This is exactly why I bought a Mac…

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/08/13/dev_osx.html

The Words of Bill O'Reilly

Don’t let the title put you off, just read…

“On the other hand, religious fanatics who demonize gays and other alternative groups aren’t covering themselves with glory, either. Yes, I know about the references to homosexuality as “an abomination” in Leviticus, but I also know what the Old Testament says about slavery. As long as a sexual issue is not intruding on your freedom or endangering your kids, leave it to God to sort it out.The Deity is a lot smarter than we are. That’s also in the Bible.”

I’m going to post this now for a couple of reasons. Primarily because he is right on target here. This sums up my thoughts succinctly. The other reason is to give the casual reader time to digest it because I’m going to refer to it several times more in upcoming essays. Particularly the part about the Deity being smarter than we are. For now, just think about it and let the words roll-around in your head for a few days. They’ve been rolling around in mine for about two weeks.

Thus ends the elusive short post.

Input devices

I was reading on Jeff’s web log an link he posted about IBM
“clicky” keyboards. These things seem to be really popular among people who have to sit at a
computer all day. I’ve never really liked them, though. I’ve been using a Sun Type 6 USB UNIX keyboard for about four years now. I bought it when I got my first PC that had a BIOS smart enough to use a USB keyboard.

Today, I’ve got it plugged into my PowerMac G5. The G5 came with it’s own keyboard, that seems to be built solidly. Over the last two weeks, I’ve been using that one, trying to get used to it. I gave up today and plugged the Sun one back in. The Apple keyboard is quite compact compared to the Sun, which is what prompted me to try it. In the end, I found the Apple keys to have too much tension and travel too far for my taste. That and the fact that the Control key isn’t where it is supposed to be.
The thing just wasn’t comfortable.

The Sun type 6 UNIX has the control key situated to the left of the “A” key. I’ve come to depend on having it there. Also, the “~” key is above the backspace. Here is a layout of the Type 6 US keyboard for reference. The
escape key is about where you’d expect it to be on a normal PC keyboard. I use vi for my text editor, and have found that I like the placement of the type 6 UNIX escape key better.

Incidentally, more keys on the Type 6 work on my G5 than seem to work out of the box than when it is plugged into an actual Sun workstation. The volume and power keys in the upper-right work on the G5 with no configuration. I’ve never seen the volume ones work on a Sun. The Help key in the upper-left works, though I almost never use it, other than to see if it works. There is also the enigmatic “Any” key, to the right of the Help key. It has no label on the key, and I’ve never seen it do anything.

The type 6 UNIX keyboard has the added benefit of driving everyone else who tries to use it crazy. Every one who tries to use my machine at work complains about it. Of course, I make it a point to complain about “normal” keyboards whenever I work on someone else’s machine at work. “Hey! Your ‘Control’ is in the wrong place!” I guess I take great joy in being comfortable on the keyboard no one else likes.

The only trouble I have with it is that:

1. Even though OS X understands that the Meta key == the Apple Key, Open Firmware doesn’t seem to. If I need to use a key sequence at boot up (for instance CMD+S to boot the G5 into Single User Mode), it doesn’t work. I have to plug an Apple keyboard in to make this work. Bummer, but I almost never need to do that anyway.
2. I can’t get the volume keys working under Windows. I don’t use Windows very often, so not too big a deal.
3. On the Sun Type 5 keyboard, you plugged your mouse into a port on the keyboard. I liked that. With the Type 6, Sun moved away from that, even though they made the move to USB. It would have been easy to put a small USB hub into the keyboard. Indeed, the Apple one (and many others) already do. Presumably, this was to save cost. Let me give Sun a hint. People who buy $20,000+ servers don’t notice that they’re paying an extra $25 for the USB hub in the keyboard. Granted, most of them don’t need it like a desktop user would, but it would be nice to have.
4. It holds up well, but it is not very sturdy.

The Type 6 USB mouse is good too, but still lacking a few features, namely:

1. SCROLL WHEEL!
2. Optical, like the old Sun Mice, except without the need for the metal mouse pad.

Sun, perhaps a Type 7 USB UNIX keyboard and mouse are in order?

Tech Time

So, today we’re going to talk about automated network installs of the Solaris Operating Environment using Sun’s Jumpstart
framework.

I’ve done Jumpstart installs for years. The stuff you need to do automated network Solaris installs has shipped with Solaris
for a long time now. It takes a while to get set up and properly configured for your environment, particularly if you do it
right. It has several advantages over the manual-take-the-CD-ROM-to-the-server-and-sit-at-the-keyboard install. To wit:

1. Usually slightly faster than a CD install, since you don’t have to swap discs.
2. Once it is set up, you can build a lot of machines in a short time.
3. Once it is set up, you can build a lot of machines over a period of several years that are configured EXACTLY the same.
4. You can deploy security hardening at OS install time.
5. etc.

The was this normally works is that you tell the Jumpstart server a few things about the machine you’re building, such as IP
Address, Ethernet MAC Address, disk paritioning, etc… Then you tell the client machine to “boot net – install” at the OBP.

The client then sends a RARP request to the Ethernet broadcast address, and your server responds with an IP Address. The client
then sends a bootparam request, then the server responds with information on a location that the client can TFTP his kernel and
where the client should try to mount his root filesystem from.

The trouble with all of this is that RARP can’t cross subnets. It is not a routed protocol. Which is fine, except that RARP
only understands class A, B, and C networks with their default subnet masks. For instance, if you have a network numbered
192.168.132.0 with a netmask of 255.255.254.0 (192.168.132.0 – 192.168.133.255), and your server was 192.168.132.1, and your
client was 192.168.133.1, Jumpstart breaks.

The conversation goes like this:

Client:HELP! Somebody tell me what the IP address for 00:0d:93:36:bb:06 is!

Server:Sure. It is 192.168.133.1! Tell’em 192.168.132.1 sent ya!

Client:Uh, Thanks. You know where a guy like me might find a kernel around here?

Server:Sure! You can TFTP a kernel from 192.168.132.1!

Client:Yum! (Starts loading kernel) Where can I mount a root filesystem from?

Server:Why, 192.168.132.1:/path/to/miniroot, of course!

Client:192.168.132.1?! That is on a different subnet than the one I’m on! (Panic, crash dump)

Server:Help! Help! I’m being repressed!

The temporary fix was of course to Jumpstart the client using an IP address in the 192.168.132.0 – 192.168.132.255 range, just
as if it had been in a class C. This worked as expected.

The long term solution is to get Jumpstart working with DHCP instead of RARP, since DHCP sends netmask information. However,
this does present some problems as well:

1. None of the Windows machines in our network know anything at all about RARP. So, we could keep in.rarpd running without
   worrying that it might interfere with an unsuspecting PC server. PC servers do know about DHCP, so we’ll have to pay
   more attention to what we put in there or risk freaking out the squares.
2. Sun’s DHCP server is rather cryptic to set up.
3. The few older Sun boxes we have such as e450’s and e4500’s have OBP versions that don’t understand DHCP, so we may still
   have to RARP those if we ever need to upgrade the OS.
4. Sun’s Jumpstart + DHCP documentation isn’t very good. Some of the older docs I have use words like “undocumented” a
   lot.

Let the music play.

So, I’m trying to get some sleep, and I’ve got the iPod on. I’m listening to an album that I haven’t heard in more than ten years. It is Bark at the Moon by Ozzy. I had this on tape in middle school, and I remember it being really good. Ok, maybe not good, but at the very least enjoyable. However, now it is absolutely hilarious. Perhaps I find it hard to take Ozzy seriously because of his recent TV show. But he had such a strong start with Black Sabbath. As an aside, it seems like every time I turn on Sirius 19 “Buzz Saw” they’re playing “Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath.”

Back to Bark. I swear this album seems like other people writing songs for the dopey old Oz man to sing. Don’t get me started about “Spiders in the Night.” That one is just freaking silly. You can’t do anything but laugh at that, even if you like “Lullaby” by the Cure (which I do). “Journey to the Centre of Eternity” starts out very nicely. Before it is all said and done, it ends up sounding a lot like Oingo Boingo’s “Weird Science.” And “Slow Down” sounds suspiciously like Eddie Money’s “Take Me Home Tonight,” which is bad enough. However, the one that made me crack up so bad that I had to get out of bed was “So Tired.” This song sounds SO much like ELO’s “Telephone Line,” I just don’t know what to say. However, I knew I had to get up and write these down before I forgot them.

Iron Maiden, on the other hand, I didn’t get introduced to until probably about 1992. This was on the Plan-B skate video Questionable. I don’t remember if it was Brandon’s video or Shannon’s. One of them got it from somewhere. That video did more to shape my musical tastes than probably any other single source out there. I don’t remember many of the skaters. I was never a skater myself, so I really didn’t obsess over knowing who did what trick on the video. But the soundtrack was something else. I have found here a listing of the song names and the skaters who used them. Looks like there are 22 songs. A few of them were not so good (O.P.P?! What was he thinking?!). Most of them were excellent. Some bands, I went out and found immediately, like Pennywise and Bad Religion. Some are just down-right impossible to find. Del the Funkee Homosapien, who didn’t stand out on the video, I would later rediscover as Deltron 3030 and Gorrilaz. Some of them liked to smoke pot in New Orleans (Louis Armstrong), and some of them aren’t allowed in the country any more (Cat Stevens). Hey Cat, there’s a million places to go, you know that there are… just not here! Primus and the Doors, I already knew. The Beasties were there too, but I really didn’t remember Green Day being around that far back…

Over the years, I have put some effort into collecting the songs from this video. It is not as if I was on the quest for the holy grail or anything (I’ve alredy got one, you see…), but yeah, there was some effort. Obviously the ones that stood out in my memory more got picked up first. Over the years, some of those got lost, played-out, etc. The song that I remember the most was “Aces High” by Iron Maiden. I remember finding the tape in my grandfather’s pawn shop. No case. Just the tape. Most of the writing was worn
off, but enough of it was there to see “Aces High.” The tapes were $1 each, and I remember picking up a few that day. Several of the songs on that tape struck me as being intense. Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 2 Minutes to Midnight, and Powerslave were the best (in addition to Aces High). Powerslave seems to have the Egyptian thing going on, and I really dig it. It took me a listen or two to convince myself he was saying “Eye of Horus” instead of “Horrors.” The Egyptian motif on the cover art finally made my mind up. Being the Stargate-SG1 fan that I am, I find it quite enjoyable today. I haven’t really heard any of their stuff from other albums, but I think I’m going to check some out.

One of the things I’ve been pulling from my Napster subscription is jazz, featuring some of the really great jazz drummers that for what ever reason I’ve never been exposed to. One of the first I grabbed was the Bluebird recording of Night in Tunisia performed by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. You should click on the link for that because Amazon has some samples you can listen to. This recording was made in 1958. I don’t think my dad had started elementary school by that time. I have had the title track of this album playing in my head constantly for the last month. I like the alternate take as listed on the Amazon site.

Brilliant Corners

For someone like me, the Napster subscription service is great. My
musical tastes are all over the place, and always have been. I am
as likely to be listening to Bing Crosby at any time as I am the
Cure, Art Blakey, Gustav Mahler, or the Crystal Method. I don't
consider Country as being music (Johnny Cash probably doesn't count,
but this is the first time I've admitted that in public). In fact,
for a time I considered circulating a petion trying to get country
music banned in public. That was a losing proposition in North
Alabama, so I decided not to.

For $10 per month, you get access to a large portion of Napster's
library that you can stream or even download as DRM protected Windows
Media files. As a result, I'm able to hear an absurd amount of music
over the course of a month. Some of which I've never heard before.
Some are old classics. There are some problems of course.

1. Not EVERY song in their library is available. It is really
   annoying to find an album you enjoy, then notice one or two songs
   that are “Buy Only” or “Album Only” or even worse, just missing entirely. It is like they are trying to
   give you just enough to get hooked. This drug dealer
   mentality doesn't help them, but I think it is probably the record
   companies' faults.

2. Their library is incomplete. Entire bands like Led Zeppelin and
   AC/DC are completely absent. Again, I'm sure this is due to some
   stodgy record company (Atlantic?) not playing ball.

3. Windows only. Since iTunes doesn't have the subscription
   service (yet), I'm stuck with a Windows machine running next to my
   QUIET G5 tower. Hopefully, either Napster will create an OS X
   client, or Apple will add a subscription option to iTunes Music
   Store. I suspect this is actually Microsoft's fault, since I don't
   think the OS X version of Windows Media Player supports DRM. I
   could be wrong there. Right now, this is the only application that
   I run on my Windows machine. I could probably fire up a Windows
   virtual machine on Virtual PC, but Virtual PC is almost too slow to
   be of any use. Again, I blame Microsoft for this.

These problems are somewhat mitigated by the sheer volume of tunes that
are available. I've been going through, digging up albums that
I've owned in the past, but due to time or stupidity have been lost,
stolen, broken, or simply played-to-death.

The latest ones I have dug up are two Ramones albums that are
so scratched that they are useless: All the Stuff and More, Vol. 1
and Ramones Mania. I haven't heard these discs in YEARS! All that I
can say is “AMAZING.” I remember everything I used to like about these
guys. They're fast and they're loud. The backbeats stay in my head for
days. The songs are short, so the albums have copious amounts of songs,
yeah. The count-offs! These are the rare discs that I start to smile
before I hit play, and dont' stop smiling until they're over. They may
not be very technical (like Rush) or have thought-provokingly deep
lyrics (like Rush), but they have a kind of soul and energy that Rush
could never have.

I have a book sitting on my shelf that I haven't read since my
senior year in high school about the Ramones. Ramones An American
Band by Jim Bessman, in association with the Ramones. I don't
remember a word that was in it by now. I guess it is time to read it
again. Joey, you are missed.

I am also time after time amazed by the fact that I'll occasionally
find a piece of music recorded well before I was born that changes my
life completely. I've been listening lately to some of the recordings
of Thelonious Monk. They're brilliant! How could I have gone very
nearly 30 years without being exposed to that?! I'm particularly
enjoying “Epistrophy,” “Bemsha Swing,” and “Well You Needn't” from
The Essential Thelonious Monk. If you get time, also check out
“Epistrophy” performed by the percussion ensemble called M'Boom (also
available on Napster). Listen to the Monk version first. It is very
entertaining to hear the Tympanist on the M'Boom pitching up and down on
the fly… Brilliant!

New T-Shirt idea…

Again, black shirt with white writing…

REMEDY IS THE DEVIL.

I'm in trouble. . .

I've very nearly run out of single-malt scotch.

I don't drink a lot of anything except craft beers and red wines. But
I've had a tradition since about 1998, and I don't want to end it. When
I get a new job, I buy a bottle of single-malt scotch in celebration.
I'll “celebrate” a few times, then I'll put the bottle up. I bring it
out a couple of times a year, for example birth days, when I have
company over that would appreciate it (Amy's step-father for instance),
or when I just feel I deserve it. When the bottle is empty, it is time
for me to get a new job.

My father-in-law seemed to like this idea the last time he was here,
sharing the MacAllan 12 year. Well, the bottle is almost empty. I've
got maybe one small drink left. Damn. This means that I'm either:

1. Going to have find a new job. Really a pitty, because I still
   enjoy this one so much. However, I've been here three years now
   (long enough to drain a $50 bottle of whisky), and the bottle has
   never been wrong before.

2. Going to have to stop drinking single-malt. Really
   I have had some good blended. I bought a 1 litre bottle
   of “Teacher's Highland Cream, Old Perfection of Scotch
   Whisky” on the ferry across the English channel (from Callais
   to Dover) when Amy and I were there on our honeymoon. This
   was four years ago.

3. Going to have to break the tradition. This isn't
   an option. It is a good tradition, and I think I'll keep
   it. It is just going to be very hard to keep from taking
   that last sip.

4. Going to have to cheat. Like a big dog. Buy a new
   bottle. Pour the remaining small amount from the old bottle
   into the new one. I might just have to do this, but it is hard
   at this point to fiscally justify the cost of a new bottle.

Perhaps… Perhaps since I started working for a new company last
year (even though I still have the same job, same desk, etc), I could
count that as a “New” job, and just convince myself I'm celebrating
late. On the other hand, I'm sure SOMEONE in the world has gotten a new
job today.

Yeah, I'll have a cuppa. . .

I’ve been roasting up some Yemen Mokha Mattari – Muslott coffee beans lately. Sweet Marias got these in November of 2004, and I’m glad I got some because they appear to be all sold out of it. That is a shame because I’m finding them so good. Note that in this case, the word “Mokha” is a place-name for where the
coffee came from, and has nothing to do with the mixture of coffee and chocolate, called mocha. I bought it with some Java Government Estate – Blawan, to make (you guessed it) a Mokha-Java blend. I’ve been
experimenting with it a bit, mostly by roasting a 50-50 blend to various degrees.

One thing that I noticed is that by roasting them together, I got a very uneven roast. The Javas turned out less roasted than the Mokha. This warranted more experimentation.

There’s a guy at work that really likes dark roasts (read Starbucks). I didn’t want to ruin any good beans, so I weighed out 64 grams of a Columbian Supremo (to me, table coffee, nothing special). Fired up the roaster,
and cooked those suckers for 12 minutes. First crack came and went. Then second crack. After about 8 minutes, there were apparently some beans that never got to first crack that finally went… Loudly. They
hit second crack a minute later. Finally, when the garage was full of a ridiculous amount of smoke, I stopped the roast. If he gets any flavor besides charcoal from these, I thought, I’ll be amazed. He wanted to try home roasted, and I was keen to oblige. It turned out that he really liked them. He correctly identified them as South American, though he guessed Brazil. He said that the South Americans were his least favorite, but that seeing that it was possible to produce a good cup, he was going to buy a roaster. That will give me some
one to trade with.

So, before I went to bed that night, I went into the garage with 64 grams of the Mokha. I roasted it until I could not see for the smoke in the garage. That was probably the best cup I have roasted. It tasted
great. Not too bitter, good roast flavor, and packed a PUNCH. I gave a cup to Chris when I walked in at 8:30. I had a 9:00 – 9:30 meeting. When I came back, he was bouncing off the walls. He drinks coffee
pretty much every day. I don’t, and I’d had about 3 cups. Whew. Got to try that again, as it managed to keep me awake and attentive through some very dull meetings that day.

Tried the same thing with the Javas the next day. Not quite as good. Definitely not the same punch.

My grandmother came to town last weekend with my mom, my sister, and my sister’s three kids. I’d roasted some decaf Sumatra water-process decafs, in case anyone wanted a coffee after dinner. My grandmother told me after dinner that she’d smelled it in the garage, and that it was too bad coffee didn’t taste like it smelled. She said that the smell had brought her back to childhood when her mother used to roast ina cast iron dutch oven on the back porch. That made it all worth it to me. Because smell is tied so closely to memory, I was able to bring out something that she had probably not thought about in 40 years. It gave her a memory she probably wouldn’t have thought of for the rest of her life. That’s just pretty cool to me.

Meanwhile, back at the farm…

It has been pretty busy at work this week. I installed Tru64 patches on four actual DEC Alpha Servers that have been running since probably about 2 years after I got out of high school. This machines have actual Digital Equipment Corporation branding on them. We have two Aplha Server 8400’s and four Alpha Server 4100’s. All of them were made before Compaq killed DEC. These machines are generally tough. I like them, but they are old. Tru64, I have a few gripes about, namely:

1. Startup scripts live in /sbin/init.d and are linked to /sbin/rcX.d. Perhaps this isn’t “wrong,” as binaries typically go under directories that have “bin” in them, and not usually ones that have “etc” in them. Sun and others probably made a strange choice here, but then again, Sun has also been known to do things like “/usr/lib/sendmail.” HP-UX, coincidentally, does it much the same way Tru64 does.
2. LSM + AdvFS. LSM == Veritas Volume Manager. I don’t know why DEC didn’t just call it that. And AdvFS (Advanced File System) is an abomination. First, you take your physical hard drives, and carve out what ever VxVM volumes you want. You have to go through all the same steps you would using VxVM, EXCEPT… replace the characters (vx) with the characters (vol) in almost all of the commands:
   • vxdisk list == voldisk list
   • vxprint -htg rootdh == volprint -htg rootdg
   • etc . . .

   After all of this, you create AdvFS “File Domains” on top of the VxVM volume. A “File Domain” is almost the same thing as a VxVM “Disk Group.” It is a pool of space you carve up to build filesystems on top of. A File Domain has a 1:1 relationship the LSM/VxVM volume it was created on top of. If the LSM/VxVM volume was 20 GB in size, the File Domain (which you give a name, like “ora-domain”), will be 20 GB.

   From the File Domain, you create File Sets. You can create many file sets inside a domain. A file set is mostly the same thing as a file system. Except, all file sets inside a domain SHARE the domain’s space.

   Take a look at this ‘df’ output. Notice that file sets are referenced by # in the left-most column. This is how they are in the /etc/fstab too.

   [root@batman /]# df -h
   Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
   root_domain#root      256M  190M   54M  78% /
   usr_domain#usr         17G  2.2G   13G  15% /usr
   usr_domain#var         17G  1.5G   13G  10% /var
   oradomain#home        102G   16G  6.1G  72% /oracle/home
   oradomain#dbf_03      102G   28G  6.1G  82% /oracle/dbf_03
   db26domain#dbf_03      68G   31G  9.6G  76% /oracle/dbf_03/db26
   oradomain#dbf_04      102G   52G  6.1G  90% /oracle/dbf_04
   db26domain#dbf_04      68G   27G  9.6G  74% /oracle/dbf_04/db26
   
   [root@batman /]#
   

   Notice the two mount-points in red. They are both carved from the same domain, this time usr_domain. Notice how both of them, even though they are mounted in different places, have the same space listed under “Size” and the same space listed under “Available.” However, the kernel is at least smart enough to track how much space each file set uses, independently of other file sets. By the way, the server really isn’t called batman.

3. Patches. Patches take FOREVER to install on these machines. The ‘dupatch’ utility is apparently a shell script, and not a very efficient one at that. The more patches you have installed on your system, the longer it takes to install new ones. Right now, it takes about 58 minutes to install a single (1) 3.5 MB patch. I have a case opened with HP, but they are not interested in fixing it. Perhaps it works better with more modern (read faster) Alphas.
4. Support from vendors. No one knows these machines any more. HP guy we had come in to replace a fan told me he took a class on them in 1995. Software vendors are getting fewer and further between. When we migrated these machines to our SAN, it took EMC weeks to find ONE guy in their organization who knew Tru64. Also, it doesn’t help that HP do not seem to be keeping parts for these things in our local parts depot. It took two days to get the fan replacement. We found out, some two years ago, that when this fan dies, it takes the whole machine with it. So it is good that this was a preemptive replacement of a squeaky fan, and not an emergency.

None of these things matter. These are the last Alphas I will work with. Tru64 is going away. HP doesn’t even really know what chip they’re going to be using on their next line of big UNIX servers, as Itanium doesn’t seem to be doing well.

Besides that, we have a Sun E25k ordered that should have shipped yesterday. 72 CPUs, 288 GB of RAM, nice. This will be our second one (actually, the first is a 15k, but we’re buying the 25k with UltraSparc III CPUs, same as the 15k). The one Sun E25k will replace all six Alphas, plus several more Oracle database servers, mostly old Sun e450s and e4500s. In all, we are trading-in (read dumping) about ten machines for this one monster. The datacenter footprint will be greatly reduced, and more importantly, I’ll only have Solaris and Linux to deal with. I’ve had to push out so many special case, one-off configurations out for the Alphas that I’m really sick of them. As nostalgic as it might be to run these old things, I’ll be glad to see the end of them.

Quote of the day…

Is an IM log between me and Nathan regarding smoked salmon in Chantico sauce:

(22:00:07) Nathan-AIM: I'm telling you. Chocolate and Salmon are two great tastes that do not taste great together.

(22:00:37) Zlilo: And I'm telling you that I've seen enough episodes of Iron Chef to know that they would.