Tonight’s SoC goal was to get mogstored running in the CSIL environment. See if I could get all the code working out of my home directory to run a functioning storage node — even if I don’t have any of the tracker stuff setup yet.

So I cvs download the code, try to run the storage node software, and it complains about missing packages. It’s okay, I expected this. I downloaded Danga’s perlbal library, which acts as a balancing proxy for web stuff. (Think cheap man’s L4+ switch, in perl.) I got it installed to another directory, and mogstored pointing to it when it complained about Linux::AIO missing. I expected this too.

I didn’t expect the latest AIO package not to compile on FC4. (I think it’s a little weird to compile a perl module – maybe I should say make?) A few searches and I found out the headers I need to add to make it ‘make’. I do that.

Then I backpedal a bit and learn about how to adjust the @INC list from the environment, and how to do ‘make install’ install things to the right place when I want that to be under my home directory. For some reason, perlbal can’t find the AIO stuff, even though it’s installed where I think it should be and it’s in the right paths.

Playing around with making mogstored look in the build directories caused another missing module, this one BSD something or other… I’m not sure it was building properly when I tried that, so maybe it’s okay.

And that’s where I’m leaving it tonight. I have a hunch this is failing because I couldn’t just do a ‘make; make test; make install’ and put it on the system. I’ll ask Chuck about it tomorrow and see if I can figure out why it might be failing. If it works on my desktop installed to the global areas, it should work from an alternate directory in my PERL5LIB environment. Not the best start in the world, but it’s something.

More students choose Illinois, producing largest incoming class

With a dramatic jump over last year in the percentage of those accepting admission, the UI is expecting its largest incoming freshman class ever, according to Keith Marshall, the associate provost who oversees admissions.

Due respect to the good people at the New Bureau and the admissions office, but I think I’ve heard the term “largest incoming class ever” about 6 times since I’ve started paying attention to UofI. There’s always more people accepting than you think, even when you accept fewer people. There are always fewer dorm room spots available, and move-in always sucks — it doesn’t matter if you have 4000 or 7000 incoming students.

I’ll have to ask Professor Kamin about CS’s admissions this fall. I know we’ve been cutting back on students and adding faculty to try to get the ratio down. I wonder if we’ve lightened up the restrictions and let more students in. It would be great to see more women and minorities in Computer Science.

Computer giant Apple made ripples through the industry in the last few weeks with (NO WINDOWS I WILL REBOOT LATER) the announcement they’re going to move from their IBM PowerPC hardware platform to Intel based chips. Apple has always had good hardware, even though it was more expensive. Although recently, it’s their OS that has been more of a pull for consumers. I haven’t read all the industry fallout from the announcement, but I’m sure when that finally happens and we can run OSX on a PC, we’ll be seeing more competition for Windows, and choice almost always helps the consumer. I tried OSX and didn’t really care for it, but I encourage people to try new things and use what they like.

Also significant in Apple news is on the RC5 front. I participate in distributed.net’s project to crack encryption with my computer’s idle cycles. I’ve been doing this since my freshman year of college (when 220k keys/sec was GOOD. Right now my computer is doing about 9Mk/s.) What’s significant is they store which OS each keyblock returned was cracked on, and MacOS overtook Linux for second place for RC5-72. (Windows is still in a strong, strong lead.) That’s significant because the G5 processor that new Macs use has incredible RC5 capabilities. (My 2.2GHz AMD gets just under 9Mk/s. A 2GHz G5 gets about 15Mk/s – a 2.7 over 20Mk/s. Of course all of that will change when Apple is running on the same hardware as Linux and Windows – then I suppose it will be sheer numbers, but for now the smarter architecture took the second place prize. After the World Series and the Final Four, I pay attention to the teams that come in second.

Also significant with respect to RC5 and Apple is the Turing cluster at UIUC (I’ll put links in later, I’m lazy.) Turing has a 640 node cluster with dual 2GHz G5s. That’s 1280 CPUs at 15Mk/s. That’s about 19.2Bk/s, or roughly 11% of yesterday’s total RC5 cracking speed. Daaaamn. I wonder who I have to convince to run dnetc on the cluster? Putting it in a different perspective, the #1 individual on rc5-72 has 22M stat blocks (2^28 keys in a stat block.) Turing would pump out 71 stat blocks A SECOND, putting it in the number one stats spot in just four days of runtime. We’ve been working on rc5-72 for 928 days and they could be #1 in four. That’s some serious cracking.

If you’re interested in RC5 and want to join my old team, search in stats for 1367 – we’re the Cracking Illini. Join up; we could use the numbers. If I ever get around to updating the static side of my site, I’ll put in a page for distributed.net, and you can wow your friends with knowledge of golumb rulers. (Almost as interesting as the origin of “Live from new york it’s saturday night,” but if I give you all of my stories I won’t be any fun at cocktail parties.)

Ha, one blog post with a single thought! And you thought I couldn’t do it. Also, I’m older than PacMan. (See, I couldn’t do it.)

Did you know Dr. Seuss’s name was Theodor Seuss Geisel? I do, now, because I have Dr. Seuss stamps. And that makes me cooler than you. I can also tell you that 860-880 Lake Shore Drive is architecturally significant, according to the USPS.

This has been one of those weeks where every minute seemed long, and in hindsight was over in a blink. I’ll give you the highlight reel.

Summer band started — only a few familar faces in the group, and we’re all looking older. I’m still sitting first part (third seat, inbetween three students) and I’m still wondering why I’m third. Loyalty? Recognition? Clearly Pete hasn’t heard me play, but somehow otherwise appreciates me coming back year after year (p.s. this is summer number seven.) The music is almost becoming rote. My hand magically moves the slide to the right place in Armed Forces Medely, Stars and Stripes, and the Glen Miller piece. Our first concert is Wednesday, and because there’s no CU community band anymore, we’re doing a full set on three rehearsals. Oh, and Monday’s rehearsal doesn’t count because there was no A/C in the band room and damn it’s hard to practice when it’s 90. The next rehearsal it was 70 outside and like 60 in the band room. Anyway, this coming Wednesday, 7pm on the Quad.

I might have hinted about this before in the blog, but I submitted an application to Google’s Summer of Code contest. My project is documenting and packaging a distributed file system called MogileFS by the gang at LiveJournal. I worked on that most of Monday and Tuesday night. Chuck and Eric helped me proof it and trim it down. I’m one of 8000+ applicants vying for 400 paid slots (it was 200, but Google raised the numbers because of the publicity.) I’ll find out in two weeks if I was accepted, and if so, I have two months to complete my project and claim at $4500 bounty. Not bad for free software development. I’m excited to start working on it, and hope I get picked for the money.

As far as my other eternal struggle goes, I’ve watched two Netflix movies and finished season one of Dead Like Me in the last two days. Triplets of Belleville was nothing like I expected, and not in a good way. Cellular WAS like I expected but I was hoping for either all suspense or all hokey comedy – this one rode the line between them too close and cheated both sides. Next up is About Schmidt, which I would have started tonight but the Internet pulled me away. If I watch that one tomorrow, I’ll have seven’d out my run and need a new shooter to bring me three more goodies. Dead Like Me was good. Season two will be out soon, and I’m looking forward to it. The main character is a 19 year old crappily drifting through life when hers ends (by an incoming toilet seat from Mir) and she becomes a Grim Reaper. I think I’m getting older when I associate more with the adult figures in her life (her Post-It-Note giving boss, her real job boss, and her previous life’s mom) than her teenage angst.

Earlier tonight my computer rebooted on me. No notice or warning, just a warm boot. Then it wanted to install some updates, and now the dumb yellow shield in the system tray keeps popping up and reminding me to reboot. Yes, yes, yes. I’ll do that later. I also need to buy some DVD-Rs and backup my machine. One of my student’s campus house was broken into this week and they stole his laptop and Xbox. His main gripe about it, besides not having renters insurance and returning home just 20 minutes after the vandals left, is that three years of his life was documented on stuff in that laptop. Pictures, music, emails, IMs – gone so someone could have a crappy three year old laptop. I’m real good at backups at work; I need to do better at home. (But at least I’m insured. I’m also not worried. As cluttered as this office is, no one would be able to find the computer.)

Work is going well. It’s been quiet on the user front (I swear there’s fewer profs this summer than I have seen gone in a long time,) so we’re all working on our projects. CSIL’s moved to AD and the new SAN. I’ve got an SNMP and fping script (written by a student,) that can give me a snapshot of our network (several thousand ports and several thousand IPs) in less than a minute. My projects to redo our IP space and DNS/DHCP backend are moving along nicely. The switch and AP upgrades are sliding in, sometimes with nice benefits (like the APs finally being able to broadcast more than one SSID on a radio.) And, I got my annual (s/nu//g;) review on paper (the actual face-to-face is next week.) It read as a very nice resume of what I’ve accomplished this year (things I hadn’t even remembered,) and was good across the board.

Bored, I know, me too. When I was home last weekend (which I should blog about, because it was three packed full days of stuff,) I didn’t really read blogs or talk on IM that weekend, and I haven’t picked it up much since. I’m a few thousand news posts behind — it’s only a matter of time until I say “screw it,” and mark them all as read, which is what you should do to this posting, if I’ve even kept your attention this long. Part of the problem is I added a bunch of feeds to bloglines and I haven’t been able to keep up – even if it’s stuff I think I should be reading. I _should_ be reading _The World is Flat_ so I can give that back to mom to read, or the Harry Potter books to get read for next month.

Somehow, people get in these tightly connected networks with blogs and Flickr and people know when you post and post replies, and I just don’t know how they do it. I don’t know people make their stuff findable. I don’t think my content (pictures or this blog,) is bad. I’d just like to get it in front of some eyes. (NO WINDOWS I WILL REBOOT LATER QUIT BUGGING ME) What I am finding is there are lots of babblers like me on the Internet, some who even make advice like “how to blog so people read it,” and “how to live a more productive life,” but I don’t think they know much more than I do. Yet I found their junk and read it, so maybe they do know something I don’t.

Plan for the weekend? Be a homebody and take care of things around here. Lounge around, watch movies, work on MogileFS. Get caught up. You should too. Have a fudgecicle bar and enjoy yourself.

On Sun, Jun 12, 2005 at 09:13:30PM -0500, Chuck Thompson wrote:
>> Could you please do a very short writeup for me on laptop backups? What
>> we’ve been doing, what works and doesn’t work about it and a few references
>> to the alternative solutions you’ve explored? Thanks.

Laptops are tricky:
– they’re not online overnight or at set times and when they are…
– they could be disconnected from the network at any time
– they can be on transient networks/modems with changing IPs and speeds
– they may have the only copy of critical data
– they tend to fail when people are far from home or really need them
– people put a ton of personal data on laptops (music, dvds, HD camera
videos) — it’s hard to tell what’s important to backup and not
– laptops have poor i/o systems, meaning backups impact performance
more than on desktops and it makes it harder to use the laptop while a
backup is running.
– If a laptop is on, it’s probably running the applications the user
needs, which means files are open, and they may not be backed up
(Outlook PST files for example)

So they introduce problems:
– How do you schedule laptop backups?
– How do you identify backup clients w/ changing networks?
– How can a user do a restore remotely, at odd times without IT support?

Legato doesn’t handle laptop backups well because:
– Networker needs a set scheduled time to run and that doesn’t suit
all users
– Users can’t trigger manual backups when it suits them
– It needs a static IP, meaning the laptop needs to be on the wired
network
– Any tape drive/server issues can get out of the ‘noon’ window when we
do our backups, and I have to kill the group
– Legato had a Networker Laptops product (was OEM’d from connected.com)
but end-of-lifed it a while ago and it’s never talked about on the
Networker list I lurk

My observations:
– Snapshots are more important than daily backups (”I’m going on a trip
tomorrow, I want a backup” is very common)
– Server initiated backups are hard; client initiated is better
– Laptop backups should happen quickly (good candidate for D2D backups)

Some other alternatives:
BackupPC (backuppc.sourceforge.net)
– OSS, Perl-based, runs over smb, rsync, ssh/tar
– no tape support – only to disk
– can be clientless (no open file support)
– web based administration/restores
– “pools” the same file from multiple systems to reduce storage costs
– users can trigger full/incremental backups
– users can restore from web remotely
– scheduling based on last backup (backup policies) rather than
calendar scheduling (if there hasn’t been a backup in 24 hours, try to
do one every hour until you can; do a full if there hasn’t been one in
the last three weeks)
– good email notifications
– uses differential/full model

EMC Dantz Retrospect (www.dantz.com)
– Windows/Mac server, clients for Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris
– uses disk and mssql to hold data
– tape and optical drive support
– some open file support
– good user interface
– user can trigger backups
– more flexible scheduling than Networker (I hope)
– backup can adjust based on connection speed
– user can do a backup to local disk that gets uploaded to server later
(for version control when offline)
– has registry/system restore functions
– much cheaper than Networker
– uses differential/full model
– web or client based restore

(edit: took out the pre tags)

“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1952

So many things to blog about – I’ll try to keep this short so that my mind doesn’t wander and you don’t get bored.

When I drive home tonight, my car will go over 36,000 miles. 36 is a nothing birthday for humans (and is just over 5 birthdays in dog years,) but for a car that’s pretty important. That’s when my standard warranty expires. I hope 36 is not like the human big 4-0 where everything gets a little harder than it was in the 30s, and you need to see the doctor more. I’m thinking it’s more like an 18th or 21st birthday … the car has finally “come of age” and it’s time for it to shine. I think for the Maxima’s birthday, I’ll clean all the dead bugs off the front of it.

Went to Chicagoland this weekend and saw my first minor league baseball game with Tony and the gang. I had a great time. mLB (note the captialization) is more about the event than the game. It reminded me of college ball the way they do promotions and give aways and stunts and events during inning breaks. We had good seats down the first base line that cost $8 – similar tickets would have been $40+ at a MLB game. There were ice cold Budwisers, mounds of sunflower seeds, sunny breezes and sunsets, and baseball. Awsome. To top it off, it was firework night so there was a firework show after the game — and the Jesse White tumblers did a post-game performance too. Now, if they would have had flyball, it would have been almost perfect!

I’ve been consumed with the idea of submitting a Google Summer of Code project. If you’re accepted, and finish the project by fall as judged by the mentors and Google, they pay you $4500. This will be the second time in 6 months I’ve been approached about paid development for community projects, and I’m still kinda kicking myself for turning down the first. I need the money, and I’m interested in the work, and it can only help my resume and experience, so I’m tempted to try. I just need to pick a project. Wordpress? Gallery? Jabber? More on this later as my brain cranks it out.

Four day week this week, as I’m home Friday for Mom’s birthday. Hope your week is short too!