JB's Miscellaneous Ramblings

On the bog-standard brought-in working lunch!

.. and sausage pies!

Yum!

During a normal day at work, I expect to receive audio input from:
iPod, personal cell, work cell (==desk phone), work PC (VOIP is popular here), and personal laptop.
I expect to send audio (speak in to. :) the middle 3 of those, and maybe all of the last 4.

WHY is there no desktop mixing console that deals with the proliferation of devices - more so, that handles both input AND output?

(If I'm wrong, PLEASE let me know.)

(I could deal with a 4-way mixer, if need be.)

(I thought I'd posted about this here before, but going over my last year of posts (<90) seems to show that I haven't.)

So, who needs a sysadmin?

Resume will be updated shortly.

... so that you don't make your admins want to kill you...

Has anyone ever seen something like this?

Things I know: "It's broken" is bad. "Fix it" is bad.

More detail is good.

For my local package, screen shots are annoying and should be avoided if possible (the email notification eats the attachment).

Beyond that, there's a lot of luser-friendly advice one can give, and if someone else has already written it, I really don't want to re-write it.

Anyone have any pointers?

Thanks...

(The following post is edited together from an afternoon's worth of IRC conversation on 2 different geekly channels. I'm sorry if I failed to make it clear, but I've been staring at all of this too long to have any distance left.)

Is there anyone here with netapp experience, especially as concerns space allocation and snapshots, especially as concerns iSCSI? I've been trying to get meaning out of the docs for a while now and I just keep glazing over... and not in the good Krispy Kreme glaze sort of way.

I'm trying to figure out how much diskspace I need to reserve where and via which mechanism to have my snapshots A) snap and B) be usable in a lun clone as necessary for data recovery.... and to figure out if I'm even thinking about all of this in the right way. NetApp's docs... well, they don't totally blow, but they're very circularly referential. If there's a proper path through dealing with their concepts, I've yet to find it.

I've got a filer with an aggregate with a flexvol with a lun.
I need to figure out appropriate allocation of reserve space to let me make snapshots and then to let me use them, if needed.
Despite that, on a 350GB volume, the lun in question is 200GB and has only 120G used (at a reasonable ROC), I'm only managing to be able to make 1 snapshot.

I've got 10% snapshot reserve on the volume - 35G.

carbarn*> snap delta mysql
. . .
From Snapshot To KB changed Time Rate (KB/hour)
--------------- -------------------- ----------- ------------ ---------------
nightly.1 Active File System 282316 1d 16:47 6922.337

I'm really just not getting how much I need to be reserving here... and where to reserve it. 70mb/hr =560mb/8hr, 1.6GB/day., 840mb/12h. So to keep 6 snaps from 8hr intervals and 2 dailys, I'd expect to need something lik 8GB. That's not very much.

What is using up the space between my 200GB lun and my 350/10% volume?
(There's nothing on the vol but the lun and the .snapshot directory/contents.)

Alternately, how do I tell how much space I need to have available to make a snapshot Right Now?

carbarn*> df -rh mysql
Filesystem total used avail reserved Mounted on
/vol/mysql/ 315GB 315GB 0KB 140GB /vol/mysql/
/vol/mysql/.snapshot 35GB 10GB 24GB 0KB /vol/mysql/.snapshot

... and yet, I've got only one nightly snap.

As well, among many other things, I'm unclear what the 140GB reserve on the volume is for. The only thing on the volume is one 200GB lun. Given that the LUN is space-reserved, I'd EXPECT to see 200GB reserved and 115GB free. I have no idea what the 140GB reserve is all about.

I'm developing an unfortunate feeling that, although I understand LUN snapshots to be block-level (and I have 3rd party confirmation to that effect), they require the full size of the lun in available diskspace. This is... bad... if it's true.

Anyone? This is also going in to a support request with NetApp, but given how my last one of those went, I'm not amazingly hopeful. (The local folks are good. The Indian outsourced tech-support crew, not so much... and it may just be language issues, but I can't really tell.)

(The filer's a 270c running DataONTAP 7.1 and the heads are named "Wellington" and "Carbarn", as our naming scheme is T stops and using the orange line maintenance yard for the storage host seemed to make sense to me. :)

(Note: None of these are geek jobs)

So, the current set of job titles open at Smarter Living is
1) SmarterTravel.com Product Manager
2) Traffic Coordinator
3) Director of Industry & Client Communications
4) Senior Credit & Collections Representative

and the descriptions for these are ( Behind the cut )

Send mail to me (here or at home (or even at work - jb, smarterliving, com)) with your resume and cover-letter if you're interested.

(Smarter Living is based in Charlestown, behind the Schrafft's factory. We're currently about 50 people. We produce Smarter Travel and BookingBuddy.com.
I recommend it as a place to work.)

I've just added 2 feeds from http://www.bookingbuddy.com
bbuddyweeklytop - "Weekly Top Travel Deals
Hand-picked by our staff, BookingBuddy.com gives you the best travel deals for flights, hotels, vacation packages, cruises and car rentals. Updated weekly."

and
bbuddy_domestic - "Domestic Air
Check out these fares for the cheapest flights on both one-way and round-trip routes from around the country!"

Enjoy.

(x-posted to syn_promo)

Always know what machine you're typing at before you type 'drop database {foo}' at a mysql prompt.

(no major harm done, in the long run...)
{sigh}

http://flickr.com/photos/jbsegal/tags/tide/

I was parked about 6 feet to the left of the light pole.

I just went wading in the Mystic River... well, ok, usually, we call it our parking lot.

15? minutes later and I'm not sure my car would've still started...

Might as well ask here, too.

Taken from a conversation on IRC (not #e) today. Most of this is me, with 2 other voices jumping in.

Does anyone see a downside to this idea?

JB
= = =
So, I've got this question about data center rack layout... We've got racks with 2 circuits in them (10 outlets on one, 9 on the other (after you take out outlet for the rack fan). We've got stacks of machines with dual (redundant) power supplies. Most of the machines are powered with a Y-cable going to both power supplies.

Can you see where this is going? ...

Is there any reason any of you can think of to NOT connect each Y power cable to 2 different machines, and then to make sure that each machine is powered off of 2 different circuits? That way - by my figuring - you'd have to both lose a power supply AND lose the opposite circuit for a machine to go down.

(I also have this thought that there might be some advantage to hooking the 1st power to machines A and B, the 2nd to B and C, the 3rd to C and D and so on, to the limit of the Y to reach back to A... But I'm not near so certain about that.)

someone else> usually have machines with pairs of PSUs connected to disparate power sources

Right. The Y cables (long Dell's standard choice which you had to deselect while ordering) give you HW redundancy but leave you at the mercy of your power source.

As well, as we have 2 racks, 38 outlets and 22 dual-power-supplied machines, we kinda HAVE to go with Y power.
(and something like 1/3 to 1/2 of the racks are still empty...)

So if I go with my concept, we can hook up 22 machines to 22 outlets and STILL have each of them powered off of multiple PDUs.

I don't see the lose, but I've never thought of this before.

2nd Someone> if you have remote power controllers, there is a new issue ;)

Remote power is one of the reasons to do the ab/bc/cd/da thing. I could turn off any 2 to get a machine cycled.

Anyone in MetroBoston - ESPECIALLY either who can come to MIT tonight or who is coming to our openhouse tomorrow - have a degausser/bulk tape eraser I can borrow? I've got this stack of DATs that need to zero'd.

If you do, could I borrow it for a day or 2? (If you're not going to be at either place, let me know where you are and when I can come by to pick it up...)

Thanks!

I've been told to find myself mysql training.

Who, other than the folks from mysql.com, is any good at this?

1 recommendation sought, 1 'keep an eye out for me'.

A) Who can name be a brand/model of keyboard/mouse arm they like? I need more than just a drawer - I'm set up with the monitor at the end of one leg of the L of my cube desk, not in the bend - and I need it to hold the mouse as well as the KB. I'm seeing prices in the Staples catalog from $120-$350 and I really can't tell what's any good.

and now for something completely different.
B) growing up, when corn-on-the-cob season rolled around, we always had a butter-applying device the likes of which I just can't find anymore: It looks kinda like a chimney and worked kinda like a deoderant applicator - it was about the 'diameter' of a stick of butter, and about half the length. You put the butter in it, put in the bottom 'press' in and then push the butter up to the top, where you'd rub it against the corn. (The top end had a cob-shaped notch in it for easy application.) When you were done, there was a little lid to keep the butter covered.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? Have you seen them in the gadget store near you? Do you want to buy me one or 2 or 3 and I'll pay you back? Let me know!

Thanks!

So, thanks to modern technology, I get to listen to music.

My mac at home has many mp3s on it. It has an Airport card in it. It's also running SlimServer. Having punched a hole in the home firewall for it, I'm able to stream music from home to my desktop. Yay.

But wait, it gets better.

Due to the vagueries of A) the home wireless, B) the cable-modem connection, C) the MP3 players on my desktop machine (running Linux (FC4)) - which seem to be bad at rebuffering after network congestion - I'm actually using VMWare Workstation to run {shudder} WinXP so I can run iTunes.

Yay, geekitude.