Undrblog - Technology

Jaton GeForce 9500GT cooling problems, with a slightly creative fix.

nospam@example.com (War) — Wed, 26 May 2010 21:57:13 -0400

A few months ago, around February, I built myself a new PC. I decided to finally move into the multi-core and 64-bit arena. I built a nice dual-core AMD 64-bit machine, with just shy of 2tb of storage, spread over 3 SATA drives. I had them raid 5'd, to get 1.2tb, but, well, we'll just say that didnt end well. I now have three individual drives, but thats a whole other blog entry.

When I built this machine, I had planned on a rather nice (and rather expensive) video card. It was $250 at the time. Well, when it came time to put the system together, I'd found that i was lacking in the toy fund when it came to purchase the video card. Star Trek Online was released, and my old machine wasnt cutting it, so i was itching to get this thing together, so i compromised on a temporary card. I went to NewEgg's bargain bin (refurbs and returns) and picked out a decently spec'd video card which was returned, for $50. The price was right, if i get a few months of use out of it I'm happy.

What I ended up with is a Jaton nVidia GeForce 9500 GT, and it works well, except for one major issue. After a few minutes of gameplay, i get horrible framerates. This will last for anywhere from a few seconds, to a few minutes, then it just clears up, for a bit, and then it comes back again. Its outright painful at times.

So i set out trying to troubleshoot the issue. My first thought was that it was a glitch in Star Trek Online (the only game I was playing at the time). After hitting up the forums, and doing some troubleshooting on my own, i found that this was not the case. I eventually found that the issue occurred in other games. Including World of Warcraft, and Quake 4.

So I went and downloaded nVidia's monitor app. Which allows you to watch things like memory utilization cpu, and temperature on the video card.

What i found was definite proof of what was wrong. Heat! The card would slowly build up to about 235 degrees F, and then hit some sort of threshold (probably a limiter which is there to keep it from overheating) until it cooled off a bit. Then after it cooled sufficiently, the card would kick back in and perform properly. Then I'd inevitably hit the limit again, and the sequence repeats.

I started trying to come up with other ideas on how to keep this card cool. My first thought was "What a piece of crap, they couldnt even design a chip cooler to keep this thing cool?!".

The case i put this machine in has a multitude of fans. One of which actually blows DIRECTLY ON the video card.

I tried turning this fan around, as it seems that out of the box, ALL of the fans were intake fans, and no exhaust. I turned this one around thinking it would help draw heat away from the video card. This didnt help at all.

So i turned to the heat-sink on the card. Have a look at this thing.

I see the idea here. The fan to the right is intended to blow (or pull?) air through the enclosure. You cant see it very well in the picture, but its open at the left, exposing an aluminum heat sink. My issue is that this obviously isn't working well. So I took the card out and started having a look at it. On the bottom of the card, there are four screws which hold the whole fan and heat sink on.

So i pulled out my old video card, which was getting almost no use in my old pc, which is now a media server. I swapped it with an even older card i had laying around, and had a look at the fan/heat sink on this card. I noticed that it too is removable.

BTW, The Gamers, Dorkness Rising, excellent movie for ANYONE who's ever played DnD for any extent of time.

So anyway, I considered thieving the fan from the old card, and placing it on the Jaton. This went well, until i realized that the mounting posts on the older cards fan, are about 1cm wider than the mounting posts on the Jaton card. I briefly pictured breaking out my cordless drill, but decided against it.

So I made a decision.

Basically, it seemed to me that the fan was inadequate, so it would make sense to allow more air to the aluminum fins. This could be done with the case fan i pointed out earlier, or worse case scenario, one of those fans which mounts in an open expansion slot.

So I did just that.

Put the card back in the pc, and booted it up, the card is now idle at around 130 degrees F, and it seems to stay around there when i utilize the card (tested a few minutes in WoW, followed by a few minutes in Quake 4). HOWEVER, I have noticed one case where the temp rose again, up to the limit, causing the old framerate issue. I exited my game, and let the system rest for a bit, the temp hung around 200 degrees for a long time, and then suddenly dropped to 130 again. This leads me to believe that the fan on the card is actually failing. Or, perhaps the fan is controlled by something, and it kicks on and off. Though, i'd expect it to kick ON when the system is under load, and not when it's been idle for 15 minutes. I think the next step will be one of the previously mentioned slot fans. This should solve the problem permanently.

How apple is stifling innovation.

nospam@example.com (War) — Sat, 22 May 2010 21:14:38 -0400

Has anyone else noticed this? I have, for a very long time, been opposed to the popular game in town, and instead rooted for the little guy. In high school I never strove to be popular, I ran cross country instead of trying to get on the football team. A junior in high school, i started trying to move to linux, getting away from Microsoft. I've always done things based on my own research, what works for me, and not based on current trends. So read this article, knowing that I personally feel that Apple is becoming "Trendy", and I am somewhat bias against "Trendy".

Next time you're at a high school, shopping mall, college campus, grocery store, or anywhere that a lot of people with cel phones. Look around. Look at people using their phones, and see if you can identify some of what you see kids fiddling with while theyre waiting in line to check out, what devices people are hugging to their cheek. You may notice an abundance of iPhones. Ok, so I see a lot of reasons for that. First, Apple is very good at marketing. Apple is also very good at writing decent software. And on top of all of that, well, the iPhone is indeed a slick device. So what the hell am i complaining about?

There are a ton of touch screen phones out there. A ton of popular smart phones in general. Ever hear of a little manufacturer called BlackBerry? Theyve been producing phones for much longer than Apple. It's easy to see however why the iPhone is more popular, its more fun, its got a slicker interface, and apple's marketing machine is no less than stellar.

So you're still wondering what I'm getting at.

Ok, here we go. How many people out there have left Microsoft to go to Apple? I'm going to say... a lot. Now, how many have left Microsoft to go to Linux? Not nearly as many. How many people do you see going out and spending less on a PC, and then installing linux on it. Versus how many people you see spending a fortune on similar hardware, for the privilege of using an Apple? Linux could kill Microsoft. Linux, a project which is free for anyone to install/use. A system which is more secure than windows. A system which is infinitely customizable. A system... which is only used by geeks and open source activists.

This is my point. If apple weren't so popular, if they weren't convincing people that the privilege of using an apple was worth the extra price tag... Then other projects might get more attention. There are projects that have been terminated because of apple's success. An example is HP's slate. It was dropped shortly after the release of the iPad.

Look at MP3 players. The mp3 music sales industry caters to the iPod, and all other mp3 players need to live up to the standard that the iPod has set. Even if these other players may feature more options, other features, more storage space, if theyre not a clone of an iPod, theyre not accepted. Everyone wants the iPod.

Am i saying everyone should boycott apple, and start looking for other products? No, i'm just ranting. Take it for what its worth.

Your role as a netizen.

nospam@example.com (War) — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 17:06:02 -0400

This somewhat links to my post on Privacy Online, if you want a little bit of back story, well, there it is. I thought I'd follow up with a little bit about what we should all be responsible for in our online lives. This is all my opinion. I don't claim to be an authority, but this is my bog dammit. Read if it you want, otherwise, go look up some porn, or start a flame war on Facebook. That's what the internet's for, right? Looking up illicit material, and getting into arguments over politics, religion, pet ownership, or whatever. Right?

Well, not really. That's what the internet has turned into. Here's a brief and history lesson (which admittedly comes from my memory, and cites no references). The internet, in its infancy, was used for communication, and early on, but colleges. It was used to internetwork research labs, and libraries, and pass factual information around. So a student in California could collaborate with a student in New York, without leaving his lab. One of my first memories of the internet was researching for a science paper that I had due. It was a bout black holes. My dad had just gotten an internet connection, and we decided to put this thing to use. So we hopped on our blazing fast 14.4kbps dial-up connection, and went to Webcrawler, and started searching. We found a pamphlet online on the subject, it came direct from Greenwich Observatory, in England. This was astounding to me! We'd gone into a computer in England, and gotten information and saved it on my dad's computer, all for the cost of a monthly subscription to an ISP, and a telephone line. Wow!

Today, that's not so amazing. I mean, you can video chat with some dude in Asia, while downloading your porn and reading the NY Times. It's second nature to us now, its become integral to our lives. The little story about the research paper, that was only about 15 years ago. Since then, connectivity to the internet has changed, a lot! Bandwidth that would have cost a fortune, and required a leased optical line to your premises back then is now commonplace, and sold for $40/month from your digital cable or DSL provider. At that price, everyone's online now. Even if theyre at the lower end, or even still using the dreaded dial-up service. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who has NO contact with the internet. And its not just on your computer anymore, cel phones, media players, and other hand-held devices. You can pull a device out of your pocket, or off of your belt, or in some cases out of your back pack, and there you have the wealth of information that is the internet at your disposal.

I use the term wealth of information loosely. Now you'll see how my little stroll down memory lane ties into the subject of YOUR role as a participant in this global thing called the Internet. See, back in 1995, when i was working on my research paper on black holes, the internet was a different place. Yes, there was porn, and there was illicit material, and even some illegal activities, but there was also this huge amount of factual information. Yea, you heard me right, information, based on fact, as in, the kind you can reference. Not ridiculous opinions presented as fact, not flat out lies presented as fact, but actual fact. Yes, it's still out there, but you need to know how to find it. Is this right? When you go to the library, do you have to read 4 books on the same subject in order to decide if the information you're reading in one book is correct? Sure, if you want to be thorough, but really, if you pick up a book at the library, and its presented to you as fact, there's a pretty good chance that it ACTUALLY IS FACT.

What does this have to do as your role as a netizen? Well, not a whole lot, except that you should try to do your best to avoid propagating lies as fact. A good example is these viral chain e-mails and microblog posts about how some such event is going to change the face of (insert service here) and the only way to prevent it is to (insert action here). I can remember these from back as far as the early ICQ days. This was before AOL bought out Mirabillis, and the ICQ service became their property, mid 90's or so. There were messages that spread like wildfire saying things like "Mirabillis is going to start charging for ICQ unless you send this message to every flipping person on the planet!". Or the famous, "Bill gates will send you money if you forward this e-mail on", which went on to say how Microsoft is tracking this e-mail, and if you send it to people, you'll get your slice of some exorbitant amount of money. Nevermind the fact that it's almost impossible for someone to accurately track an e-mail like that. Its not like an e-mail can phone home. At least, not without some sort of attached application. This method of spreading panic has moved its way on to pretty much every social network i've ever been a part of. I see it on facebook, i've seen it on myspace, and so many others before them. Before you spread something like this, think about it, i mean really think about it. Take a ride over to Snopes and try to find an article referencing the item that you're about to continue to spread. If you find reason to believe it's true, then ok, post away, but if you find evidence to the contrary, stop in there, or even better, spread the correct information in its place!

Now comes the good part. Protecting yourself online... Imagine the battlefields of old, where wars were waged with swords, maces, bows and arrows. Warriors went into battle wearing armour, and carrying some weapon with which to defend themselves. To do otherwise would be suicide. Now imagine the internet as that battlefield, and your computer as the warrior. If your computer isn't wearing its armour, it's going to get killed. There are a lot of threats out there. Spyware, viruses, adware, attackers... Sounds like a lot to deal with, right? Well, not if you're prepared. First, it's good to be knowledgeable of what you're getting into. Be aware of current threats. I don't mean that you need to go and get a Computer Science degree, but keep an ear to the ground for threats. There are lot of web sites which publish these things. Subscribe to an RSS feed, or just hit up one or two of these sites a few times a week, just to see what's out there. Know your enemy so to speak.

Next, consider your computer. Think about what OS you're running, and what its vulnerable to. It's pretty common knowledge that Windows is a target for many viruses and malware. There are a number of reasons for this, but I could write a whole other post about that. So if you're running windows, you need to be on the alert. Keep your computer up to date. Microsoft makes this relatively easy by building automatic updates into your OS. If you cant be bothered with actively going and installing these updates ever so often, then turn on auto-updates, and let them install for you while you're sleeping. The next thing to consider is Anti-Virus. Keep one on your computer, keep it running, and keep it up to date. I personally use AVG Free on my windows machines. Is this the best on the market? No, but it's free, and it works well for me. The last thing to consider is a firewall. Personally, i run a pretty lax firewall on my pc's, but then i protect my network with a firewall in between me and the internet. I do this via a Smoothwall Express machine acting as my internet gateway. It's connected to my cable modem, and then my network accesses the internet through it. You could also use a personal firewall, such as the windows firewall, or a 3rd party application. I could get into a long talk on network security, but I'll spare you.

Yea, that was all about Windows, the same ideas apply to other OS's. Personally, I like linux. I run linux on my workstation at work (solely linux, no dual-boot), and my laptop, and home pc both dual boot Windows 7 and Linux. IMHO, you cant beat the security on linux. Again, i could go nuts listing the reasons, but we'll just say that at a core level, linux is just more secure than Windows. Much of this applies to MacOS X as well. The same basic principles apply however. Anti-Virus, and Firewalls are still a good idea.

So, we've covered your pc, and the spread of nonsense. How about you, as the user? It's simple really. In the words of Wil Wheaton, "Don't be a dick". Yea, I know it's fun to poke at people from across the world because they have no way to retaliate, other than poking back at you, but really... If you wouldn't do it to someone's face, don't hide behind your computer and do it. We're all guilty of this from time to time, but make an effort, and the 'net will be a better place. Other than that, just try to educate yourself on how the magical machine you're sitting behind works! Yes, I know it's daunting, I know that your dvd player, your computer, and your cel phone all hold quite a bit of mystery. A computer is not that complex of a device when you get down to it. Well, it is, but you can get a general understanding of its parts and what they do without spending 4 years in higher education. Once you have that basic knowledge, you're really much better off than most of the average users on the internet. Go read about it, and learn things, you'd be surprised how simple some of this computer magic really is!

Last but not least, protect your identity. There are a lot of people out there who want to collect as much information about you as possible, and use it against you. Whether its for advertising, or identity theft. See my entry on Privacy (linked above) for a more in-depth look at protecting your privacy online. If you get an e-mail, asking you for personal information, please take a really good hard look at it before you blindly reply. Any company who's asking you for your password in an e-mail really needs to take a good hard look at their security practices. Under no circumstances should you ever send someone your personal information in an e-mail unless you've encrypted it using a method that only the intended recipient can decrypt. I mean it, seriously, if a legitimate company asks you for your password in an e-mail, you should either stop dealing with them, or call them and ask them if they're really serious. E-mail, unless you've made an effort to make it otherwise, is clear text. If someone intercepts your message, they can see what's in it.

So anyway, there it is, now go, be a productive member of the 'net.

Privacy online.

nospam@example.com (War) — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 10:05:43 -0400

So I'm listening to online radio, and one of the commercials i keep hearing is for this service called Privacy Defender. They tell you how all of this information that you thought might be private is floating around the internet. The continue to scare the crap out of you by stating that prospective employers, significant others, and others might go find this information online, and it could affect their opinion of you.

First I'd like to say that this is nothing more than a company preying on your fear and dis-information to try to make a buck. The idea that you could hire someone to go about erasing your identity from the internet is ridiculous. You may or may not be aware of how "The Internet" works. So I'll give you a basic run down. There is no thing called "The Internet" which is operated or controlled by some group. The network that we perceive as this mysical thing which you can go play games on, chat with your friends, or (imagine this) research things you'd like to know more about, is a conglomeration of many computers, all containing data, which is then shared out to all the rest of the members on the network. If you're reading this blog, on your computer, sitting in your living room, you're an equal member of this network as any other machine that's connected. You could be a web server, you could be a mail server, providing that your ISP allows you to.

You control your information. If you don't want others to have it.... Dont share it! Keep in mind, that a lot of your information is considered public knowledge, and can be obtained through the court house, or even your local library. If you've already jumped in both feet, and your information is everywhere, well, go try to get it back. A lot of web site administrators will cooperate with you if you go to them in a professional manner. I don't know if they're legally obligated (or, even if they should be) to remove your data, but ask them, if theyre reasonable, they'll help you out. If they won't, don't sue them. It's different if they've obtained private data about you and published it without your knowledge. If you've posted some embarrassing pictures of you and your college room mate making out at some frat house party in college, you put it there, you should have thought better of it before you posted it. If someone else posted it because they were at the frat house party, and took a picture of you, and you let it happen, then maybe you should have thought of that and tackled them and deleted the picture from their phone. Contacting the site operator is essentially what services like Privacy Defender would do. Of course, i don't know what goes on under the sheets of Privacy Defender, but knowing what i know about running a web server, what else could they do? They can't go and remove things from my server, they have to go to Me, the operator of the server, and ask nicely. The only power they have that you might not, is a knowledge of the law and perhaps sleazy lawyers that know how to exploit it.

I recently watched an interesting video, where Eben Moglen spoke in front of a group about "Freedom in the cloud". I'll embed the video in a moment, if you'd like to watch it. He made some very good points regarding privacy, a user's role in the internet, and how we've all blindly given our information away. If you use Facebook, i'd highly recommend you watch this video. It's a little dry, and some of it's a bit technical, but it brings out some very important details about what the guys at facebook (and other social networking sites for that matter) can do with your data!

So, why am I posting this? Well, watching that video really made me think about our society, and how intertwined our lives are with our online lives. Slowly they're becoming one and the same. This is a cool trend, but also a scary one! When companies like facebook can, via a nicely worded EULA, claim ownership of all of the data you decide to post, where does your privacy go?

When i started getting involved with computers, BBS's, web communities, and things of the like. I always used an alias, an avatar, to identify myself. This is how it was done, this is how everyone did it. If someone signed up with their full name as their username, you knew they were naive, and not privacy minded. At that time, if you chose to sign up with some online community, the only person who had access to your data (other than the data you chose to make public) was the operator. Was there still a chance of that operator doing nasty things with your data? Yes, but that was your responsibility. You tried to keep track of who you were giving your data to, and what you gave them.

Today, we share some of our most private data without a through on sites like MySpace, and Facebook. Sexual preference, the town you live in, how many kid's you've got, what their names are, what your favorite hobbies are, where you work, your political affiliation. I could build a profile on you based on the information you post daily on Facebook. On top of that, i can find out what you looked like from your picture gallery, or if i were a predator, what you're 14 year old daughter looked like... Combine all of that data, and someone could literally show up at your door, or stalk you at work, or god forbid, your children at school.

Am i saying we should all leave social networking en-mass? No, just be careful what you make public. Keep in mind that ANYONE on the internet can find that data. Dont set the password to your bank account online to some data that i could phish out of your facebook profile.

-War

4.2U Wii, homebrew hack.

nospam@example.com (War) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 08:59:18 -0500

A while ago, a friend of mine helped me exploit my Wii, so that I could run the Homebrew channel. There are many advantages to doing this, and for lots of reasons. Not just game piracy. Homebrew lets you install 3rd party apps on your Wii, which allow you to get some creative use out of the system. You can also connect USB storage to your Wii, and use it to store your games, so that you dont need to swap discs around when you want to play a game.

When we hacked the Wii, it was running update 3.6. I'd stopped updating the Wii from Nintendo's update procedure because I assumed that they would probably tromp on my hacked wii, and restore the OS to its pristine condition, and I'd then have to go through re-hacking.

Well, I knew this time would come. I was forced into an update, so I could run the New Super Mario Brothers game. I guess it has something to do with the ability for the players to interact as they do in the game. So, i bit the bullet, and ran the update. It wasn't until after i ran the update that i found a number of reports on the 'net about how to update a hacked Wii, without actually running nintendo's update. This would have kept my Homebrew intact, and still gotten me the update. But, oh well, I was committed at this point.

After some digging, I found a number of how-to's on the subject of hacking a 4.2U Wii. 4.2U being the most recent update. I tried a number of them, and none of them worked. Until i found this how-to, which was SOOOOO much easier to follow than some of the others.

Since i'd been through so many other failed attempts at hacking this system, and since it was hacked once before, i decided now was a good time to backup my save data, and format the Wii's system memory. Luckily, i was able to backup all of my save data to an SD card, and then save that data to my PC. I then performed the format, but wasnt able to put my save data back on the Wii until after i'd run each game at least once. This meant i either had to break out all of my discs, or get homebrew and the usb loader working before i could get my save data off of my sd card. So i started down the road to Wii-freedom. In the end, it wasnt all that difficult, and i ended up with bootmii, which is a more secure replacement for Wii's boot2 loader, and the homebrew channel. I also have all of my USB capability back, and once i get all of my homebrew software reinstalled, i'll have all of the functionality that i had before the format.

On top of all that, i can play Mario now.

Zettabyte File System (ZFS)

nospam@example.com (War) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:35:48 -0400

We've been doing a lot of storage research lately, and there's been a lot of talk about ZFS. I'm going to spare you the magazine article (if you want to read more on what it is, and where it comes from, look elsewhere) and give you some guts.

ZFS is a 128-bit file system, and unfortunately isnt likely to be built into the linux kernel anytime soon. You can however, use it in userspace, using zfs-fuse, similarly to how you might use NTFS on linux (for those of us still dual booting). The machine i'm running on, runs solely Fedora Core 11, and has a handsome amount of beef behind it. It's also got 500gb of local storage, so I can play around with huge files no sweat. You can do the same things i'm doing, with smaller files, if you'd like.

First of all, you'll need to install zfs-fuze, this was simple on Fedora.



$ sudo yum install zfs-fuse

Next some blank disk images to toy with.



$ mkdir zfs

$ cd zfs

$ for i in $(seq 8); do dd if=/dev/zero of=$i bs=1024 count=2097152;done

This gives me 8, 2gb blobs. Make these smaller if you'd like. I wanted enough space to throw some large files at zfs. You'll see in a bit.

Now let's make our first zfs pool.



$ sudo zpool create jose ~/zfs/1 ~/zfs/2 ~/zfs/3 ~/zfs/4

I named my pool jose. I like it when my blog entries have personality.

zfs list will give you a list of your zfs pools.



$ sudo zfs list

NAME   USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT

jose    72K  7.81G    18K  /jose

Creating the pool also mounts it.



$ df -h

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00

                      454G  210G  221G  49% /

/dev/sda1             190M   30M  151M  17% /boot

tmpfs                 2.0G   25M  2.0G   2% /dev/shm

jose                  7.9G   18K  7.9G   1% /jose

An interesting note. I never created a file system on this pool, i just told zfs to have at it. zfs must work at a block level with the drives.

Now, let's poke jose with a stick, and see what he does.



$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/jose/testfile bs=1024 count=2097512

2097512+0 records in

2097512+0 records out

2147852288 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 118.966 s, 18.1 MB/s



$ sudo zfs list

NAME   USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT

jose  2.00G  5.81G  2.00G  /jose

Its worth note, that with a zpool add /dev/whatever you can add space to a pool of this sort.

That's all fun, but this is essentially just a large file system. No really cool features yet. Let's see what we can really so with this thing.

Let's make a raid group, instead of just a standard pool.

Goodbye Jose



$ sudo zpool destroy jose

From jose's ashes, lets make a new pool.



$ sudo zpool create susan raidz ~/zfs/1 ~/zfs/2 ~/zfs/3 ~/zfs/4

$ sudo zfs list

NAME    USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT

susan  92.0K  5.84G  26.9K  /susan

Notice that susan is smaller than jose, using the same disks. This isn't because susan has made more trips to the gym than jose, rather it's because of the raid set. This is similar to raid 5, where one disk is taken for parity. So you lose a one disk worth of capacity.

Let's remedy that, by throwing more (virtual) hardware at it.

You cant expand a raid group, by adding a disk, so we'll do it by recreating the group.



$ sudo zpool destroy susan

$ sudo zpool create susan raidz ~/zfs/1 ~/zfs/2 ~/zfs/3 ~/zfs/4 ~/zfs/5

$ sudo zfs list

NAME    USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT

susan  98.3K  7.81G  28.8K  /susan

And there you go, about 8gb again.
Now let's poke susan with a stick.

First, here's her status:



$ sudo zpool status

  pool: susan

 state: ONLINE

 scrub: scrub completed after 0h0m with 0 errors on Tue Oct  6 15:22:24 2009

config:



	NAME                    STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM

	susan                   ONLINE       0     0     0

	  raidz1                ONLINE       0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/1  ONLINE       0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/2  ONLINE       0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/3  ONLINE       0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/4  ONLINE       0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/5  ONLINE       0     0     0



errors: No known data errors

Now we'll dd another file to susan, and we'll see if we can damage the array.



$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/susan/testfile bs=1024 count=2097512

Then, in another terminal...



$ sudo zpool offline susan ~/zfs/4

$ sudo zpool status

  pool: susan

 state: DEGRADED

status: One or more devices has been taken offline by the administrator.

	Sufficient replicas exist for the pool to continue functioning in a

	degraded state.

action: Online the device using 'zpool online' or replace the device with

	'zpool replace'.

 scrub: scrub completed after 0h0m with 0 errors on Tue Oct  6 15:22:24 2009

config:



	NAME                    STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM

	susan                   DEGRADED     0     0     0

	  raidz1                DEGRADED     0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/1  ONLINE       0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/2  ONLINE       0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/3  ONLINE       0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/4  OFFLINE      0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/5  ONLINE       0     0     0



errors: No known data errors

The dd is still running.



$ sudo zpool online susan ~/zfs/4

DD's still going.....

DD finally finished, and it took a little longer than the first copy, but it finished, and the file appears correct.

Now, let's try something else. With raid, you generally wont just take a drive offline, and then bring it right back, so let's see what happens if you replace the drive.

Another dd session, and then the drive swap commands.



$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/susan/testfile2 bs=1024 count=2097512

In another terminal...



$ sudo zpool status

  pool: susan

 state: ONLINE

 scrub: resilver completed after 0h0m with 0 errors on Tue Oct  6 15:26:06 2009

config:



	NAME                    STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM

	susan                   ONLINE       0     0     0

	  raidz1                ONLINE       0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/1  ONLINE       0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/2  ONLINE       0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/3  ONLINE       0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/4  ONLINE       0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/5  ONLINE       0     0     0



errors: No known data errors

$ sudo zpool offline susan ~/zfs/4

$ sudo zpool replace susan ~/zfs/4 ~/zfs/6

$ sudo zpool status

  pool: susan

 state: DEGRADED

status: One or more devices is currently being resilvered.  The pool will

	continue to function, possibly in a degraded state.

action: Wait for the resilver to complete.

 scrub: resilver in progress for 0h1m, 25.87% done, 0h3m to go

config:



	NAME                      STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM

	susan                     DEGRADED     0     0     0

	  raidz1                  DEGRADED     0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/1    ONLINE       0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/2    ONLINE       0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/3    ONLINE       0     0     0

	    replacing             DEGRADED     0     0     0

	      /home/lagern/zfs/4  OFFLINE      0     0     0

	      /home/lagern/zfs/6  ONLINE       0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/5    ONLINE       0     0     0



errors: No known data errors

This procedure seriously degraded the speed of the dd. It also made my music chop, once.
After the dd finished, the status was happy again:



$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/susan/testfile2 bs=1024 count=2097512

2097512+0 records in

2097512+0 records out

2147852288 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 356.92 s, 6.0 MB/s



$ sudo zpool status

  pool: susan

 state: ONLINE

 scrub: resilver completed after 0h4m with 0 errors on Tue Oct  6 15:35:52 2009

config:



	NAME                    STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM

	susan                   ONLINE       0     0     0

	  raidz1                ONLINE       0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/1  ONLINE       0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/2  ONLINE       0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/3  ONLINE       0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/6  ONLINE       0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/5  ONLINE       0     0     0



errors: No known data errors

Note that 4 is now replaced with 6.

Time for some coffee...........

Now lets look at some really neat things.

I mentioned that you couldn't expand a raid volume. What you can do is replace the disks, with larger ones. Its unclear how this affects your data though (at least, it is unclear to me!) so I'm going to try it.

First let's make some larger "disks".



for i in $(seq 9 13); do dd if=/dev/zero of=$i bs=1024 count=4195024; done

Here we are at the beginning



$ sudo zpool status

  pool: susan

 state: ONLINE

 scrub: resilver completed after 0h4m with 0 errors on Tue Oct  6 15:35:52 2009

config:



	NAME                    STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM

	susan                   ONLINE       0     0     0

	  raidz1                ONLINE       0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/1  ONLINE       0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/2  ONLINE       0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/3  ONLINE       0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/6  ONLINE       0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/5  ONLINE       0     0     0



errors: No known data errors



$ sudo zfs list

NAME    USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT

susan  4.00G  3.82G  4.00G  /susan

The new disks i created are 4GB, So we should be able to double the capacity in this pool using these disks.



$ sudo zpool replace susan ~/zfs/1 ~/zfs/9

$ sudo zpool replace susan ~/zfs/2 ~/zfs/10

$ sudo zpool status

  pool: susan

 state: ONLINE

status: One or more devices is currently being resilvered.  The pool will

	continue to function, possibly in a degraded state.

action: Wait for the resilver to complete.

 scrub: resilver in progress for 0h0m, 12.94% done, 0h6m to go

config:



	NAME                       STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM

	susan                      ONLINE       0     0     0

	  raidz1                   ONLINE       0     0     0

	    replacing              ONLINE       0     0     0

	      /home/lagern/zfs/1   ONLINE       0     0     0

	      /home/lagern/zfs/9   ONLINE       0     0     0

	    replacing              ONLINE       0     0     0

	      /home/lagern/zfs/2   ONLINE       0     0     0

	      /home/lagern/zfs/10  ONLINE       0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/3     ONLINE       0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/6     ONLINE       0     0     0

	    /home/lagern/zfs/5     ONLINE       0     0     0



errors: No known data errors

$ sudo zpool replace susan ~/zfs/3 ~/zfs/11

$ sudo zpool replace susan ~/zfs/6 ~/zfs/12

$ sudo zpool replace susan ~/zfs/5 ~/zfs/13

$ sudo zpool status

  pool: susan

 state: ONLINE

status: One or more devices is currently being resilvered.  The pool will

	continue to function, possibly in a degraded state.

action: Wait for the resilver to complete.

 scrub: resilver in progress for 0h0m, 8.21% done, 0h5m to go

config:



	NAME                       STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM

	susan                      ONLINE       0     0     0

	  raidz1                   ONLINE       0     0     0

	    replacing              ONLINE       0     0     0

	      /home/lagern/zfs/1   ONLINE       0     0     0

	      /home/lagern/zfs/9   ONLINE       0     0     0

	    replacing              ONLINE       0     0     0

	      /home/lagern/zfs/2   ONLINE       0     0     0

	      /home/lagern/zfs/10  ONLINE       0     0     0

	    replacing              ONLINE       0     0     0

	      /home/lagern/zfs/3   ONLINE       0     0     0

	      /home/lagern/zfs/11  ONLINE       0     0     0

	    replacing              ONLINE       0     0     0

	      /home/lagern/zfs/6   ONLINE       0     0     0

	      /home/lagern/zfs/12  ONLINE       0     0     0

	    replacing              ONLINE       0     0     0

	      /home/lagern/zfs/5   ONLINE       0     0     0

	      /home/lagern/zfs/13  ONLINE       0     0     0



errors: No known data errors

This took a while, and really hit my system hard. I'd recommend doing this one drive at a time.



$ top



top - 16:12:10 up 25 days,  5:27, 25 users,  load average: 11.36, 9.27, 6.20

Tasks: 280 total,   2 running, 278 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie

Cpu0  : 10.2%us,  1.3%sy,  0.0%ni, 61.0%id, 27.5%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st

Cpu1  :  1.6%us,  2.9%sy,  0.0%ni,  5.5%id, 89.6%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.3%si,  0.0%st

Cpu2  :  0.7%us,  0.7%sy,  0.0%ni, 92.7%id,  5.9%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st

Cpu3  :  3.9%us,  2.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 94.1%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st

Cpu4  :  1.0%us,  0.3%sy,  0.0%ni, 98.7%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st

Cpu5  :  1.3%us,  2.0%sy,  0.0%ni,  9.8%id, 86.9%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st

Cpu6  :  5.4%us,  6.8%sy,  0.0%ni, 87.3%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.6%si,  0.0%st

Cpu7  :  1.6%us,  1.3%sy,  0.0%ni, 97.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st

Mem:   4121040k total,  4004956k used,   116084k free,    13756k buffers

Swap:  5406712k total,   322328k used,  5084384k free,  1441452k cached



  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                       

11021 lagern    20   0 1417m 1.1g  35m S 14.2 26.8   2393:07 VirtualBox                                                    

  313 lagern    20   0 1077m 555m  13m R 12.6 13.8   1089:52 firefox                                                       

22170 root      20   0  565m 221m 1428 S  6.6  5.5   5:57.71 zfs-fuse

I think i'll go read some things on my laptop while this finishes.

Done! Took about 15 minutes to complete. My test files are still present in the pool,



$ ls -lh /susan

total 4.0G

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.1G 2009-10-06 15:27 testfile

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.1G 2009-10-06 15:35 testfile2

My pool does not yet show the new size....



$ sudo zfs list

NAME    USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT

susan  4.00G  3.82G  4.00G  /susan

I remounted...



$ sudo zfs umount /susan

$ sudo zfs mount susan

No change....

According to harryd a reboot is necesasry. I'm not in the rebooting mood at the moment. I'll try this, and report back if it doesnt work.

So, there you have it, zfs! Oh, another note. raidz is not the only raid option. raidz2 supports two parity drives. Like raid6. You can specify this via the zpool create command, using raidz2 where raidz was.

Enjoy!

-War

Blackberry Storm, First month or so.

nospam@example.com (War) — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 12:53:43 -0400

I've had my Storm for a little more than a month now. I've decided it's time for that follow-up review.

First of all, I've had to have the phone replaced once already. The buttons on the phone stopped working. Of the 4 buttons below the screen (the hangup, call, menu, and back buttons), two of them stopped working on me. After a quick call to Verizon's support, they happily replaced the phone. I still like the phone, but I'm a little wary about it's durability. I've had the replacement phone for about 3 weeks now. It was about a month before the first one had its problems, we'll see how this one fares.

Ironically, while i was waiting for my new phone to come in the mail, the old phone slipped out of my hand, and bumped my desk (about a 2" fall) and the buttons started working! I still didnt trust the old phone, and sent it back to verizon as they asked when i got the new phone in the mail.

Overall, i like the phone. The screen seems like it could use some work though. If you try to press at any of the edges, it's difficult to get a response. I did find something of a hack online to fix this. You simply take a small piece of paper, and fold it up a few times so that its just a little thicker than a sheet of paper (in my case, 2 folds seemed to do the trick, making it 4x the thickness of just one sheet). Take that folded piece of paper, remove the back of the phone, pull out the battery, and place the piece of paper between the back of the battery, and the inside panel of the phone. Then put the battery back in, and put the cover back on. This for whatever reason, helps the issue. I do not know what long-term effects this may have on the phone, but it doesnt seem like it's putting pressure on anything vital, at least, not enough to cause a problem.

Themes for the phone are sometimes finicky. One of the things i really wanted for this phone was an LCARS like theme. It's a touch phone after all. I tried a handfull of them, and found one that i really liked, and used it for a while, but i eventually switched back to the standard theme. Why? because themes don't just change the look, some of them actually change some of the interface. Every one that I tried degraded the user interface, some of them slowed the phone down, some even caused lock-ups! I decided the look just wasn't worth it.

Application support is nice on this phone. It's not like an iPhone. I cant find app's that will control every aspect of my life, but that's ok, i dont need that. I have found a number of cool apps. all of which thus far have been free. Including a weather app, apps for twitter, mysapce, and facebook, and even a shoutcast streaming app called flycast.

One of my concerns was calendaring and syncing with Zimbra. I'm sad to report that i have NOT found a slick way to handle this. The blackberry will not talk directly to Zimbra, well, i lie, e-mail itself is great. I was able to use BIS to setup a standard imap connection Zimbra, but the calendar and contacts are not there. There's a connector to go from a BES to Zimbra, but we don't have a BES. I played around, forever, with an open source BES like server, called Funambol, but i've had no luck with it. Thus far, the best compromise i've found is syncing with outlook. Which is a bummer, because I don't use outlook regularly. So i need to boot windows, fire up outlook, sync, and then shut outlook back down. Sort of a waste for all that outlook is designed to do, you know?

I do still find myself in somewhat envy of the iPhone crowd, but theyre just not an option for me at the moment. I do not want to switch providers, and verizon does not currently offer an iPhone. I wouldn't be surprised to find myself switching to an iPhone if Verizon ever offer's one.

-War

Blackberry storm: First couple days.

nospam@example.com (War) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:57:24 -0400

Well, i've had my storm for 4 days now. I'm going to try to put some of my initial impressions and experiences down in writing now.

So far, i very much enjoy this phone. I've had one or two little quirks that I'll touch on, but so far, i like it.

How's the sure-press screen work? I like it. I've even had an iphone user or two comment on how the sure press screen is nice. None of them are rushing out to get a storm, but they didnt puke when they tried to use it. I really like the feedback from the screen. Its subtle enough that it doesnt feel gimmicky, and it feels solid. Some of the apps that i've used dont work well with the touch screen. This is probably a compatibility with older apps thing, and not necessarily a flaw in this phone. I can see how that may have been a sticky subject at blackberry's R&D lab. Do we reject the use of older apps, and make developers re-write every app on the market? Or do we tack on clunky touch screen usage for older apps? I can see both sides of that, and i can understand why they did what they did.

I've run into an issue or two with free resources on the phone. The phone will slow down to a crawl, and i'll have to reboot it in order to free that up. I think this is more due to how i'm using the phone, and not necessarily a problem with the phone. It seems like if you exit an app by using the back button, it doesnt close, rather it goes to the background. I haven't found a way to find out what's running, but it seems that if i hit the bb menu, and select close instead of backing out, it works well.

I'm not crazy about how they handle e-mail. I know why they do it, but i dont really love it. When you setup your e-mail, they pass it all through their BIS. You put in some very basic info into a wizard, and it somehow guesses the information, and enters it into their service. Then your mail is passed through their service to your phone. Well, if you use this wizard, it apparently sets up your bis account, but doesnt actually give it a username! I had to call verizon's support to get that worked out (which i just did). I tried to add my work account, with uses imaps, rather than clear imap. So it takes some advanced settings to get it working. You cant enter these settings on the phone, you need to do it on their site. Once i got into the site, it was actually detected properly, which surprised me. It also let me take the verizon branding out of the signature line of all of my e-mails, which is nice. I dont want my work e-mail being sent out branded.

I've dont some fiddling with about 50% of the stuff i see on the main menu of the phpne. I've also added a few apps. One of which with google maps, another was a media player which supports shoutcast streams. Pretty cool. Never thought i'd be able to play The Blast on the go. I've also run across a few cool free apps, like games and whatnot.

I've also been toying with a BES like open source package. It may, if i can get it working, get me my calendar from Zimbra sync'd on the storm. I got it working tonight for email, but it was buggy as hell, and kept crashing the phone. The contacts/calendar app (which is a separate sync app) seems stable, so i'm going to continue to pursue that. The app is called Funambol. I could probably post an entire entry on that later.

So far, i give this phone a big thumbs up. It's cool enough to be a fun phone, but.. erm.. Blackberry enough to be a good business phone. Exactly what I needed.

-War

Blackberry Storm. Before Purchase.

nospam@example.com (War) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:20:31 -0400

Tonight I aim to walk into a Verizon Wireless store, and upgrade to a Blackberry Storm.

I'm currently using a Samsung SCH-U740, a phone that has recently been re-branded as the "Alias". If you were to go to Verizon today, you'd find it on the shelves/website as the Alias. A good phone no doubt. It's held up well to my abuse, and general use. I've recently moved into a position where communication is a bit more prominent than it has been. We have enough of us working on a team that E-Mail and Calendaring is much preferred over the SMS messaging that i've been doing primarily on my current phone. It's served its purpose well, with its dual-flip and full keyboard.

I plan to post again after I've purchased the Storm, and used it for a day or so, to give my initial impressions. Then again after a month or so of usage. Assuming that i don't hate the phone, and have given it back to Verizon. I dont expect that to happen. but who knows.

Today I'm going to talk about why i picked the storm, and what my expectations are. Be aware that i may be be incorrect on some of these assumptions, but you'll get to see that once i post my first follow-up.

Why the storm?
I want a touch screen phone. I don't really want to leave Verizon. The Storm was the ONLY touch screen phone offered by Verizon that does not run Windows Mobile. Windows mobile is a horrid piece of trash, and I will not purchase a device that runs it. I've heard in the past few days that Verizon now offers another touch screen phone without Windows mobile. It's an LG, and has a full keyboard when it's flipped open. I hear that it does not handle e-mail well, and some of its features are locked unless you subscribe to them. I'll touch on that in a second.

Touch screen aside, i want a phone with email, calendar, and web. We run Zimbra Collaboration Suite at work, and although the storm does not currently support zimbra (which uses activesync to sync over the air) I feel that a popular platform like the BlackBerry is more likely to have some addon written for this functionality, than something that runs a proprietary OS like the LG does. The Storm also has a larger community of folks writing apps for it. Now, the iPhone, and Windows Moble both talk to Zimbra already, but like I said, i have reasons for not going with either of those options.

Features... This phone is packed with them. Including (or so i'm told) an unlocked GPS feature. Which allows me to go and download something like google maps, giving me a fully featured GPS right on my belt at all times. Something that most (if not all) other verizon phones force you to pay monthly for.

Expectations:
I expect that I'll like this phone. I think that's obvious, otherwise I wouldn't be buying it.

I expect that I'll be able to tweak the storm to make it a little more personalized than is possible with some other phones.

I expect that I'll be able to find applications to do most of what I'd like to do on this phone. Some things I'd like to do are: Listen to music (including streams, like shoutcast if possible), get directions, and of course, email and calendaring.

What makes me think that this phone will do all of that?
Well, honestly, I dont think it's going to do every single thing i'd like it to, in fact, i expect that it wont, but if it does, i'll be VERY pleased. The bottom line is, if it does all of the things that i've heard it can, i'll he happy with it.

What about this Sure-Press screen?
I've done a little homework. It seems that the biggest complaint regarding the Storm is the screen. If you're not familiar with it, I'll sum it up. The entire screen seems to be mounted on one giant button. When you touch the screen, it responds by hi-lighting things, or scrolling, depending on the gesture of your finger. If you press on the screen slightly, the entire screen clicks, like a button. This makes me wonder about the longevity of the phone. Will this button start to wear out? Will the screen start to get loose? What about dirt and whatnot getting in the crevices around the screen that allow it to move? All i can say to that is.. I'm going to be careful with the phone, and see how it goes.

As far as the operation of the screen goes. I stopped in at a verizon store, and had a look at a powered up, but not activated Storm. I brought up a new text message, and started typing. I like it. I think it'll work out just fine. I was able to type a sentence with just as much speed and accuracy as i do on my SCH-U740.

That's it for now, see you in a few days!

-War

Dell and Google to build an iPhone competitor?

nospam@example.com (War) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 15:06:11 -0500

Slashdot has an article regarding Dell's entrance into the PDA Phone market. Experts speculate that Dell and Google will announce a partnership in building an iPhone like product. Running google's software, and on dell's hardware 'Id assume. This should be interesting.

I just hope they do a better job on it than they did on my Dell Pocket DJ. That things a buggy piece of crap. Sure, it plays music, but half the time it locks up doing simple things like.. ohh.. adding music to the current playlist!

At any rate, i guess we'll find out if theyre right at next month's 3GSM telecoms conference in Barcelona, which is where theyre expected to make their announcement.

-War

Youg IT workers expect too much?

nospam@example.com (War) — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 07:16:41 -0500

I read an article on SlashDot today about young IT staff expecting too much in compensation for their skills. The article claimed that members of the "Millennials" generation are jaded due to the high quality of life they were subjected to as children in the US. So i guess being a prosperous country, and not living in fear of militants, starvation, and plague is actually bad for you?

It's an interesting read honestly. As a member of said generation, I can say that i've seen exactly what theyre talking about. I'm pretty modest when it comes to my skills, and i'm pretty greatful for the salary i get currently. I cant imagine demanding more just because i'm full of myself. I have however seen a number of my friends and co-workers move on to "better" jobs for higher pay or status. At my current job i've been witness to a stream of developers and admins that come and go. always looking for that "perfect" job. Since I started here, 2 network admins have passed through, one of which was only here for a month and a half, 4 web designers, and 3 developers. That's JUST the IT staff! Forget about Sales staff. And i've only been here for just over 2 years! My last job.. I spent 8 years working for the same company. Started there just out of High School. Guess why i left? Money. Ha! Sounds like i'm a hypocrite eh? Not really, the place i used to work for horribly underpay's their IT staff, unless you have the right last name, or you're in the right position or you've been there since the place opened their doors (15 years ago or so) then you make CRAP wages, but that's a whole other blog post.

It's like people dont appreciate their job's anymore. I feel privileged to work in this country. I dont feel that I'm owed a job. It's more like i owe my employer for my job. Isn;t that how it works? I work for him, i do my job, he pays me... Not he pays me, and i gripe about my job and do as little as possible.

I guess i was just raised differently than all of the rest of my generation.

-War

Samsung SCH-u740, after 2 months

nospam@example.com (War) — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 10:53:05 -0500

Time came for me to replace my old Cel Phone with something a little more flashy.

My carrier is Verizon, and anyone who has verizon knows that every 2 years they give you credit tward a new phone. Well in October my new every two came about, so I started looking for a phone. I decided on the Samsung SCH-u740. It;s got some cool features, a full qwerty keyboard, and with my new-every-2 credit, i got it for FREE! Pretty cool!

I like belt clips, so i ordered a $20 belt clip along with it. In a few days, my new phone arrived via FedEx. Theres something about new electronics... I couldn't wait to fire it up. I charged it up, and activated it. To my dismay i found that the belt clip had arrived broken. It's made of plastic, so i figured, what the heck, it was just packaged wrong or whatever. My first phone call on my new phone was to verizon, to ask them how to go about getting it replaced. They were very helpful and told me to jus take it to a verizon store, and they'd replace it. So i did, and all was well.

The phone is great. I've had it for almost 2 months now, and i definately DO NOT regret my purchase. The qwerty keyboard was easy to get used to, and the dual flip screen (vertical, or horizontal) seems well thought out. When text messaging, you can flip from one position to the other without even losing your message. This doesn't work on all screens though, which is sort of a bummer, but it's not that often that i;m switching from one mode to the other, unless texting.

The phone also plays music, though i havent tried it out. I have an MP3 player already, so it's not really a selling point for me. I did download a ring tone of a Static-X song, and it sounds pretty good. I'd imagine that an actual MP3 would sound better. The phone has touch-screen controls on the front of the phone for playing music. Theyre a little too sensitive. If i just pick the phone up i usually activate one of the buttons. Not a big deal, the phone has a lock function for the front panel, so that solves that.

The outside of the phone is easy to scratch though, so get a protective cover for it. Using my belt clip, i managed to scratch the front of the phone. I dont even remember hitting it off of anything... I'm a little rough on phones due to my hobbies, so i expected to scratch it, I just hoped it would last longer than 2 weeks. Heh.

On the topic of that belt clip... Dont buy one. It;s a terrible design. I dont know what it is about samsung, but they do not make good belt clips. I have another samsung for work, i forget the model. But it's got a belt clip as well, and i;m not impressed with it. It's doing a much better job than the u740's clip does though. Because of the dual flip, they had to use a somewhat non-standard clip for the phone, in order to allow it to operate while in the clip. It's got one finger that clips over half of the hinge, and sort of wraps around the hinge. One night i was called into work, late, and i was working on fixing a problem. I was in a bit of a rush. My wife called me to find out when i;d be home, and in a hurry, when i put the phone back in the clip, it broke the finger off. Later i took it back to verizon, and reluctantly got it replaced with another of the same clip. The lady that helped me told me that this happens when you clip the phone back into the holster without minding the clip finger. I thought that was a little rediculus. I'm all about well made stuff, and that sounded the opposite of well made to me. They said they'd replace it this once, as a courtesy. Which again, sort of miffed me. The thing failed through normal use, after a friggin week.

So i took the replacement, and off i went. With my old phone, i used my belt clip 99% of the time. Now with this fragile pice of underengineerd crap, i decided that i;d put the phone in my pocket, when i had one available, and only use the belt clip when necessary. This was working well, i usually wear cargo style pants to work, so they have a nice large pocket on each leg, perfect for the phone, and a lot of my jeans have carpenter style pockets on one leg, also perfect for a phone. So i was using my belt clip, maybe 20% of the time. So this worked well, i figured the less i used the belt clip, the less chance there was that it would break again.

Well it was inevitable. This past saturday we were cleaning up the yard from the fall leaves, setting up christmas decorations, all that mid fall stuff. Well i was pulling a garden hose out to let it drain so i could coil it up and store it for the winter, and as i'm pulling, i brushed against my side, where the phone was clipped to my belt. When i say brushed, i mean that literally, Well i must have snagged the phone with that brush, and it just snapped that damned finger off like it was made of.. well. CHEAP MOTHERF*#$ING PLASTIC. I felt my phone fall to the pavement... I was already pissed by the time it hit the ground. The battery cover popped off, the battery flew out. I quickly picked it up and inspected it for damage. After putting the battery back in and making sure the phone still worked, I pulled the clip from my belt, sure enough, that damned clip was broken. I didnt hesitate, I threw the damn thing with all of my might, straight to the pavement. It flew apart into half a dozen pieces. Yea, it was a waste of $20. I might have been able to go make a scene in their lobby and gotten it replaced, or a credit for the price of the piece of crap, but it just felt too good to destroy it.

So anyway, good phone, but DONT buy the plastic belt clip, get a case with a clip if you like belt clips like I do.

-War

Daylight Savings Time...

nospam@example.com (War) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 10:23:07 -0400

Why in the hell did congress decide that it was essential to the survival of the country to change DST?!?!?!

From an IT standpoint.. what a bloody nightmare. I manage a number of servers, ranging to Windows 2k, 2003, FreeBSD, and Linux. All of which require a different update for the DST changes. What a pain. I should have dealt with these back in March, but such things happen when you've only got 2 admins to manage over 100 servers....

So, for those interested here's what ive come across:

Windows 2000: Microsoft has a utility called "tzedit" which will allow you to manually update the DST info. I dont know for certain, but i think they later released a Windows update to automate this.

Windows 2003: Same as 2000, except that the Update was released earlier than the update for 2000 was, so the need for "tzedit" is removed, unless you tried to update it before the update was released.

FreeBSD: Apparently the guys at FreeBSD shipped 6.2 with the new DST info pre-packaged. Lucky for me, the newest FreeBSD server i manage is 6.1! With the majority being older. So if you're in the same boat, use Ports to update the zone info. First Update the ports tree, then install /usr/ports/misc/zoneinfo. Afterward I ran tzsetup to make the changes take effect, I dont know that this is necessary.

Linux: We run Fedora, and CentOS, so the yum package repository of choice. yum update tzdata gets the update, then system-config-time re-set's the clock.

Hope this helps someone avoid my headache...

-War

Nostalgia... BBS

nospam@example.com (War) — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 09:37:19 -0400

You remember it... Maybe you don't, if you grew up in the same age as I did, and you were into computers, you know what I'm talking about.

The BBS...

I spent most of my life between the ages of 14 and 18 or so playing around on BBS's. They started out as dial-up, then telnet as technology progressed. I ran my own for a short while back then, using all pirated software, but it wasn't like i was making money off of it. It was just a local thing, for me and my friends to hang out and play the games we loved in our own environment.

I took it offline, for a few reasons, one was the fact that i was using a few thousand dollars worth of software, publicly accessible, illegally. I wasn't comfortable leaving it up. Plus interest faded.

Then I came across legitimate software, that an old sysop just gave me. I know it's legitimate, because It's a board that was up and running as a business for a long time. So i got that up and running, and it's been my board ever since. It's been online since sometime around 2002, it was down for a few months when i moved (hard drive failure) but i got it back up and running, and it's been The Underground BBS ever since.

Now I'm working on a custom developed copy of Tele-Arena. A BBS game that I run. The problem is, that this software is sooo old, that it's tough to actually develop on! I dont have any computer's that will still run the software, other than the bbs itself, and the hardware that the BBS was running on before, and that's all in use currently. So I'm fighting with running the software under a VM. So far it's been almost completely un-successful. Apparently WorldGroup 2 does not like being run in a virtual machine. I'll get it going, it's just been a hell of a headache...

-War

The Mentor's Last Words

nospam@example.com (War) — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 22:40:13 -0400

A blast from the past... I was cleaning up my computer room and I ran across my "stash" from when I was a teenage hacker kid. Which consisteded of 10 floppy disks, containing things like, The Nowhere Utilities, CyberPhreak, VCL, a bunch of old outdated warez serials, and a ton of text files! I never did anything other than tinker with CyberPhreak, the Nowhere utilities were just a cool pack of utilities, VCL.. hell, i dont have it in me to create a virus, and actually distribute it to anyone other than the kid down the street that cheated me in Doom, but the texts.... man, i used to spend hours reading all the text info I could find. Thats probably why I am who I am today, and probably why I chose the IT field as my profession. One of the most profound things I can recall reading back in those days was "The Mentor's Last Words", by, of course, The Mentor. It was (somewhat) featured in the movie "Hackers" though it was chopped up a bit. I'd read it long before Hollywood stumbled across it and put it in their movie.

When I was in Business School, for PC Networking, I had a public speaking class, and I used this piece as the subject of one of my speaches. I'd like to think that the class took something away from the whole presentation. Anyway, because things like this seem to be fading to the background in todays age of script kiddies, botnets, bullshit malicious viruses, and people who care more about the allmighty dollar than even a shred of knowledge... (ranting.. i know), I've decided to post this bit of computer history here, for everyone to (re)read...

Enjoy!

Mentor's Last Words

"Mentor's Last Words"

Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers. "Teenager
Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank
Tampering"... Damn kids. They're all alike. But did you, in your three-
piece psychology and 1950's technobrain, ever take a look behind the
eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces
shaped him, what may have molded him? I am a hacker, enter my world...
Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of the
other kids, this crap they teach us bores me... Damn underachiever.
They're all alike. I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to
teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction.
I understand it. "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in
my head..." Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.
I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is
cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I
screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me... Or feels threatened by
me.. Or thinks I'm a smart ass.. Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be
here... Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike. And then
it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through the phone line
like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out,
a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is found.
"This is it... this is where I belong..." I know everyone here... even
if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them
again... I know you all... Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again.
They're all alike... You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been
spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of
meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless.
We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few
that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are
like drops of water in the desert.
This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the
beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without
paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering
gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us
criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We
exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias...
and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you
murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our
own good, yet we're the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is
that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never
forgive me for. I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop
this individual,but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.
+++The Mentor+++

Hope you've enjoyed the read...

-War