Last Tuesday my colo provider knocked the powercord from my machine there whilst doing some power work. Since then, although I didn't make the connection until just now, my nightly afs backups were taking much much longer than usual. Since I was also running out of space on the disk at home that holds one copy of the dumps, I just turned off backups until I could look at it tonight.
Cranksgiving was held this year the Sunday before Thanksgiving. Over thirty finishers raced to six Ann Arbor area food stores, purchased items, and raced back to Bandemere Park, where the food was given to Food Gatherers. I believe I heard that over three hundred pounds of food was collected. I rode over to the park to help out as I usually do. The weather was pretty cooperative for the race, dry, probably around 40ish when the race started (and clocking it at just above 30 when I made it home just before 8).
I broke down and purchased a copy of Paralells Desktop for Mac several months ago. It's very useful when I want to have a local NetBSD system to work on (typically because the network at my Designated Local Coffee Shop is sucking hardcore). I've got a fairly nice setup with OpenVPN, and have it set up so that the parallels virtual machine has its own little network that can reach (and be reached) by my entire network, as well as get to the rest of the Intertoobes.
#review music #band They Might Be Giants My second favorite band ever is on tour and came through my part of the world, playing at the incredibly wonderful Michigan Theater in a little suburb of Ypsilanti I like to call Ann Arbor. The show was, as I usually expect from TMBG, excellent. Opening for them was a duo from Belfast, Ireland called Oppenhemier. Poppy, synthesizers (and they must have had a sequencer in there somewhere, because there was more music than two guys could play).
I got an e-mail from my friend Nick [1] today, in which he was probably the dozenth person to ask me if I had a blog. I'm a curmudgeon when it comes to things like that, but I've finally broken down and called this thing a blog, for what it is worth. There's no comments because I'm too lazy — strike that, because I make things too complicated to set up something like that without months of work — most of what is here already is either computer arcana or random food tidbits I don't want to forget, and I can't promise I'll update it with any regularity, but here it is.
Okay, this is probably better entitled "Stupidity on My Part". If you have multiple zephyr servers and forget to put the keytab with the zephyr/zephyr principal in the proper place, they can't talk to each other. The symptom of this is your zephyr servers constantly trying to braindump at each other, and failing. Once I realized I had forgotten to put the keytab as well as the srvtab in the proper place, everything started working.
This comic, and the fact that it is the 137th comic in that series, clicks in my mind very well.
Create a cell, say, backup.awesmoe.org. Use a separate database to translate bizare volume names into a particular backup set (say, ab.d92fgaf9a8as0 to backup of foo.bar.awesmoe.org on 23 July 2005 03:28 UTC). You can mount these volumes in a tree, say /afs/backup.awesmoe.org/bydate/2006/07/23/foo.bar.awesmoe.org-200607230328 or /afs/backup.awesmoe.org/byhost/foo.bar.awesmoe.org/2006/07/23/.... Set acls to use list so that machine admins can see files (prolly have to use hashed list names as well --- what is limit on pts list name length?
One issue with netbooting computers is that the standard processes --- get a network address, get a bootloader somehow, load a kernel, pull down an image --- are all pretty unauthenticated. You are trusting that the thing answering your dhcp query or the thing supplying you with an image is the thing you want to be talking to. For client machines this is bad enough, but what if you are wanting to deploy simple services?
So, this afternoon after purchasing an ipod nano (whee) I get a voice mail message on my cell phone. It's someone from Amtrak, telling me that the train I'm scheduled to leave on tomorrow, from Osceola to Chicago, is already 10 hours late. This would put me in Chicago (assuming it didn't lose any more time) a couple hours after the train to Buffalo leaves. So I chat with Lou a bit, basically planning to take the late train tomorrow, kick it at the Castle Juloulie, and take the remainder of my trains one day later.