Scott’s Blog

Here’s screenshot-proof that you can run the GroupWise cross-platform client on Ubuntu Linux 7.10 on an x86_64 kernel.

Also, notice my empty inbox, which I manage using Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero strategy.

Here’s what it’s like where I and the rest of my group are:

Here’s what it’s like where our boss is:

I don’t know about you, but I’d take +23 in the rain instead of -23 in the sun (except that here we can snowboard).

My daughter Emily will be participating in the 2008 St. Valentines Day Hair Massacure, in support of the Stollery Children’s Hospital and the Make A Wish Foundation. She will be having some of her hair died pink and her head shaved to raise money to support sick kids in Alberta. The un-dyed hair she gets shaved off will be donated to make wigs for kids who lose their hair in medical procedures.

Emily has thought about this a lot, and wants to support the Stollery, which is what we did when my dad passed away last year, and she wants to help kids who are suffering with cancer. Any support you can offer would be appreciated. To sponsor Emily’s hair “massacure” please go to her donation page. Her goal is $500, but I’d like to see her exceed that.

Thanks everyone. Bald-headed-Emily pictures will ensue after the shave.

I just helped Jennifer finish off the bylaws for the Thunderbirds Water Polo Club. She’s been working on it for days, and was done except for some problems with formatting. She was using Word on her Macbook. I helped her tag the paragraphs so that it would automatically generate a table of contents. If you were to have some preconceived notion about how that should work, Word does it in exactly the opposite way to what you expect every step of the way, and then refuses to show you the result until you do a print preview. For what it’s worth, I really think OpenOffice Write is much easier to work with. This session with Word reminded me why I write anything of any length using docbook tags and let the style processor do all the formatting for me. Emacs is my word processor and .txt is my .doc.

I have a 5th gen 60 GB iPod. A while ago, the headphone jack casing cracked, and made the headphone jack wiggly. It still worked okay for a long time, but recently it has become worse and the right channel doesn’t make proper contact. I googled for “broken ipod headphone jack” and found this page explaining the repair procedure. It linked to www.idemigods.com as a source of replacement parts. I ordered a replacement headphone jack / hold switch assembly for $32 including shipping, and I’m going to try to fix it myself. When the jack gets here I’ll photo-document the disassembly and (hopefully) reassembly of my iPod.

I’m building new DNS servers for our corporate DNS due to our recent hardware problems with one of our old servers. We have had good success with publicly exposed BSD servers on the Internet, including OpenBSD and FreeBSD. My experience with FreeBSD is much more recent than with OpenBSD so for the new servers I am going with FreeBSD 7.0. We also have been building almost everything new as virtual machines on ESX server for the last year or so, so the DNS servers will be no exception.

FreeBSD is not officially supported by VMware on ESX server, but it runs on ESX 3.x without problems. My ESX server is configured with ESX 3.02. My first step was to build a template FreeBSD virtual machine. I’m going to use that as the basis for a master DNS server that we hide away and use to make changes on, and some slaves that are public-facing.

The first thing I didwas to get the FreeBSD iso files and put them somewhere where the ESX server can see them. I have an ISO library on my Sun x4500 that can be nfs mounted by my ESX servers, so that’s where I put the FreeBSD iso files (there are 3 iso files for FreeBSD 7.0 RC1).

Next, I set up a new virtual machine with 512 MB of RAM (probably overkill for a dedicated authoritative DNS server in charge of a few zones) and an LSI scsi adapter. For the guest OS, I chose Other/Other (not 64-bit). I pointed the VM’s CD-ROM drive at the FreeBSD disk1 iso file, and booted it. I’m not going to go over the partitioning and installation details of FreeBSD here. The install of FreeBSD is fairly straightforward if you have some UNIX/Linux experience. I chose to install the “Developer” package set, and to install the ports collection. I also added emacs and bash via the packages at the end of the installation because that’s how I roll. During the install it’s a good idea to add another user besides root, and to make them a member of the wheel group, so that they can run su to become root. In FreeBSD you have to be a member of the wheel group in order to be allowed to run su.

Once the install was completed, I rebooted, and logged in as root. To make the FreeBSD system a good virtual citizen on your ESX server, it’s a good idea to install the vmware tools. Unfortunately there is no vmware tools installer for FreeBSD on ESX 3.x. Luckily, the vmware tools for FreeBSD from VMware Server work in ESX Server. To install them on my virtual machine, I downloaded the tgz package for VMware Server 1.04, extracted it, and copied the file vmware-server-distrib/lib/isoimages/freebsd.iso to my ISO library. Then I connected that iso file as the CD-ROM of the virtual machine. Then from inside the VM, I used the ports collection to install the vmware tools. To do that, I logged as root (or become root with su) and then ran the following commands:

cd /usr/ports/emulators/vmware-tools6
make install clean distclean

Once the install completed, I rebooted to startup the vmware tools guest daemon. I logged in after the reboot and ran ps ax | grep vmware to verify that the vmware guest daemon was running, and I saw output like this:

570 ?? Ss 0:03.52 /usr/local/sbin/vmware-guestd --background /var/run/vmware_guestd.pid --h

The final thing to get the FreeBSD VM ready to go is to replace the default ethernet device, which is a lance virtual nic. There are many anecdotes about the lance ethernet driver in FreeBSD dropping packets under load. It’s a good idea to change to either the vmxnet device or the e1000 device instead of lance. The FreeBSD GENERIC kernel (the default kernel) in FreeBSD 7.0 does not have a driver for the vmxnet device, but it does have one for the e1000 device. Either can be used, but if you choose the vmxnet device, you have to build a new kernel (waaay beond the scope of this post).

To replace the default lance virtual nic with the e1000 one, I first shut down and powered off the vm. Then, I accessed my ESX server as root with a shell (via ssh or on the console) and used vi to edit the .vmx file of the FreeBSD virtual machine. I found a bunch of lines beginning with ethernet0 and inserted a line at the top of those lines like this:

ethernet0.virtualDev="e1000"

Then, I saved the file and started up the virtual machine. When it came up, there was no IP address bound to the ethernet interface in the VM, and I had to login to it using the VMware ESX server Virtual Infrastructure Client console or Virtual Center. I logged in as root to the VM, and edited the /etc/rc.conf file. I found the line that said ipconfig_le0=... and changed it to ipconfig_em0=... and then rebooted. The new virtual nic was then started up with the same settings as the old one had before I replaced it.

That’s it. If you follow this procedure, you will have a VM that is ready to be configured for whatever workload you want to put on it.

Tonight while applying Windows patches I wanted to make a backup of all our Vision servers so that I can install them on an ESX server in engineering and do a few test upgrades. The total size of all the VMs involved is about 200 GB. So far I’m pushing 3 hours copying all that stuff on the 2GB/s fibre-channel SAN.

I can’t wait to see how long it will take to copy all that stuff over the WAN from our colocation site to our corporate office. I should be ready to start testing in a week or so.

When Mac OSX Leopard was in beta, the new backup feature Time Machine was able to backup to USB disks plugged into an Airport Extreme. By the time Leopard was released to the public, this feature was removed. Now, after today’s announcements, I know why they pulled that feature from Time Machine: So they could sell you another Airport Extreme! The new Airport Extreme is called Time Capsule, and comes with an internal disk, and can be used for Time Machine.

Thanks for that shafting Apple. Maybe they’ll be nice in some upcoming update and re-add the ability for Time Machine to work with a USB disk plugged into the older Airport Extreme.

For 16 years, this hardworking 486 desktop computer has served our company. It started out life as a high end CAD workstation, progressed through the ranks as a spreadsheet number cruncher, then a word processor, then an IT lab workhorse, and finally served for the last eight years as our primary public DNS server. In that time, it ran OpenBSD 2.6, which was updated with security patches while they lasted, but the machine has run exposed on the Internet without a single patch and completely without downtime since 2002.

Last week we had a scheduled power outage in our building, and the box was shut down. When it came back up it’s hard drive was all corrupted and messed up. Some repairs to the filesystem got it running again for a few more days but on Saturday it gave up the ghost. I built a temprorary replacement for it today, but somehow I don’t think the new box will last us quite as long.

Denys suggested we take it to a taxidermist and have it mounted for display. I’m thinking that might be a good idea.