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Alternate title: But damn, FreeBSD is pissing my off good this time around.
One thing about my job that really spoils me is the shear size of it. Where I'm at, we have more machines down for maintenance than most folks have in service company wide. We don't bundle up too many services on any one box - less things to go wrong when a box fails. And, boxes do fail - a fairly predictable amount fail every day, like clockwork. I tell people I plan for failure and they look at me funny. But what I mean is, I know things will fail - we can build to accommodate it.
I hate telemarketers. And, despite the do not call list, or perhaps in spite of, they've gotten much meaner and naster as of late - bogus or missing caller id, no identification when the predicitve callers call you, and if you do get a human, the moment you utter DNC lists, actually _before you finish_, you get a click. One was so rude as to tell me *I* had the wrong number, before the click.
I finally ran across the device at http://interceptorid.com/. It is known as a few different names but is really the same device. Plug it into the phone line between your phone and the wall. It intercepts all phone calls, finds the caller id after that first ring, then either sends it to your phone, or to an answering machine. For my own setup, calls with valid caller id, coming from "local" area codes (basically, northern California) all ring my phone directly; *everything* else (especially toll free #'s) ring the answering machine instead. Best part is, those screened calls, don't ring me at all.
Good stuff, but hard to find at this time - looks like they are preparing to change the design some. This was definately a version 1.0 product - a bit clunky. But, it definately works as advertise.
Some of the things we want to watch are... region 2 *only*. Grr!
Here's a cheap DVD player ($41 at Amazon - and with Amazon Prime, it was delivered free!), that can play discs from any region. It also can play PAL movies on my NTSC tv. The DVD player *is* cheap - the remote is a peice of crap, and the surround sound output is coax only, no optical. But, it does seem to work, and for the price it was worth a gamble for me.
To make it region code free follow these instruction:
- 1. Turn on the unit
- 2. Open the loading tray
- 3. Press the "Setup" button on the remote
- 4. Navigate to the "Preferences" page using the right arrow key
- 5. Press the down arrow once to enter the Preference page
- 5. Enter 138931 on the remote
- 6. You will now see the current region code displayed
- 7. Use the Up/Down arrow keys to select the region required or "0" for all regions
- 8. Press the "Play" button on the remote
This entry has been tagged "screwballs" in honor of the MPAA.
Most of you know we're a mac family. And, like many of those brainwashed by His Steveness, we upgraded to 10.5 starting the day after it came out. Here's a status report.
- The system seems faster, at least once the spotlight indexer is done. Even on old gear, the system just seems more responsive. I'm not the only one making that observation.
- Spotlight indexing after you fresh install and restore all your data SUCKS. For a couple hours of suck in my case. Once caught up, it becomes invisible.
- .mac and idisk worked great on all the machines we installed 10.5.0 retail box on. However, the wife's brand spankin new macbook, which came with "restore media", failed. And, the 10.5.0 retail box would not work on the macbook. Sigh. With last night's 10.5.1 release, the wife's iDisk syncing problems have entirely gone away.
- One machine out of the 6 (no, not a typo..) had issues with MS office, and the auto updater that can't seem to update itself. On that host I downloaded all the patches from MS and installed'em one at a time. Office is working on all the hosts. Boy, sure would be nice to get an intel build though!
- Everyone in the family is using Time Machine, backing up to a central mac mini with external storage. It Just Works.
- Remote management is built in and *easy* to use. Enable screen sharing on all the hosts, done. Everyone advertises via Bonour, so screen sharring is available by just browsing the network.
- Via shell, you can type
open vnc://hostanmeand it Just Works. - One thing that sucks about the built in VNC: No full screen mode.
- One thing that rules: Built in tightvnc. And the screen background is automatically dummied out.
- Terminal: shift-apple-double click urls, opens automatically.
- Terminal is *stable* for me. This alone is a feature compared to past versions. I've managed to avoid X11 and XDarwin entirely since installing Leopard.
- GPG mail broke. There's a beta. Get on the mailing list, check the archives. The beta works on the latest version of Mail.
- Other than breaking plugins the new mail seems nice and more robust for my imap-over-socks use.
- Neither the wife nor the kids are yelling at me to restore Tiger.
Lots of little things suck into 10.5. Apple lists 300 new features, but .. that's far from all of them. None breathtaking on their own, but overall, this is a heck of a release.
Using LSI's megaraid? Find your system bogging down every 4h? Could be PR.
sudo megarc -stopPR -a0
sudo megarc -enPRman -a0
If anyone finds docs on megarc that don't absolutely suck, please let me know.
Paraphrased from a recent discussion, saving this off in case it is useful to myself or anyone else looking.
If the FreeBSD kernel crashes pretty reliably, ie if you boot with hardware it doesn't like, you can try and catch the function pointer address where the panic happens. From there, you can cross reference it back to what function in the kernel it is, using these ideas, in order from worst to best:
- Use a released generic kernel, post asking for help, include uname -a output.
- nm /boot/kernel/kernel and search for a function symbol close to the address you crashed at
- objdump -d /boot/kernel/kernel and search..
- Best is to break to debugger if possible, and get a stack trace, check the freebsd handbook.
The new server to replace vette.gigo.com has arrived from ixSystems. So far, so good. I'm working on a base FreeBSD install on it now. I expect to put this thing live some time late August.
If you're a "local user" on gigo.com, and you're making use of php/mysql/perl/etc, you might want to take stock of what you depend on, and see what gotchas there will be when the latest versions of those tools are used.
Thanks to the info posted by Erik Romijn at http://www.uname.nl/closer-look-airport-extreme/, I now have the Airport Extreme being tracked by mrtg for graphs. For those wishing to do the same, the important interfaces are:
- 1 - gec0 - ethernet traffic on the home side
- 2 - ath0 - wireless traffic
- 5 - vlan1 - ethernet traffic on the provider side
There are other interfaces as well; wlan0 is the madwifi driver (and best I can tell, irrelevent), and bridge0, which sees all traffic (again, irrelevent).
For those of you keeping score, I've turned down the big G, and the local startup, and have decided to stay at Yahoo. However, I'm going to change positions, moving out of the production engineering position within web search, and move into the network engineering team. My initial duties will be centered around being the DNS architect, and also looking to help the neteng team scale better.
On a related note, the production engeering team is hiring. We're going on a hiring spree, in fact. We're looking for well rounded people who are experienced in system administration (Linux is a plus, but.. not 100% required), perl programming, application debugging, and network debugging. The team is responsible for operating tens of thousands of machines, automating and providing scalable solutions, managing the applications in the production environment, and participating with development teams to promote scalable and supportable products. If you'd like a formal job description, or you want to talk about the position, mail me, jfesler @ gigo.com .
