debian/rules
   
Sat, 31 Jan 2004

Weekend Overtime Sucks.

Ok, so it goes like this. Crappy old third party SCSI drive fails in the staff mail server. No problem, we'll just replace it. Ok, no spares available in a decent time frame from any local suppliers. (It's an old 18G with an SCA connector). Right, next plan. Lets just remove the partner disk of the failed one from the mirror set, and reduce the size of the mirror. Afterall, The single 75G volume served both Staff and Students until a month ago, so staff wont miss ~18G or so.

Tonight rolls around, when I'm supposed to do this work. Ok, so I try putting a spare 36G into the slot where the 18G failed. BAD idea:

d20: Submirror of d21
    State: Needs maintenance 
    Invoke: metareplace d21 c2t3d0s1 <new device>
    Size: 143302506 blocks
    Stripe 0: (interlace: 32 blocks)
        Device              Start Block  Dbase State        Hot Spare
        c2t0d0s1                   0     No    Maintenance  
        c2t1d0s1                   0     No    Maintenance  
        c2t2d0s1                   0     No    Maintenance  
        c2t3d0s1                   0     No    Maintenance

For some reason, it cut power to the entire disk enclosure. Although, there are two enclosures, and half of the mirror set is in each. (4 18's striped in each enclosure, then mirrored.) No problem, after futzing with power in the enclosure, things come back. Good good. Right, New plan. I use the silly Solaris DiskSuite tools to remove the failed submirror from the mirror, and recreate a new stripeset with the 3 good disks. We'll copy to that, then do some fun data shuffling. No problem.

Start rsync. Wait. Wait some more. And some more. Go get food... Right ok, I'm back, and what do I find? but it copying the old student spool, sitting in cyrus/PRE_STUDENTMOVE/ - Mike, you're a dumbass. Lets see if I can get by for the rest of the evening without screwing up too badly again... *sigh*

UPDATE 2004/02/01: Finally...
... I can go home.

d21: Mirror
    Submirror 0: d20
      State: Okay         
    Submirror 1: d19
      State: Resyncing    
    Resync in progress: 11 % done

Still had to wait ages on rsync though....

[10:07] [/Work] [permanent link]

Fri, 30 Jan 2004

Don't buy a car.

I can't get by without one.. And I fully acknowledge that they're money sinks.

  • Tail light got smashed. replacement from a wrecker: $120
  • 4 year old battery finally gave up: $85
  • Front left tyre will not pass next 'Warrant of Fitness'. at least $130.

Let's not mention insurance, me being under 25 and all....

[01:15] [/Life] [permanent link]

Wed, 28 Jan 2004

Thought Provoking Movies

This evening was a quiet one, and I ended up watching American Beauty which happened to be showing on the local television network. The huge amount of different ideas presented certainly pushes home the complexities that life can hold.. Happy thoughts, sad thoughts, and some thoughts to ponder.

The last few days have been interesting to say the least. Everyone's been blogging about the latest and greatest mail-borne exploit for windows, so I'll not say anything more than I've had my fair share of cleanup from that too... The mind boggles at the number of people who open attachments from 'strangers'. Two (thankfully simple) mutli-user systems for a department at Work reinstalled with RHAS, from RH7.3. I have no thanks whatsoever for RH. Oh to have a simplistic, and SANE package filename naming scheme. Trying to replace the installed packages from the old installation to the new is a veritable nightmare.

I caught up with an old friend today, after she sent me a surprise SMS asking to go to lunch. We had an interesting chat about things that have been going on in our lives, and things that haven't. Well, ok, mainly about things in her life... I hardly got a word in edge ways. From what she was telling me though, I'm fairly sure I'm onto a pretty good thing with Raewyn. Speaking of which, it's only 9 sleeps till she's back! ... Ok, so I'm a sap. At least I can admit it :P

elmo pointed me to lrrd a week or so ago. After installing it at work to monitor some of the Debian systems, I've decided it's double-plus good. If you run a few systems that you need to keep a close eye on, it's a great tool, I highly recommend it. There are numerous times in the past when it's been useful to look at the graphs generated by <product> (I'm embarrased to admit we use it). lrrd looks like it'll knock the socks off it. Thanks elmo (and tore too...)

Still haven't found the envelope containing watch links. *hrmph*

Tomorrow morning will be fun, I'm sure - silly me, I haven't shaved in 3 days...

[10:59] [/Life] [permanent link]

Thu, 22 Jan 2004

Time Crawls when you're not having fun...

Ok ok, so we all know the lovely clichés about time, and the lack of it, but I appear to have too much. It's only 15 sleeps till my girlfriend finally gets back from her summer holiday up in the Far North (that's actually the province's name). I guess it's kinda pathetic how I act about this, but dammit, I miss her! She's been up there for the best part of 3 months, and I only got to see her for a week over New Year. So yeah, I'm pining pathetically, I know.

Work is starting to suck more and more.... Pretty much the same old dreary crap, and having to deal with RHEL makes it even more of a pain in the ass. RH pulling support for < RH8.0, really bites the big one. Especially when you've got systems that you can't just upgrade/reinstall at the drop of a hat. Why I didn't do the whole fight-tooth-and-nail for Debian earlier, I don't know...

I spent a good hour last night, looking for the small white envelope that had the extra 3 or 4 links for my watch.. It appears my arm is getting fatter. Perhaps this is my excuse to start on the whole lose weight thing.... *snort* - Yeah, right. It'll turn up.. I hope...

[03:23] [/Life] [permanent link]

Tue, 20 Jan 2004

Ain't no place like Home.

So, I finally made it home, after a complete day of flying and hanging around boring airports. I did manage to catch up with Brendan O'Dea at Sydney, and we had a quick coffee before I wandered off to board my flight to Wellington. He enjoyed the chance to go for a bit of a ride on his bike.. Lucky bastard. I had three or so hours in Wellington, so I ended up catching the bus into the city, and catching up with a friend there, who happens to have a 100Mbit link to the local CBD network, called Citylink. I'll just seethe with jealousy for a while. (6MB/s to Australia, dammit).

Got back into Dunedin at about 8pm, and was politely informed by the pilot as we landed, that we'd all missed out on a 30°C day. The airport apparently got up to 33°C. I was picked up by my 'Brother-in-law' (they're not married, and they don't plan to... it's just easier to say that), and delivered home. My cat was ultra-pleased to see me.

Anyway, to top it all off, There was a letter waiting from the Justice Department. Yay. The thought "Oh god, what have I done?" went through my mind. After opening it, I discovered it was a summons to Jury Duty. Great! A week off work! Perhaps I should demand compensation for the undue stress of receiving a letter from the Justice Department thinking I was in some sort of trouble.... Hmmmm....

[02:10] [/Life] [permanent link]

Sat, 17 Jan 2004

Linux.Conf.Au

Indeed, thom Smudge is right, it has rocked hard. But, I don't know what he's on about, with the whole 'having to put up with Omnic' comment. The weather has been great, not too hot, not freezing, just a happy medium. Sadly it's a bit colder today, and Linus is getting dunked in about 15-20 minutes... We have a dunk tank! I'm sure there will be many interesting pictures up later today/tomorrow.

I have to be up at some ungodly hour tomorrow morning, something like 4am.. not really looking forward to it, but I guess I'd rather go home than be stuck in Adelaide for the rest of my life. I hope my bag doesn't get 'misplaced' like it did in Sydney on the way over.... Qantas did give me a pretty cool overnight bag though.

Conference Dinner. Right. yeah, ok... lets buy a T-shirt for AU$3,600 - No thanks! but still, it's pretty cool to raise that much for charity. Anand is a bitch though, he pumped some absynthe into me last night, which promptly spelt the end to my drinking.

Right, off to see Linus get wet!

[02:16] [/Travel] [permanent link]

Thu, 15 Jan 2004

Bad jokes...

...were the order of the day last night.

Q: What does a fish say when it hits a concrete wall?
A: Dam.

Q: Why do the Irish call their unit of currency the 'punt' ?
A: It rhymes with 'bank manager'.

[09:41] [/Random] [permanent link]

Linus, and all things perl.

So, Linus was whinging that Fedora didn't have Frozen Bubble... So I did a quick check of freshrpms.net found him both frozen-bubble and perl-SDL rpms.

Now all he does is swear when he buggers up a shot...

[03:49] [/Travel] [permanent link]

Tue, 13 Jan 2004

Another Year, another LCA.

Bdale, AJ, Thom, Jaq, Jdub, Willy... some of the important folk that are here. Good to catch up with them, and discuss another year of Not Much.

AJ spoke on testing, and I finally got a chance to let him know about how verbose he can be. Bdale informed him that reading a 'Release Update' mail was a rather involved process.... Comfy chair, can of soda, and a couple of hours....

[23:47] [/Travel] [permanent link]