June 2005

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The stuff movies are made of

June 30, 2005 in Views | No comments

Its always fun to read an account of a person that defies the norms, moves to her own drummer no matter how measured or far away. Domino appears to have been a very stimulating and challenging person that took things to new places. The story really describes this maverick that wanted more and perhaps less and perhaps different. Back doing archeology, we had the wherewithall to ask why the career was so much fun (usually over amounts of beer that my wife called “dangerous”). But the things we came up with were enlightening and perhaps cast some light upon people that move to different drummers:

  • archeology was exciting because it took a person to so many mystical, scientific, and theoretical levels and never have I had a career that matched it for pure experiences
  • many of us shunned traditional cultures, institutions, social mores and values and we liked living that way
  • there was an abiding hatred of mass society and its conundrums and isolation produced many insights into how cultures evolved
  • counter the last one with annual scientific meetings where we all joined together and rejoiced

I believe that the “cowboys of science” I once had the pleasure of being one of knew how to live life, where the joy was, the sunsets and rises, the desert scapes, and wondrous Sierra Nevada Mountains. Nowhere in technology or Linux or IT or any pasttime have I found such a balanced and almost irresponsible joy. I think we were mavericks and I once knew what drove a person like Domino to want the new challenge. It was the career but it was the pure joy, danger, challenge as well.

There is a different and more subtle joy in what I do now. But its still there; perhaps tempered a bit by changing careers. As my wife says, “outside you do this Linux thing; but inside you are a raging social scientist”. To which I reply “just don’t call me a sociologist”.

I think we must all respect Domino, see what her life became and how many of us lead lives of quiet desperation. I’m borrowing from one of my heroes, Henry D. Thoreau. But he had it right so many times.

Just out of reach

June 28, 2005 in News | No comments

beyondreach

So many things are just out of reach. But the main thing is a plan for how we are going to move honorably past the bloodshed to something else. I always hope that there is a way to reach these things but somehow between here in California and there, we seem to lose out on the plan and go for the “no plan scenario”. We’re simply asked to trust but trust comes at a cost. And I don’t see either the California Governor willing to really pay the cost. Arnold wants us to vote on a special election that really has no relevance; Bush just wants us to be “patient”. Patience is one of those virtues that are earned not given.

My answer is that I support the troops because I remember. I don’t support the cause. The thin line separating the two are miles apart in some instances.

Blogging to the Beat

June 26, 2005 in Weblogs | No comments

Awhile ago, I lost my lnxpowered.org system to a disk failure. I posted a few times here about the things I have done in order to minimize the loss in the future. Simply put, if not for Linux and rsync, I woulda been lost. My life these days at work is around documents I create, edit, and collaborate on. I stood a chance of losing it all. But what I did perhaps out of some sense of paranoia or just additional protection was to rsync my important stuff to a second system which then became my Samba server. I took the old system and rebuilt it with a 3ware controller and two maxtor drives mirrored as a RAID 1 array.

In this process, I decided not to maintain a lnxpowered.org website any longer. I had already decided to move to a hosted solution and get WordPress on it. Hence this place. This caused a bit of reflection on what I wanted for a web presence, how I wanted to do it, and whether I even needed something at lnxpowered.org as some personal home webpage. I really don’t have a lot to offer there any longer. This is the place where I hang my virtual hat and its also the place I’ve spent time recently on the new default WordPress scheme. I don’t personally like the wide and thick top image at all in Kubrick. It seems to somehow imbalance the rest of the site. My site is already in jeopardy of other kinds of imbalance with my daily rantings so I decided to simplify things a bit. Unfortunately, I am not a CSS guru and it took me awhile to figure out how the top image gets stored and where. If you use the default theme and you want a change, look at the main index page in the editor. That’s where it sets those things.

Secondarily, I thought it would be nice if my pages would be compliant a bit and the old blog hack was not at all. So, I’ve been working a bit on making the default Kubrick lose some of the characteristics that I really don’t like. I also wanted a few cutsie little web buttons on the site to openly display my support for Mozilla Firefox and kind of the overall feeling I get about the words I write.

In the end, whether this is what I stick with or this is just a stopping point in my blog destiny, I think I like where i am now. Its perhaps this middle point of me exploring the rather rich, complex, and mysterious Kubrick theme in WordPress. But I’ll be blogging to the beat here from now on so if you have some desire (for some reason unknown to me) to make a comment or a contact, its all here. If you want to hack on Kubrick, don’t ask me for help…

I’m still larnin’ the durned thing myself.

Debian Sarge, 3ware, fun and frills

June 25, 2005 in Linux | No comments

This is one great combination of use. Specifically, a 3ware RAID controller, a CD install of Debian Sarge, and mix with 2 inexpensive SATA drives. When you have all the ingrediants together in one space and place, carefully fold into a PC case with requisite memory, video and power supply. Now boot the said PC and carefully add a 3ware bios adjustment to build the type of RAID array you want. A RAID 1 will work fabulously for this recipe. After building the array, boot the linux CD with the boot switch “linux26″. This will get you the required 2.6 kernel and add the necessary magic to get a 3ware controller seen at boot. Now mount the file systems and you have a mirror.

From all this occurring within 20 minutes, I ditched my older ecrix tape drive and wrote some simple rsync scripts, exported a key, and let the backup fun begin! Now I am gonna rebuild my primary Linux box with this same array because its my thinking that installing anything with only one drive is plain wrong if that thing is gonna be a server. Let the RAID begin!

Thanks Debian, 3ware, and Maxtor for making all the required ingrediants and making them at good price points!

From Netaid to Live 8

June 24, 2005 in News | No comments

Some years ago, I had the opportunity work on Netaid. My role was building out testing approaches for hardware SSL solutions running on a variety of Linux distributions and kernels. We built out a set of testing methods that would allow us to place three different hardware SSL devices into some testing. That project was quite exciting and it really was fun to see how it came alive and what it meant. The number of hits to the website was staggering to say the least.

Now we have Live 8 and its sequel events to the original 1985 event. And we have Technorati’s website that accompanies the original with bloggers making their mark.

I really like both missions but it seems Netaid has stood the test of time. The content on the site remains to this day relevant and full of value. I think the new 8 will build a sense of continuity as well. There is this mission statement in there but I think the new medium has to be blogging the event, the technologies, and just adding a voice to the threads. Back in 1999 or so when we did Netaid, I got this feeling of completion. It aligned things from all over and the technology that was implemented to do it, was very cool.

Compare the two sites though. See what you think. Which one has more relevant information as far as hunger, poverty, world conditions.

The amazing Blogadog

June 22, 2005 in Weblogs | No comments

Not being an expert blogger, but far from it; I am still very interested in the non-technical aspects of blogging. Lets just say there are a few reasons that so many of us operate the so-called tail of the blogadog. The tail definitely is long when compared to the top 100 reported on Technorati. Is there a basic difference in the content of the tail or the head of the blogadog? I suspect that many that would define themselves on the tail, blog for many reasons and many of them are very important. We as a group don’t really do it to advance a cause I suspect or to define ourselves in some technology community or to represent some social or anthropological meaning. Instead, I believe that we do it because we:

  • believe honestly that its fun and entertaining
  • advance a common desire; namely the very act of dialoging and thought transferrence
  • don’t really know what RSS or Atom is; but we do know that we feel better after we blog
  • think that by blogging we may be a member of that very tail of the dog or the blogadog

I suspect I am situated way back on the tail. I’ve moved my weblogging activities all around so I don’t have some longish history of posts/archives. I’ve used hosted solutions like Typepad and Manila and I’ve used self-hosted things like Wordpress on my own apache web server. Each has taken me to a place and I’ve felt that the first point has allowed me to stretch out and find some interesting factoids. But in the end, its been blogging my own rather limited experiences on this earth and perhaps doing a few interesting (or not so) jobs and careers. A few people have asked what it could have been like when I worked here or there; but by far people are naturally curious what an archeologist actually does. Well for one thing, it ain’t spelled with a second “a”. :).

I believe that all of our combined human experiences allow us to create our own blogadogs and tails. Weblogs whether they are hosted or owned come along and allow us to speak. In the end, I have gotten a few good comments that my weblog was fun, interesting, or frustrating to read. The first two I understand, the third one I laugh at continuously. One of my favorite authors was this guy Ambrose Bierce. He was featured in this rather interesting western movie called “Old Gringo”. HIs life was truly interesting and he seemed to simply disappear into the American West. Watch the movie sometimes. Truly interesting… But the point here is that he was also frustrated with writing and storytelling. He was once asked to review a fictional work by a 19th century author. His response when asked about the book, there were too many pages between the covers .

We all generate too many pages between our covers. Our pages may be literal and they may be individual hairs on the tail of the blogadog. But each one of us has a value to discourse. If you do blogging, consider where you are. Your journey may take longer on the tail but there are certainly more comrades around. You can go off and read the pages inbetween lots of covers and make your own mind up.

After all is said, blogging may not be for you. But if it is, its just like real estate. Location, Location, Location :)

Freedom’s Look

June 20, 2005 in News | No comments

freedom!

… and there it is. The face of freedom in Lebanon away from Syria.

Birthing the Stealth

June 19, 2005 in Subterfuge | No comments

Its come to me a few times that birthing a new company is a difficult and consuming passion. Awhile back, I was there for the birth of Linuxcare; not that the link goes there any longer. I also was around for a few others then. Now I am doing another but in a different kinda role. Its been my feeling that many startups that focus perhaps on hardware or a so-called hardware product lose sight of exactly what it is they are gonna sell on that product. Way back when, I did this work for Linuxcare around technical relationship management, technical account management, and repairing a rather strained relationship with one large OEM. At that OEM, I heard a senior VP of storage solutions once say, “hell we don’t know software, man. We do hardware. That’s why we got partners around, ya know?”

The interesting part of that statement and there are a few is that it separates out the common bonds that hardware and software live by. It makes them become partnerships and not bonds. This creates an interesting requirement or limitation when the deals go beyond the hardware. I think sooner rather than later they absolutely do that. Then with no bond between the hardware and software/sevices, you are left with that feeling you could have gotten more of the primordial ooze of dollars. Software solutions, especially regarding Linux, can focus on what a insightful colleague once called “the final mile”. Its the things we do after the sale to support, package, administer, and update.

I’ve always thought with Linux and with a clued-in company that these things can become much, mure more. Services can be extremely malleable groups of inter-related ideas that are packaged, sku’ed, and sold. Bht the final mile makes it even more. The updates, new technologies, new services, new support can also be packaged the same way. I’ve like Ian Murdock’s ideas around custom linux for a long time because they make good sense. Companies want an approach that blends the ooze of hardware and software into a package they understand. Don’t tell them they gotta buy the other stuff elsewhere. Make it a solution that fits all the sizes.

Now, I am lucky. I am involved with this stealth-mode startup which is focusing exactly on that. My friend Ed and I have built solutions, sold them, modeled them, and done it at a few places. Now we’re engaged yet again in fun, exciting, challenging work. Its that startup fever that wells up; but most of all, its a way of packaging, delivering, and selling that “final mile” solution. The one that will bring customers back asking for more. Linux is so very good at that. People come to it for a variety of reasons. Licensing, cost, freedom. But they come back I think because the sweet spot solutions are so sweet. Build the final mile parts and they come back for even more. That allows us to build more, the stealth mode partners to focus on new things. It makes a nice triangle or so of event, occurence, modeling, and solutions. A solution by its nature has to be sold more than once so there is an idea in it that its modeled as a replicative type thing. One offs simply don’t work and won’t scale in the Linux space. Perhaps the day of the appliance is gone; but the day of offering those cool, unique, and scalable final mile offerings have not.

Democracy Ascends

June 18, 2005 in Uncategorized | No comments

There is the quick way and the long way. The dirty way and the clean way. I heard this story from Iranian youth one day on the tube. There is a burning desire there to move on, gain reform, join the international countryhood. People block this though and elections there are not really about electing new government but extending the old one for more years.

I have my line drawn. I see the battles in Iraq and Afghanistan and the numbers go up and the popularity of the warrior elite go down. People are tired of the numbers going up; students and the young in Iran want new numbers. An old Guns and Roses Song called Civil War speaks miles to this. Like this one group,

Look at your young men fighting
Look at your women crying
Look at your young men dying
The way they’ve always done before

Look at the hate we’re breeding
Look at the fear we’re feeding
Look at the lives we’re leading
The way we’ve always done before

Lets not give in the face of fear and loathing. Remember the lessons learned. I hope that at some point the real forces in Iran get to build what they want. And its not more nuclear weapons. Thats for damned sure.

Followup on the system…

June 17, 2005 in Linux | No comments

If you read the last blog entry down, you can see that my primary server decided to do its dance of death while I was gone to Oregon. While gone, I ordered a few replacement parts for it. First I got one of these. I got the cheaper and smaller 2 port variety. Then I got 2 maxtor 250g sata drives and attached them. Next I got the latest Sarge Installer with the 2.6.8 kernel and installed it. First I went into the console 3ware bios application and setup a simple Raid 1 setup so that both drives were smashed into one mirror. This basically gave me about 247g large file system that I mounted in one place and also created a root partition for the OS. The Debian Sarge installer sees the 3ware card, puts the right magic in. Then I just did a very basic install. I don’t need no X or fancy tools. This box is a backup server for a variety of documents, mp3s, other stuff. I have an ecrix tape drive but I am thinking that is gonna fall out of use now. I think hard disk drive backups are easier to manage. Really the things I need are my documents and music files. So now I just rsync everything to the backup server from the samba server.

You may ask why two systems? Well, if you only rsync to another drive in the one system, you may be protected a bit more but it still in one physical place. This way, I rsync over my snappy home network every other day or so. Rsync does all the heavy lifting for me and it makes sure I get all the new files. I also chose not to run rsync in “delete” mode so even if erase a file from the source later, the backup has it all. I’ve made a few mistakes here and there with that.

The 3Ware solution works remarkably well and the drives are seen as one big scsi drive. There is kernel support for the 3ware controller which is really nice!

Anyways, if you are looking for a way to back things up, consider Linux for that and a trusty rsync cron job. It all works remarkably well!

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