The Clan of the Cave Bague

I’ve just had a server returned by a client. Apparently it keeps overheating and dying. It’s a 1u box and they swear blind they’ve left a ventilation gap and have aircon in the server room. So, I popped the lid and had a look.

 The first thing that struck me was the amount of muck, crap and dust inside the box. The fans were so full of nasty sticky gungey fluff that they refused to turn. That certainly explains the overheating. I suspect that the server may have been stored in a chicken coop rather than a server room.

Given that I had the top off it to give it a good clean, I reckoned it was only sensible to have a good poke around the thing to make sure there wasn’t any glaring damage. Fairly quickly, I spotted a few places where the temperature had got high enough to cos some solder joints to leak flux. Not a good sign.

Then I saw this. A couple of pins on an interface point which had been bent over so extremely that they were shorting out. “Hmm,” thought I, “that’s not a Good Thing.” Question is, how in god’s name did they get in there to bend the pins? The top panel at this point is actually rivetted in…. ah. The rivets have been drilled out on the side of the casing. 

Anyway, at this point I pulled out the vacuum cleaner in order to give it a good hoovering out. Half an hour of intensive disassembly and cleaning and all the fans on the mainboard were functional. The fan at the front of the power supply assembly were not. So, slid the power supply out and squinted in the back of the box. Dear oh dear – it’s not looking good for you, mister server. I have only one option left open to me:

The Anal Probe…..

I really dread to think what google search strings are going to appear in my web stats next month.

Ok, so I have a couple of Solaris LDOMs running on a big über-core SPARC T5240. I also have a pile of old E220s, Netras and 450s running an Oracle based webapp that I’m migrating to LDOMs as a proof of concept.

Except they’re on separate networks and the gateway is a little linux box. Annoyingly, when I try to blatt 13Gb of data from one of the netras over to the T5240, though, the gateway box mysteriously loses its routing tables half way through the transfer and one of the ipaliases vanishes.

It’s a bit annoying.

Ok, so the mighty mouse is a thing of beauty. It’s an accurate, comfortable and pretty mouse. Except it has a tiny little pea-sized rollerball embedded in the top for scrolling in 360 degrees.

The trouble is, gunge, oose and muck get in there and, if it blocks the sensors, stops the scrollball from working. This happened to me this morning.

As the mouse internals are effectively hermetically sealed, there’s no way to get it cleaned – or so I thought. Googling revealed loads of weird and wonderful ways to clean it – from the brute-force methods of vivisecting the mouse through to the weird chicken-sacrificing pressurised air freaks.

Then I tried the unthinkable – I have wet and dry screen wipes here. “I know,” I thought, “I’ll give it a clean with one of these IPA soaked wipes.”

Bingo! One minute later, my scrollball was restored to its usual state of aceness.

Result!

Ok, so we have a Linux box sitting at our colo doing, amongst other things, some ASP stuff. Thing is, this server is a little broken. Someone, at some point in time prior to me working here, decided in their infinite knowledge and wisdom to ‘transfer’ one machine to another by rsyncing random bits of the filesystem over.

Naturally, as /etc and /var were included in this madness, it’s a very broken machine with an even more broken package management system.

So there I was today. I decided that, as I was implementing a new backup procedure on the machine after moving it out to the datacenter, that it would be helpful to fix the horribly broken mail system so I can actually get the results of the backup job mailed to me. No problemo – ripped out the horribly broken exim system and replaced it with a simple and elegant localhost-only sendmail set up. Hooray! Mail is fixed.

Except what’s this! I’m receiving loads of mails of failed cronjobs. Quickly fire up crontab to have a look. Nope, nothing in the crontab – must be the system crontab. Had a look in there. Removed a couple of synced-over crontabs for applications which weren’t even installed, but still no sign of the one generating the verbose errors.

To cut a long story short – crontab was cheerfully showing me the cron files stored where it expected them. Crond was happily running the cronjobs stored where it expected them. Sadly, the crontab application was not only from a different version of the cron package from the actual daemon, but it was from a completely seperate distro of linux which expected the cron files to be kept in a different place.

Lovely.

I was speaking to Mr Daniels today and waxing lyrical, as is my wont, about the lovely messaging system in objective C. He commented that something I said was a really nice metaphor so I thought I’d post it here.

Objective C, as you might know, uses square braces (these []) as part of its syntax for sending messages. For example:

[myObject init];

Well, it occurred to me that those square brackets make the object and the message look like they’re in a wee box – so when you ask an object for an answer, the question just kinda falls out of the box. Like this:

theAnswer = [myObject whatsYourFavouriteColor];

That’s all it was – but he’s right enough – it helps to make things easy. You drop the question into the box beside the object and the answer falls out the other end

Been listening to a (n awesome) podcast for the past few mornings. It’s an ongoing series as part of the Wizards of the Coast D & D podcast that’s a live session of the guys from Penny Arcade playing 4th Edition D & D. Some of them, believe it or not, are even playing it for the first time! And they call themselves geeks!

Anyway, the whole thing is an (entertaining) promotional recording for the new ruleset, and I have to say (as a long-time v2, v3. v3.5 player) that there are a few odd things in the new rules. For example, all classes now get ‘Healing Surges’ which allow them to, well, heal themselves for a quarter of their hit points several times a day, even during combat. That pretty much takes the planning and challenge away there and then. Another thing that stuck in my mind was the wizard class – infinite magic missile casts at level 1? Ok, so the spell has been nerfed – it doesn’t do nearly the damage it did in 3.5, but infinite casts? 

I can see what WotC are trying to do, here, they’re attempting to aim D & D at the videogame crowd (which is kinda ironic, really, as D & D was originally the inspiration for a lot of videogames), but I think they’re taking it a bit far. The role-playing aspects of the game are largely lost – when will the Cleric get the dilemma of “Do I use my last heal on our fighter or my best friend?”. When does the mage think “I have one cast of magic missiles left – do I do it now to save a party member’s life, or do I keep it to myself for self defence?”

I daresay this is nothing more than the same old story – it’s change and therefore the crusty old nerds like me must make a noise, but I have to say I don’t think I’ll be playing it – it just isn’t the game I want to play. It’s warcraft without a computer – all combat, no roleplaying, no moral dilemmas.

Then there’s the whole ‘play it over the net’ virtual table top. Come on, guys, it’s NOT a computer game – it’s a social game about teamwork, problem solving, roleplaying and, yes, combat. It’s NOT WoW.

Of course, it’s all academic. There’s no *need* to ‘upgrade’ to 4th Ed. D & D being what it is, there are plenty of pre-written 3.5 adventures out there, and god knows how many worlds you can set your own adventures in. And if you run out of them, well, you just write your own.

It’s not all negative, though – if 4th Ed. brings in a new audience to D & D then that’s fab (<geek>even if it’s not proper D & D</geek>), and I’m sure they’ll have a great fun discovering this new/old universe. I do hope, though, that playing the (should I say ‘dumbed down’? Probably not) new version will lead them to try some of the older, more traditional versions.

Well, as most of you will know already, I got a nice shiny MacBook a week or two ago. I haven’t really said much on here because I tend to turn into a dribbling fanatic when talking about macs, and it upsets my PC-bound wife. But I have to talk about Time Machine. I’ve no choice.

The thing is, disks are big these days, and between keeping all my documents and finances on the computer, having years worth of photos and music, and all the time that goes into getting it set up just right, the fear of losing hardware constantly niggles away at the back of my mind.

Not any more, though. I’ve mentioned, way back in the distant past, the way I’m always impressed by the fact that a Mac, as delivered, already has 99% of the stuff you’re ever likely to need already installed. Well, Time Machine takes it one step further than that. It’s a backup program – the kind you really have to spend quite a bit of money on in windowsland. 

It works like this. You connect an external USB hard drive. It asks you if you want to use it for Time Machine. You say yes. Your backup needs are now met.

What it does is this – it does a full system backup. Then every hour or so it does an incremental. It then does a weekly and a monthly. By default, it will keep the last week’s worth of hourly backups, several months of weekly backups, and monthly backups for as long as there’s available disk space. Once disk space runs low, it’ll remove the oldest Monthly backup.

But that all just happens behind the scenes. If you don’t have your external drive connected – if you’re out and about, for example, it’ll just do the backup next time you connect it.

You can then click the Time Machine icon on the dock and get a swirly swooshy view of your machine at any point in time since the backups started. Travel back to the date you want, browse the filesystem to find the file you want and click restore. Done. This even works in applications – start Apple Mail, click Time Machine and browse your inbox or deleted items from $wayback. 

A nice touch is that full system recovery can also be carried out. Boot of the OSX installer DVD, select “Time Machine Restore” and poof! off it goes.

It’s just lovely.

deKay thinks he’s being clever by running a spectrum emulator under wine on Mac OSX. Except he’s not being clever at all, because my dashboard widget STILL wins.

My lovely lady wife has Mac Envy. It’s a terrible thing to see. She was wrestling with MS Office this morning and was practically turning purple. So, I’ve been commanded to “Get Her A Mac”. Thing is, we’ve been stuck with the PeeCee for over a year now and she’d kinda got used to the whole “fighting against the operating system” thing. Until, that is, she saw my shiny MacBook.

So there we go – mission for 2008 is “Get Debbie an iMac.”

Oh yes I have – thanks to this site, I’ve just spent an hour or so making the most awesome everlasting wallet out of duck tape (or duct tape, for our American readers).

So once again, my firm belief that the whole universe is held together by duct tape is confirmed.

Not only that, but it’ll last forever – if a bit gets worn, well, just tape it up again!