out there’s a good chance that the US numbers were quite a bit higher then reported and the Chinese numbers (originally based upon reports from the Chinese government) were highly inflated for a number of reasons.

When you think about it, China and India have a vested interest in reporting higher then actual numbers (to increase interest in getting companies to open offices in their country) and many companies (both US and foreign) have a strong reason to perpetuate those numbers (to perpetuate the myth that there is a labor shortage in the US).