Heading out to Washington, DC

Starting on Monday, I’m in travel mode. Heading out to work with our east coast support and sales team in Washington DC. The weather there sounds kinda interesting (humid). I’ve worked a great deal with these guys via phone and Cisco MeetingPlace which is like WebEX; but the trip is great because I also get to meet up with our east coast application architects and the Help Desk management staff.

I’ll be adding a bit to the blog while in travel mode; but the days are pretty well spoken for in meetings and training sessions.

Other News with a view…

More personal notations. I got to meet up with Art and Jeremy at Left Bank Restaurant in San Mateo yesterday. We talked iPhone, work, and general non-work related catching up. Art lives the “global hobo” lifestyle traveling across Asia so I only see him every few months. Jeremy still works here. So, since we all worked together there at one time, conversation is usually limited to stuff I really cannot blog since my quality of blog filter is in place. I don’t care to spread too much BS about previous work engagements; no matter how much they deserve it :). As an aside, I should also note that my old buddy Ed is gone from there too for about a week now. Good luck with finding a great new thing Ed. Your skills around Linux are legendary. You are the enigmatic sensei (that’s an inside joke for any that live on a certain IRC server).

On the technology side, I finally took my work laptop home to see how difficult the Nortel Contivity VPN client software was to get working. Good news is that with a wired ethernet interface, its no problem. Bad news is that with a Centrino setup (Intel BG 2200) it has problems. The fix on my XP work laptop was to disable the Intel Agent completely in the network properties and use the Windows Almost Zero Configuration tool to do wifi. After making that change, the Nortel client behaved and allowed me to initiate VPN to work.

My Linux musings and experiments are continuing but I’ve had to seriously curtail how many systems remain powered up last few days due to the thriving heat wave we have been having. Today it broke and we have the acclaimed fog belt moving across the bayside. Very welcome!! I’m still at play in the fields of the AMD64 and I bought two 500g Seagate SATA drives from NewEgg and connected them to a two port 3ware card and built a RAID 1 array which gives me a bit under 500g of total space. I’ll probably find some use for such a contrivance. The AMD64 boxen running Debian Sid is very fast and I’ve had a few updates which borked my nvidia drivers; but the Nvidia Drivers Debian Wiki Page helps out a lot.

If you’re looking for a nice RAID alternative fully supported on Linux, I’ve done a few of these including a huge backup system and my smaller two port home systems. For the home computer user, RAID1 provides a very nice feature set for protection of your music and photos and data. If you wanna read all about RAID and what it can do for you, consider this wikipedia entry on it.

The amount of futzing with a 3ware card is pretty minimum. Comes down to a few steps including installing the card and drives and adding power to each drive. Power up the system and choose the 3ware Configuration Utility. Build a RAID 1 array if that’s what you want to do. That initial operation will destory all the data on the drives and it will bond them together to Linux as a single drive. Now boot da Linux and it will be found like this initially:

3ware Storage Controller device driver for Linux v1.26.02.002.
scsi4 : 3ware Storage Controller
3w-xxxx: scsi4: Found a 3ware Storage Controller at 0xec00, IRQ: 19.
scsi 4:0:0:0: Direct-Access 3ware Logical Disk 0 1.2 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0


I found it by simply doing a dmesg |grep 3ware in a console.

Now create the actual file system on the drive. Being root is easier for this; but do it your way. I create XFS file systems on these things and I don’t boot off them. I end up booting off a cheaper IDE drive and then mounting the XFS RAID 1 array.

If you don’t know how to create a file system on Linux; shame on you. You must go read!! Go find a reasonable place about how this is done so you can then grep and grok the various types of file systems that you can create. Debian has some nice shortcuts to creating them. Finally, if you want to mount one at boot time, add it to that secret place on Linux. You know the place, right?