Novell is Closing Novell Forge

Novell launched Novell Forge a few years ago to host open source application projects on. I have an open source application for GroupWise called MailSaver, which lets users save whole folders worth of email all at once to text files from GroupWise to disk. I moved it to being hosted on Novell Forge when it opened.

I have now moved the download again to a place that won’t go away when Novell Forge shuts down in December. You can find the link to the installer and the source code on the MailSaver page of this site.

ZFS Not Borked

A while back I posted an article where I thought the gigantic data volume on our Sun x4500 server was corrupted or lost because of a faulty disk. I tried a bunch of troubleshooting to no avail. I couldn’t get the system to boot up and mount the 20 TB zfs data volume cleanly. I was at the point where I had written off the data on that volume.

I left this problem alone for a long while, having bigger fish to fry in the mean time. Yesterday I got back to it, and decided to just nuke the system and start from fresh. I installed the latest build of Solaris 10 on it, which because it’s Sun hardware, went very smoothly. Then, once I had the boot environment configured I tried importing the zfs volume that I thought was screwed, and it imported cleanly. The data is all there, and the volume mounts automatically when I reboot it. I’m doing a pool scrub to validate the data, but it seems to be all available.

I decided to try this because I had a similar problem on another machine with a much smaller zpool. The zpool stopped mounting and started acting really weird after I destroyed a zvol that was shared via iscsi. Doing a clean install of Solaris fixed the problem and the zpool is still ok.

I’m relieved to get the data back, because there was about 9 TB of useful stuff on there (mostly backups of production data from the last year or so).

X Mouse Yes!

I learned how to use X-Windows on Linux more than 10 years ago. One of the things I always liked was the way the mouse worked. If you moved the mouse into a window (without clicking) that window was selected and ready for input, without moving to the foreground. If you selected text, it was instantly copied to the paste buffer (clipboard) when you released the mouse button, and the third mouse button (the wheel nowdays) would paste it. You could push a window to the background by right-clicking on it’s title bar to reveal the window underneath.

You could get some of this functionality in Windows XP with Microsoft’s TweakUI, but it wasn’t quite right and it was very slow to select new windows when you put the cursor in them.

Today, years after I started using XP, I discovered something called True X-Mouse Gizmo for Windows. It is a tiny executable that you run on login (copy it anywhere, and have it run via a shortcut in the Startup folder) and it gives you exactly the mouse functionality of X-Windows. Awesome.

Biked to work for a week

Several years ago I cracked my tailbone. That makes sitting on a bike seat hurt.

Last winter I decided I needed some kind of exercise to do over the summer during non-snowboarding season, and I really liked biking when I was younger, so I started looking into recumbent bikes. I figured one of those would let me ride without tailbone pain. I eventually decided on a recumbent trike from Terratrike and I bought one at Bentley Cycle in the spring. I had grand plans to do a lot of bike commuting to work.

The summer was very busy for us with two kids swimming in different competitive programs, so I only managed to cycle to work a few times prior to August.

Last week, however, I decided to try to go a whole week on human power for my work commute. I enjoyed it tremendously, and although our family’s schedule won’t allow me to bike every day in September, I am going to do as much as I can.

I learned a few things:

• Drivers are weirded out by recumbent trikes and generally give them lots of room.
• You have to pick a route that doesn’t require a lot of curb-hopping if you ride a recumbent trike.
• I have to bring more food when I ride to work, or I die on the way home.
• Recumbents are awesome for commuting and you don’t get sore at all.
• I’m not as unfit as I thought I was, just fat.

I had a lot of fun this summer working my way up to being able to handle five days in a row of a 46 km round-trip commute, but it wasn’t as tough as I expected. On a recumbent, it’s like nothing to ride for a couple of hours, and it’s surprisingly fast, especially downhill.

On my commute, at first I had a tendency to want to go as fast as possible, but I discovered that if I just went steadily, and concentrated on a smooth cadence, my times didn’t change much and I got much less tired by the end. I was also less stressed getting home from work than after driving. It takes a bit longer to bike, but is much less frustrating.

It would sure be nice though if there were some better bike routes between Edmonton and St. Albert.

Oracle Passworded PDF

I was in the process of renewing our Oracle support agreement today, when our Oracle sales rep sent me a PDF license agreement form to fill out and sign. The form was password protected to prevent me from filling it out electronically. They wanted me to print it out, fill it out with a pen (can you believe it) and then scan it back in again and email it back.

I removed the password, filled it out electronically, and sent it back. I pointed out that their password is an unnecessary and useless waste of effort. We’ll see what they say.

Anti-Vaccination!

Oprah Winfrey is about to give a voice to the most dangerous health nut in the public eye today, Jenny McCarthy. Oprah has the potential to kill many more people than the swine flu by giving McCarthy a TV show to espouse her scientifically illiterate ramblings.

I tried to email this to the Oprah Winfrey show but the email widget only allows 2000 characters. I guess I’m too long-winded.

Oprah:

Please reconsider carefully giving your backing and support to the dangerous and wrong Jenny McCarthy. Anti-vaccinationist propaganda like that espoused by McCarthy has literally caused the death of children all around the world. Her refusal to understand the basic science around vaccination, and denial of numerous scientific studies proving that there is no link between autism and vaccines is responsible for the return of several deadly diseases previously eradicated in the civilized world.

This quote of hers clearly shows her complete misunderstanding of the situation:

“€œI do believe sadly it’s going to take some diseases coming back to realize that we need to change and develop vaccines that are safe. If the vaccine companies are not listening to us, it’s their f___ing fault that the diseases are coming back. They’re making a product that’s s___. If you give us a safe vaccine, we’ll use it. It shouldn’t be polio versus autism.”
Jenny McCarthy in Time Magazine, April 2009

The reason that the diseases are coming back is that people are not vaccinating their children with the EXISTING, WELL TESTED, SAFE vaccines. The reason people are not vaccinating is unscientific fear mongering, and that is the fault of ignorant, self-deluding fools like Jenny McCarthy. There is well founded science behind the safety of the vaccines. McCarthy’s claims about the problem have morphed with the science. First she blamed mercury in the vaccines. When that was disproven by science, she started blaming dead virus fragments. When that was disproven, she started blaming some mysterious “toxins” in vaccines for autism. She and her associates are scientifically illiterate, and giving her wrong ideas your implied support is dangerous.

Please please please have your own team of experts look into this situation. Talk to real doctors and epidemiologists. Don’t encourage your huge audience to look to celebrities with liberal arts educations for their medical advice. You have a huge influence over the general public, and with that influence comes a huge responsibility. You have the potential to kill people by supporting Jenny’s crank ideas. You don’t have believe me or others like me who contact you on this topic, just please do the due diligence and talk to the real experts.

Thanks for listening.

ZFS Borked

I have a Sun x4500 at work, with 48 500 GB disks in it, with 46 of those configured as a gigantic ZFS filesystem. A couple of weeks ago when I had to restart it, it wasn’t able to mount the ZFS filesystem. After bashing on it a bit to get it to boot up without mounting the ZFS filesystem, I was able to use Solaris’s format command to determine that I have two disks with bad blocks, but format was not able to repair them. Fortunately the two disks are in two different raidz groups, so the data is all still there.

I have been trying to disable the problem disks, so that I can mount the ZFS filesystems in degraded mode and at least get at my data. I use cfgadm -c unconfigure device to turn off the SATA port of the two problem disks, and then zpool import pool to import the pool. That takes forever, but during the import, I can manually mount some of the zfs filesystems and access the data for a while until the server locks up.

This is a real nuisance. I don’t know why disabling the bad disks doesn’t allow the system to work normally until my replacement disks arrive. Ok Internets, any ideas?

Das Keyboard vs IBM Model M

I just saw this article on techreport.com via reddit, reviewing a Das Keyboard and comparing it to an IBM Model M. I use a Das Keyboard every day, and I have loved it since I got it two years ago. Last weekend, I was taking a bunch of old electronics junk to the local recycle depot, and as I was unloading my van, I noticed perched on top of a pile of old junk, a pristine Model M keyboard. It was as if my attention was drawn to it by a stray sunbeam, illuminating just the keyboard.

Of course, I grabbed it and brought it to work, and tested it out. I couldn’t believe that I found a genuine Model M in excellent condition that was very clean and actually works! It was made with the 1984 design, but built in 1993, so it has a ps/2 connector instead of the old style big keyboard plug. What a find!

If you don’t know what is so special about an IBM Model M keyboard, you are not a typing snob or computer geek. If you do know what it is, writhe in envy.

What’s Shaw Doing to My Torrents?

I have Shaw Cablesystems as my ISP. I was downloading a few torrents today, a couple of which were using trackers hosted on thepiratebay.org. For some reason, the tracker announcements kept failing, which prevents my torrent client from finding any peers. I had no network connectivity problems, and I could ping the tracker servers.

I launched a command prompt, did a “dig vip.tracker.thepiratebay.org” and got a list of IP addresses. Then, in my torrent client, I went into the stuck torrent and added http://ip-address/announce as a user-added announce server, where I replaced ip-address with one of the addresses that my dig command produced, and restarted the torrent. Lo and behold, the torrent started downloading and instantly ramped up to a couple of hundred k per second of transfer rate. A few minutes later it finished.

I don’t know what’s going on there, but it seems like somehow Shaw is trying to block my access to torrent trackers. This seems to be an alternative method to reduce torrent traffic instead of doing traffic shaping, which they have been accused of in the past.

It still works, but if I always have to do that it’s going to be a nuisance.

Quick ZFS Trick

I just built a new big disk array for disk-to-disk backup, and I want to re-purpose the old disk, but not for a while. I already have applications set up to write to /data/ on this server, so I want to build a new zfs pool with all it’s zfs filesystems mounted at data, where the old pool is.

First I created a new zpool from the new disks called datanew. Then I used zfs send and zfs receive to replicate the old pool onto the new one. Then, I did this neat trick to remount the old pool on /dataold/, and remount the new one on /data/.

zpool export data
zpool import data dataold


zpool export datanew
zpool import datanew data

The end result was that the new pool is now mounted at /data/ and I didn’t have to reconfigure any of my applications, and the old data is still available at /dataold/ just in case.

Every time I have to do anything funky with zfs filesystems it turns out to be super-easy and I’m always impressed.