I’m in the middle of drawing up an equipment list for the new workshop and machine room. So far I’ve come up with the following:
- Decent workbench
- Steps (to work on the machines at the tops of racks)
- Lots of storage bins and shelves
- technical vacuum cleaner
- work lights/torches
- toolkits
- lifting gear (possibly a scissor lift of some kind?) Are there affordable lifts that will get heavy machines up to the top of a normal rack?
- a trolley or truck
Any advice on items I’m missing or good suppliers for this stuff in the UK is gratefully received.
Uncategorized
My aged Nokia 6600 died the day before going on holiday. Generous souls might want to text me their numbers.
Anyone mentioning backups will be met with a rant about broken SyncML implementations.
I wish FIC would hurry up and release their consumer phone.
Uncategorized
My descent into responsible adulthood continues apace. The vacuum cleaner that came with my current flat appears to be powered by elastic bands. It doesn’t suck. So finally in a fit of practicality and technophillia I bought one of these.
To quote one of Neal Stephenson’s characters:
“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Columbian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted myself to being bad.”
At 30 the fact that I’m excited about a new vacuum cleaner proves that this is no longer, if it ever was, true for me.
On the plus side. My new vacuum cleaner totally rocks.
Life
The unfortunate limerick cascade on the Linux Kernel Mailing List is a horror to behold.
However I have to share with you Alan Cox’s song about memory management to the tune of the Beatles Eleanor Rigby.
Ah look at all the laundered pages
Ah look at all the laundered pages
Handling Pages
Pick up the list and the link where kswap has been
A paging scheme
Runs down the I/O
Watching the queues that now keep me a list of the store
Who is it for
All the laundered pages
Where do they all come from
All the laundered pages
Where do they all belong
Meeting bdflush
Writing the pages of a disk file that no one will clear
No task comes near
Look at it working
Sleeping a lot in the night when there’s no pressure there
What does it care
All the laundered pages
Where do they all come from
All the laundered pages
Where do they all belong
Ah look at all the laundered pages
Ah look at all the laundered pages
Oracle DB
Died under load and was freed along with its name
No admin came
Good old bdflush
Wiping the dirt from the pages as it walks down the chain
Nothing was aged
All the laundered pages
(Ah look at all the laundered pages)
Where do they all come from
All the laundered pages
(Ah look at all the laundered pages)
Where do they all belong
Uncategorized
When I originally set up the ZFS on my development v880 I added the internal disks as a raidz together with two volumes off the external fibre-channel array. As is the way with these things the development box has gradually become a production box. And I now realise that if the server goes pop I can’t just move the fibre-channel to another server because the ZFS pool contains that set of internal scsi disks.
To my horror I now discover that you can’t remove a top-level device (vdev in ZFS parlance) from a pool. Fortunately I have two spare volumes on the array so I can create a new pool and transfer the existing zfs filesystems to it. Here is a quick recipe for transferring zfs filesystems whilst keeping downtime to a minimum.
zfs snapshot oldpool/myfilesystem@snapshot1
zfs send oldpool/myfilesystem@snapshot1 | zfs receive newpool/myfilesystem
this will take a while but the filesystem can stay in use while you are doing it. Once this finishes you need to shut down any services that are relying on the filesystem and unmount it.
zfs unmount oldpool/myfilesystem
And take a new snapshot.
zfs snapshot oldpool/myfilesystem@snapshot2
you can now do an incremental send of the difference between the two snapshots which should be very quick.
zfs send -i oldpool/myfilesystem@snapshot1 \
oldpool/myfilesystem@snapshot2 | zfs receive newpool/myfilesystem
Now you can point the services at the new filesystem and start over until all the filesystems on the original pool have been transferred.
SysAdmin
Is about to start..
http://www.lugradio.org/live/2007/index.php/Main_Page
I am feeling a bit fragile today due to excessive beerage. Fortunately I’m not speaking this year so I can find a quiet corner to go collapse in..
Uncategorized
I’ve been running some tests at work on a shiny new Sun x4600 with 8 dual-core Opteron processors.
It’s very nicely put together.
So far benchmarks have ranged between “That’s really quite fast” and “Is it powered by Hamsters?”.
More pics here
SysAdmin, Tech
I’m supposed to be going on a site-visit to Birmingham University today. Instead I will be in the office because none of the trains I need are running.
Apparently rain is now an adverse weather condition.
edit 26/06/2007
OK given that thousands of people have been evacuated from their homes, maybe it does count as adverse weather.
Uncategorized
Skated the new Severn bridge last night..
Hurt.. So.. Much..
Life
Jamie Cansdale the creater of TestDriven.NET is having some lawyer issues with MicroSoft.
As one commenter says:
“Is it safe for me as a developer without a large legal department to work with Microsoft technology? “
To which the answer, of course, is No.
Tech
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