Glass Panes That Separate

transparent barriers to communication

Author: nosilver4u

  • moving along – part 2

    Indeed, moving hardly seems appropriate. Flying may perhaps be a better term in this case. A lot has changed in the last couple months. As I mentioned before, I started a new job. It has been a lot of fun, and a lot of work (as you can probably tell by the previous posts). The two guys that used to work here left things in a bit of a mess. Fortunately, I’m a bit of a neat freak (I know, my wife wouldn’t agree), and so things are shaping up nicely. Having a real budget is also a nice change (sorry Joe). I also get to work with one of my good friends, Matt Hull, which is pretty awesome. We also have a Fantasy Football league up at the college, and I’m beating everyone handily. It’s kind of nuts. So far, I’ve only been favored to win 2 games. I lost one of those. All the other games, I’ve won. I’m favored to win next week, so I’m nervous.

    We also just bought a house, and moved in subsequently (I think I used that properly, grammar nazis… go take a hike). It’s great. It’s not large, but it’s perfect for us, and will last us for a while (until we have eight kids…). It’s got a great yard, and Scooter is just loving it. The sellers had done some remodeling, but hadn’t quite finished things up, so we got a great deal on it too. We took some pictures, but they’re stuck on the camera right now. I’ll hopefully get them posted this week sometime.

    We’ve had some snow already, which is great. It melted quickly, which made Amanda happy. I would have been more excited about it, except it knocked our electricity out for most of a day (about 15-17 hours), and we had no heat in our house. We bundled up, and made it through just fine.

    Amanda just got a job, and her first day (today) went quite well. So well, in fact, that her supervisor is having her work tomorrow all by her lonesome. She’s also going to be directing the Spring play for the high school in Savage which is about a half hour north of here.

  • blurb

    Ok, real quick for posterity:

    After my last two posts I was getting an odd error, that I thought might be related to the WordPress + Livejournal cross-posting plugin I use. The important part said it was error 32300, that it was a transport error, and that it had not recieved code 200 (which is how a server tells your browser that everything is just peachy). A quick search didn’t turn up anything too useful, so I was a bit stuck. I had, however, just upgraded my wordpress install to 2.6.3, and thought that might be related. I went into the settings for the Livejournal Crossposter, and saved (didn’t make any changes). Went back to the last two posts, and saved those, and everything was indeed peachy again.

    UPDATE: must have been a fluke, because I’m getting the error on another post, and I seem to remember it having something to do with how much livejournal allows you to post at a certain time. Guess I’ll have to repost the last post in the morning.

  • iscsi

    Recently (and related to my last post), I was in the market for a free iSCSI implementation. Having read the wikipedia entry on NAS and then the article on SAN, I decided to try out FreeNAS.

    FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD, and borrows heavily from Monowall. It’s a super small download, and the full installation stays that way. I was really impressed by the ability to run it right off the CD. Of course, if you want your changes to be permanent, you have to adjust the configuration slightly. FreeNAS allows you to either run from the CD forever, and store the configuration on a USB stick/Floppy disk or you can install it on a hard drive and run it from that. All configuration can be done from a web interface, and it even let’s you do Software RAID. Having done Software RAID from the command line before, this is a pretty huge deal, and they make it really simple. I had determined that what I really needed was SAN, not NAS, so I wanted to use FreeNAS to provide an iSCSI ‘target’ to my Windows server. It took a couple tries, but I finally figured out that one needed to have fully configured an iSCSI target on FreeNAS before you could enable it and save your changes. I installed the iSCSI initiator software on Windows Server 2003, and then logged onto the iSCSI target. Things were looking pretty good. Upon trying to format the iSCSI drive, I got an error. I went back to the instructions from the FreeNAS knowledgebase and determined that I needed to follow the instructions to make the iSCSI target 1 MB smaller than the partition size. It worked, and I was able to format it just fine. Things got a little bit trickier when I decided to try using 2 drives as part of 1 target. I’m not sure how this is supposed to work, but it didn’t at all. Instead, I used the software RAID to build a RAID0 device, and then used that device as my iSCSI target. Everything should have been working now. Unfortunately, there appears to be some issue with the iSCSI support in FreeNAS, because I could write data just fine, but as soon as I tried to look at the data, it locked up my server. Not cool.

    I left work Friday feeling pretty frustrated. Monday morning, I said a quick prayer while I was getting ready for work. God answered quickly. I started searching for issues between the iSCSI initiator and iSCSI on FreeNAS. I stumbled across an article comparing file-sharing performance between FreeNAS and Openfiler. It basically said Openfiler was the superior option if you wanted a NAS sharing files via SMB (the Windows sharing protocol). That was pretty much irrelevant to me at this point, but I now had another option to try in my quest for iSCSI.

    Openfiler is based on rPath, which is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (if my memory serves me correctly). Linux is a bit more familiar territory for me, but it didn’t really make a difference, as all configuration is again done on a web interface. It also includes ‘Linux Enterprise iSCSI’ which sounded promising. You can’t run it from the CD, although they do have a VMware image if you want to try it out before installing it on real hardware. The interface was quite slick, and since I had already mastered the iSCSI stuff on FreeNAS, doing it on Openfiler didn’t take long. I was able to quickly create a RAID0, and exported the entire drive as an iSCSI target. Initiated it on the Windows server, formatted it, and I was in business. Reading and writing worked great, and shortly thereafter, I had a backup of our email system dumping files to my new iSCSI device. I intend to get an actual server with hardware RAID for production use, but this will certainly get me by until that time.

    The win goes to Openfiler for making it all ‘just work’. Now, if only I can get things straightened out with our Quantum Autoloader, we’ll really be cruising (with dual rocket-boosters even).

  • backups

    Once upon a time, there was a tortoise who was on a journey. Where? Doesn’t matter, because it’s not a real tortoise, it’s a literary device. This tortoise plodded along just fine. Of course it wasn’t getting anywhere fast, because it was a tortoise. But it went even slower because it only had a leg and a half. That’s right, only 1.5 legs. So it didn’t so much plod, as scoot along the ground. It never worried about the half-leg being but a stub, so long as it had the other good leg. It kept going, day after day. Then, one day, it’s leg fell off. Of course we all wondered how. Perhaps it just got worn out from being the only real leg the tortoise had. Perhaps… Really, it doesn’t matter, because it’s a literary device, remember?

    The tortoise was stuck, it needed to get that other leg going, but it was only half a leg. Fortunately, the tortoise was resourceful, and built a rocket-ship out of spare parts he kept in his knapsack. The moral of the story? Never put all your eggs in one basket when going on a journey, much less when backing up your data. And if you lose your basket, build another one really quick, and start collecting more eggs.

  • together

    This last weekend we had a Bishop family reunion. Most of my aunts and uncles were there, with a few grandkids, and even a few great-grandkids. In all, there were about thirty of us there. My cousin Brett got a hold of my camera, so there are a lot of pictures.

    Reminds me of another time when he took almost two hundred pictures with it during Thanksgivining. It was shortly after I got my new camera, and I wanted to see how many pictures could be taken on one set of batteries (rechargables, the alkalines never did more than twenty or thirty).

    Anyway, it was a lot of fun, except I missed out on the bowling, because it got too late (I know, I’m getting old). One thing I am quite excited about is that my aunt Debbie got a lot more old pictures to scan, so I’ll have more to add to the Bishop Family History section sometime in the near future.

    I also finished a video project that I had been working on, with completely free and open source tools, but more on that later.