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It’s a huge task: I’m no archivist, and I don’t have a big fancy scanner like they do at work, so it’ll be a while before it’s all available.
Have a look at what I’ve done so far (at the time of writing I’m only half-way through ‘C’!).
If you’ve arrived here expecting a cache of Marxist-Leninist newspapers, I may have misled you. I am neither a Marxist nor a Leninist (although I do have a soft spot for Imagine), and if I’m completely honest I don’t really know the difference. The title of this post is actually taken from a c1990 programme schedule for Radio Tirana, the English-speaking Albanian equivalent of the BBC World Service. As someone who heard that programme first hand, I can tell you that it was exactly as interesting as it sounds. We’ll get back to Albania shortly, but first a little context.
I used to have a soft spot for Sun. I cut my teeth on a Sun 3/50 running SunOS 4.1.1, marvelled at the crystal-clear screen of the SPARCstation SLC, struggled with the half-baked Solaris 2.1 x86, schlepped countless Ultra 10s around a big EDA shop, and ran lots of mid-range Sun hardware. However, since Oracle took over, in my view there has been a loss of interest in small- to medium-sized systems, and a significant regression in the quality of support. For me, it’s no longer a value proposition.
However, I have quite a few (what I now regard as) legacy systems running Solaris, so I have to keep my hand in. At the beginning of the year I decided that I should start playing with Solaris 11 with a view to upgrading my existing systems. Solaris has always been a bit quirky, but it had a few surprises in store for me. Hopefully this post will mitigate the shock of those planning a move to 11.
This article was written in 2012. I no longer live in the area and don’t have any more up-to-date information. I’m leaving it here for reference only.
For the majority of the UK population, it would be unthinkable to live somewhere untouched by the mains gas network. Most of the country benefits from a pool of aggressively competitive energy companies offering dual-fuel discounts, assorted tariffs, smart meters and other nice things. A plethora of price comparison websites plead for your business as the different companies jostle for position in this crowded market.
Surprisingly, one doesn’t need to venture too far from large towns to leave the mains gas grid behind. Take a drive into the country and you’ll see plenty of houses with their own bulk fuel tank, whether LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) or heating oil. There’s competition here, too; not as much as for the mains, but there are still quite a few companies offering tank rental and filling services. It works pretty well: they just turn up every so often and top up the tank.
There is a third category: so-called metered estates. These are typically new housing estates, built outwith the reach of mains gas, where the developer has arranged for a bulk LPG supplier to install large tanks that will feed the whole estate. Generally (although not always), the householders will have individual contracts with the supplier. Clearly this is an uncompetitive environment, as householders can’t switch suppliers, no matter what happens to their bills.
For a ‘lifer’ Unix engineer like me, trying to diagnose subtle problems on a Windows box can be very frustrating. You know the data is in there somewhere, but getting it out can be very tricky. Recently I’ve had a problem with a 2008R2 server and I needed to know the error statistics on each of its many NICs. Most of them are made by Intel, which made things a bit easier, and had the side-effect of revealing data for a couple of Broadcom NICs too.
In August 1991, Gennady Yanayev led an attempted coup and seized power in the USSR, temporarily deposing Gorbachev. The Russian news agency TASS started sending a loop tape of statements and rhetoric as events unfolded. I was lucky enough to have left my receiving equipment running, and captured the TASS tape below.
Nagios doing its thing. Looks like all is well with the UPSs.
In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centuari were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. (Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy)
Another first today: my blog joins the majority of tech blogs which somewhere contain a Douglas Adams quote. I included this quote because my axiom for today is
A SCSI disk array should be a real SCSI disk array. Ditto iSCSI.
(there’s a reason I never became an author)
What I mean by this is that it should behave like a normal block device: a big bucket into which I can pour my data. Of how it organises that data I could not give a flying turd, but for the fact that the underlying structure should be completely transparent to me. It could engrave the data on glass statues of Leonard Cohen for all I care, as long as it’ll give it back to me in thirty milliseconds.
It’s not every day I sit in front of my computer and talk to it. However, yesterday I watched something that affected me so strongly that I made my first ever piece to camera. I have now joined the countless thousands on YouTube who speak their brains through their webcams into the void.
This is an interview with Sean Faircloth (of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science) talking to a woman called Liz Heywood. Ms Heywood had the misfortune to be raised by Christian Scientists, who over a long period of time failed to treat her osteomyelitis, leaving her in excruciating pain and eventually necessitating an amputation. Ms Heywood demonstrates a remarkable capacity for perspective. I do recommend you watch the whole thing (17 minutes; alternatively, here is an embedded version on the RDFRS website).
I have seen and heard such stories before, so I was naturally horrified but not overly surprised. What I found most shocking, and what prompted me to make this little video, was the fact that in the majority of US states it is legal to neglect your child in this way if you claim that you are providing ‘faith healing’ instead. Here aresome specific details of the laws involved.
This gets a bit ranty, so if you’re only going to watch one video today, please watch the interview rather than my ugly mug.
Further reading
Update (6-Feb-2012): I am reliably informed that the next major release of SANsymphony-V (9.0) will include direct SNMP support, making this nasty procedure unnecessary. Hooray 🙂
It seems that every time I install a new product for production, I have to find new and amusing ways to monitor everything to make sure I’m alerted in case of untowardness. My monitoring solution has Nagios at its core, so I want every alarm and fault condition to appear in the same place.
I’m in the early stages of implementing SANsymphony-V, which—despite its clumsy name—is a rather clever way of presenting replicated storage to a vSphere cluster. It presents iSCSI LUNs to hosts while looking after all the replication and mirroring nastiness itself, hiding the physical storage from the rest of the infrastructure. I might write more about it when I’ve finished the implementation, but for now let’s look at monitoring.
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