Glass Panes That Separate

transparent barriers to communication

Tag: tech

  • outlaws captured

    I couldn’t resist using the tired-out reference about in-laws being outlaws. And captured on camera (not in jail). For shame…

    Anyway, back in September, Amanda’s parents came to visit. We took them out to Makoshika (the largest state park in Montana), and got some great pictures. We finally bought a new card reader so that I could upload them. I also found some great pictures of Scooter that hadn’t been posted, so there’s some new stuff in the ‘Scooter’ gallery as well.

    There are also a couple of the new house in Glendive. There will surely be more in the not too distant future, but that’s all we’ve got for now.

    Lastly, if anyone ever needs to edit EXIF information on a photo (it’s the extra information your camera stores about when the picture was taken, what camera was used, exposure, etc.) and you’re using Linux, try out mapivi. It’s not the fanciest program in the world, but it works, and has an option to make ‘relative’ adjustments to the date a picture was taken. This can be quite useful if you have 40 pictures that were taken after your camera was without power and you forgot to reset the date.

  • 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).

  • moving along

    Tomorrow, I embark on a new journey. I’ve been working at an office supply shop doing computer and network service for the last few months. It’s been fun, but there’s just been something missing. My coworkers are great (they’ll probably never read this). I’ll miss Tom, Jeremy, and even April too. Denny…not so much. Actually, I go to church with him, so it would be tough to miss him when I still see him.

    My new job will be as Technology Coordinator at DCC, our local community college. I’d give you a link to their website, but I don’t want anyone to see it yet; at least not until after I’ve had a chance to clean it up a bit. I’m pretty excited, as there will be a lot more of what I like to do there, but most importantly, its where I believe God wants me to be right now. I can’t ask for anything more than that (and I won’t).

    So, farewell, old job. Hello, new job!

  • ouch

    Ok, so a combination of crazy things happened way too close together, and Dreamhost ended up having to disable the Mysql account for WordPress. Firstly, I was trying out whoisi.com and added several friends and family, along with myself. I then reported a bug to the author, who then happened to mention it on his blog, which happens to be syndicated on Planet Gnome. In the middle of all this, I was finishing up migrating that last of my photos from Gallery to WordPress. It just so happened that yesterday, I finished the last in a series of 10 ‘gallery’ posts that included around 700 photos of my family history. I then proceeded to make a final post that included links to all 10 of those galleries.
    So, a word to the wise: Don’t write a post that links to ten other posts which include over seven hundred photos the day after you get mentioned on Planet Gnome.
    As before, you can get to the Gallery via the link at the top of the page, and shortly, I’ll have the random image block back on the sidebar too.