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2008/01/29 Linux.conf.au 2008: Melbourne

π 2008-01-29 01:47 by Merlin in Linux

Like each year, it was nice to go to LCA again, in yet another city. This year was a bit weird as it was the first time I wasn't a speaker (too many people from google and not enough speaker slots), but they were nice enough to let Jennifer and I join the speakers dinner as some speakers cancelled and freed up their spot.
The evening was quite enjoyable, especially as I got to sit in front of Linus, and discuss various non linux related things :)

The speaker's dinner felt like a banquet from Harry Potter

LCA went by quickly (3 packed days), but was well run again and quite enjoyable as usual.

2008/01/27 A few days in Melbourne around linux.conf.au

π 2008-01-27 01:01 in Australia, Ntrips, Trips

Jennifer and I did a quick visit of Melbourne before the conference. When we arrived, we just had a quick look at downtown, and Jennifer invited me to see Monty Python's Spam A Lot musical, which was quite entertaining.

The next day, to make things interesting, the next day we rented a car, and drove to the Healesville Sanctuary, where I was hoping we'd find some roaming animals, and have the chance to interact a bit with some of the animals (like feed/pet wallabies and emus), but the place felt more like a zoo.
Speaking of driving, I didn't find it overly hard, except for the following:

shifting with the left hand, I had a sometimes a hard time getting the right stick throw and would get 2nd instead of 4th gear or 3rd instead of 5th.

The turn signals are moved to the other side of the steering wheel. That was the worst thing: each time I tried to turn, I set off the windshield wipers

Also, I would tend to drive a bit too far on the left of the road due to my seat being on the wrong side.

All in all, it wasn't that bad though, and thanks to my Garmin GPS with Australian routable maps, we got where we needed without problems.

We then went to the nearby Yarra Wine Country and visited 3 different wineries, which made Jennifer very happy :), and we finished the evening by driving up Mount Dandenon. It was only 2000ft high, but the poor little stick shift 60 horsepower rental I got, really had a hard time climbing us up, and I had to stick to 2nd gear :)

Then, during one of the evenings, we went to Melbourne Museum , as invited by the conference, and amount other things, we saw the last first generation computer left on earth, on par with ENIAC. That was cool to see:

In hindsight, we didn't have enough time to see as much as we could have, but better than nothing for this time. We'll fix that in 2016 when we're be back.

See more images for A few days in Melbourne around linux.conf.au

2008/01/16 rescuing/rebuilding magic, and magic back online and live

π 2008-01-16 01:01 in Computers, Linux, Public

magic died from a double disk failure on Dec 31st 2007, at the time I had to fail over all my services to moremagic, which thankfully I had setup and put online just for a eventuality like that one.
It was a then top of the line VA Linux 2250 with hot swappable SCSI SCA drives which I likely built around 2000 or so (don't have exact records nor pictures):

looks like it was at MFN early on while I was at google (before that it was at VA Linux)

moved from MFN to via.net in 2003

When I got home to fix it, the server was in a sad state because one of the raid5 drives was dead (you could hear the head scraping the disk when you turned it on) and a second drive would die as soon as you accessed some portions of it. So, when I managed to manually bring the raid5 array on 4 drives instead of 5, that second drive would go offline as soon as I accessed some of its sectors (as /usr was being mounted).
Unfortunately, all the partitions were all logical volumes on a big volume group, and the boot process would try to mount /usr from /dev/intraid5/usr and bring the raid5 array down, along with the volume group and all other logical volumes.
Now, I already had a backup of almost all the data there, but not my ftp site, as it was too big to bother backing up. This was what I was trying to get back.
After a little effort, I actually got it to work: I manually brought a not up to date raid with
mdadm -A --run --force /dev/md5 /dev/sd{a,b,c,d}3
(--run because one drive was missing and --force because /dev/sdc3 was not up to date with the rest of the drives, but at that point, I didn't give a shit, I just wanted it to come up with whatever data it did have).

At that point, I would try to mount /usr to get some binaries and everything would go down and fail. Eventually, I managed to rescue it by mounting just /var/ftp without touching/mounting any other logical volume, and I was able to bring networking up and make use of tar and nc which were both in /bin to copy the data off and save the day (rescuing a system without any binary in /usr can be a bit challenging :) )

While I was working working on bringing magic back up, I decided to build a new server: I decided against fixing the old server as is, just because all my SCSI/SCA drives were old, and replacement ones would be bound to fail again (not counting the fact that they are low capacity too). The old motherboard was also a dual P3 800Mhz with one failed CPU, and RAM that still worked, but wasn't new either.
Instead, I used a lesser VA Linux 2230 system which didn't have any hotswappable drives or SCA midplane (compared to the previous 2250 I had), and used a free server motherboard that a coworker gave me. In hindsight, maybe I should have bought a new server board and populated it, but I eventually made it work: the major challenge was that it didn't have SCSI onboard, and only one PCI slot (also, it unfortunately does not allow for bios console redirection on serial port).

I ended up with a frankstein machine with:

dual P3 1.4Ghz CPUs (vs one 800Mhz)

no CD-Rom or floppy as I removed them to add 2 drives on which I jerry-rigged a fan

the 2 sata drives worked with a sata to ide converter to run them off the system IDE bus

In total 6x 250G Sata drives (4 running off Sata in addition to the 2 running off the IDE bus)

PCI connection doubler with IDSEL on 27, for one Sata 3114 sil board and one SCSI NCR 53c895 board (see below)

24 to 20 pin power connector and extender

The PCI bus was a problem since it only allowed one card, but I was able to find a PCI extender with bus selector for the second card from logicsupply.com. This was challenging to get working (and only one of the two cards will post at boot time), but in the end both cards show up in linux and work, which is all I cared about.

In the process, I also managed to smoke a SATA card by putting it in the wrong direction in the PCI slot (don't laugh, it has no header bracket and it's very hard to see its front from its back, especially on an angled bracket), I also got some smoke to get off the motherboard when it wasn't screwed to the chassis and it slid while powered on and touched a chassis bolt which shorted a solder trace on the back of the board.
Amazingly, I'm now stress testing the board and it seems to still work fine, for all of CPU, Ram, and PCI. I've restored my last backup of magic on it, ready for going back in production tomorrow.

After that, I went to via.net to rack the new frankenstein magic, after having just finished copying live data back from moremagic and switching mail/web/everything back over. This is what it looked, racked up a few months later, still running that huge disk tray filled with obsolete SCSI/SCA drives :)

We're now back up with: 2TB of disk, 2GB of Ram, and 2x1.4Ghz CPUs (ok, not stellar, but it'll do). The 2TB was through an external SCA/SCSI disk array I had before and could still connect to.

Here are a few pictures of the new server:

this was the pci riser/doubler with idsel

The power connector was also 24 pin instead of 20, and too short. Thankfully I had a power connector extension that came in very handy

I had to adapt the motherboard specific front panel connector (for intel 550GX) to a power connector that worked with a regular motherboard

4 sata drives on the right, in proper slots, and 2 sata drives on the left, one in the CD-Rom slot and one in the floppy slot, with a jerry-rigged fan I added

those IDE to sata convertors (which actually have a sata controller that takes IDE commands and translates them into brand new sata commands), came in quite handy to add 2 more drives when I only had 4 sata slots on the controller card

As I write this after the fact, I do wonder "what on earth was I doing?", that was a fair amount of complex engineering to re-use free hardware that wasn't really meant for the job, but once I factor in my engineering time to make it all work, including the PCI doubler config, or making Sata drives work on IDE ports because I didn't have enough ports on my free Sata card and probably could have bought an 8 port Sata card, even back then

For version 3, it looks like I eventually removed the SCSI card to run that obsolete external array with power hungry obsolete drives, and somehow managed to connect a single 1 or 2TB drive, sitting on the motherboard with a CPU cooler and fan:

some of my best work, haha

This allowed me to get rid of the obsolete disk array filled with drives that got replaced by a single drive sitting on top of the motherboard :) which was non redundant but contained non essential data. It still had 6 sata drives I also got for free (250GB each) running Raid5 for the main system.

That new system went on to run from 2008 to 2019, not a bad run for such a weirdly pieced up machine that blew smoke from a short when I built it until the motherboard finally died in Aug 2019, apparently from a failed capacitor.

I'm not too sure how that happened, while I still felt remnants of my cold, boot camp was "long run" today, so I ran a couple of times around the google block, as usual. I started a bit late since I went back to my car to get my heard rate monitor and GPS.
Maybe it's because of that and my trying to catch up with someone who left a good 4mn before me, that I had the drive to run a bit faster.
The stats were:

total:3.2 miles, 22:54, 7:11mn/mile, heart rate: 174bpm
1st mile: 6:59, 167bpm
2nd mile: 7:32, 169bpm (getting a bit tire)
3rd mile: 7:06, 180bpm (pushing like crazy to catch up with, and pass my foe)
3 miles:  21:37
3.1m (5k):22:18
3.2miles: 22:54 (full two laps of the block, by then I was at 186bpm)

By the end, I was absolutely tired, my throat was dead from the cold and laboured breathing, but I had made it :)

2008/01/13 Quick day at kirkwood

π 2008-01-13 20:36 by Merlin in Nsnow, Snow

After blizzard conditions, and more than 2 metres (!) of snow that fell in 2-3 days, everyone and their brother tried to go to Tahoe the following weekend.
Unfortunately, outside of crazy crowding, the snow had also melted and frozen, so there was a good base, but the snow conditions are not great.
That said, Jennifer hadn't seen any snow this season yet, so we decided to do a day trip sunday. Poor Jennifer didn't manage to sleep much before we left due to having so many things to do for her upcoming work trip in the UK, so when we left around 05:20, I did the drive and we got there in 2h50 or so.
As expected, the snow was frozen in some places, but when we stuck to the sunny spots, it was good enough. Jennifer and I were both trying our new flow bindings, which worked fine for me because I also had new boots, but Jennifer found out that her boots were actually not a good fit (either too tight in some places, or too loose, and with her ankle moving). Her old strap in bindings must have compensated for the boot issues.
She kind of had a hard time due to the boots, but was still happy to get some snow. We'll get her new boots when she comes back.

It was kind of sad that all the snow that looked nice and pristine was also crusted and very hard to ride/make turns in. Oh well...
The rest of the picts are here

2008/01/07 1 week in France

π 2008-01-07 18:46 by Merlin in Ntrips, Paris, Trips

So little to do, so little time...

We first spent 4 days with my dad, had the usual Jan 1st lunch at Geneviève's, and then spent a few days with my mom.

My dad, among other things, took us to Park Astérix , which was cold as shit :), half closed, but it was fun to see what was open, as well as the ice skating show that my dad's friend setup there.

We tried to spend a little time visiting Paris , namely La citée des sciences et de l'industrie @ La Villette, seeing an IMAX movie at La Géode, visiting le Pantéon , and an exposition on the TGV at le Grand Palais.

After a couple of days with my Mom, we did the usual trip to Holland to see all my aunts, uncles, nephews, and nieces.

And after just being back from Holland, we barely had enough time to pack, and see Rani, Severine, and Benji for dinner:

After all this excitement and little sleep before the monday morning plane, we ended back up in SFO, but without our luggage :( (although it should get there by tomorrow, I'm told). Thank you again Air France, and the lazy ass folks who work at CDG.

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