What is going on

Suddenly world around becomes very strange.

First Oracle is breaking it’s promise to keep OpenSolaris running.

Then BBC Future Media & Technology is announcing more departments relocated from London to North…

Now I just received sad news that Wesabe is closing down.

So far I see that  IT related stuff is going downhill…

However there are some positive voices coming about the aeronautics …

Flying Katana in Bautzen

(c) Flug Service BautzenI’m back from Europe where I had a chance to fly Diamond DA20 Katana.

Aircraft is LIGHT! comparing to PA28′s it’s crazy. Bubble canopy also works great and you can see plenty.

It was my first encounter with complex aircraft. It has Constant Speed Prop  what means, no throttle but manifold pressure and prop control. A bit more work ;) but easy to handle.
Trim! man this aircraft has such light controls comparing to PA28′s that I do not feel any pressure on the stick and trimming accurately becomes impossible!
Another thing is that this was my first time in German aircraft and yes, all labels and check lists are in .. German, bit weird especially that POH is in English ( what saves my butt a lot )

This was also my first flight outside UK. They speak German! I was only on Bautzen Info so not much experience with other ATC around, but it hurts. They default to German on everything, even when I’m PIC and speak English they talk back in German to my instructing passenger and he tells me what they said. This is sad. Hope they will get their act together when he is not there.

Flight was short, only .7h due to aircraft bookings , whole week was booked by one person and I don’t know how, but I  managed to get up in the air between his slots for a short familiarization route around Spree and 3 circuits.  Unfortunately this was not enough to get a sign-off on it, so will need to get back in the cockpit with Mr Buttner.

This weekend I’m off to AeroExpo UK, lets see what they have!

The Joy of Weather

My pilot license arrived 2 weeks ago. I was so happy that I will be flying now as a Captain!

First weekend, I couldn’t go up in the air, my health was not allowing me ( blocked sinus ). Bugger, that was a blow. So I thought about flying this weekend. Continue reading →

IPv6 Geo Location Database

Would you like to be able to pinpoint where are IPv6 visitors coming from , just like with IPv4 ones ?

Well, I wanted and I have created an IPv6 Geolocation database.  It holds Country code for every IPv6 subnet which was available on BGP last weekend. I am going to update it every 2 weeks.

I’ve used Perl with Net::IP to convert address to an integer and I am using integers in a SQLite database to identify it.

The flow is as simple as :

  • convert address to integer
  • run SQLite query
    SELECT country FROM ipcountry WHERE ip <= ? ORDER BY ip DESC LIMIT 1;
    ? – is your IP in integer format.
  • 2 letter country code will be returned

Yes, if you will query for IPv6 address which is in a subnet which wasn’t advertised on the date when database was updated you will end up with a country code for other closest subnet.

I am not releasing it publicly, yet. However if you are interested, contact me and we will see what can get arranged.

PPL Exam Tips

I’ve passed my PPL Exam and now I’m awaiting to receive the license papers from CAA.

My journey to actually have it happen was long and I not always made good decisions. Thanks to this I have some tips for future pilots ( this is a reprint of what I’ve sent to one of my friends who is to take his exam at the time of writing ).

  1. Have a flight with an instructor before flying the test! at most 24h in advance, no more.This will keep you fresh and is the most important. Short Nav and some handling. Instructor will pick up on things which one thinks need some refining.
  2. Also have a casual read on PoH for your aircraft as Examinator will ask you a few questions about the aircraft.
  3. Relax, but not too relax, I would not recommend being casual with him/her in the cockpit, better to be on the edge.
  4. Radio, don’t be afraid of it, talk, request, they like to hear that you are using it.
  5. When weather permits higher climb, plan for it and request while still in ATZ/Controlled Airspace.
  6. When flying in vicinity of other aerodromes, request freq changes to them.
  7. Always talk to the closest Radar service, don’t stay with your origin one for too long if there are other closer to your route.
  8. When on approach to final, don’t overshoot it! Doing it twice fails section.
  9. While on glide approach, too high, all flaps, don’t start rapid turns, that’s a fail, wider, not exceeding 30 deg are OK. Side slip ( crossed controls ) is OK as well.

How to reset Juniper Netscreen SSG Firewall

Using reset hole/button, press it for 4-6 seconds, status LED blinks Red, as soon as it starts blinking Green, release it for 2 seconds, now push it again for 4-6 seconds until it resets completely.

After that you are back to default settings. (user/pass is netscreen)

Seagate HD is not good

Hard DriveAfter reading some posts on Server Room I’ve decided to do some scrubbing on my zfs pools … just in case ( done it a few times some long time ago )

The I’ve noticed that one pool takes ages to scrub:

state: ONLINE
scrub: scrub in progress for 0h59m, 40.72% done, 1h26m to go

turns out one of the drives is under-performing :

extended device statistics
device    r/s    w/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b
lofi1     0.0    0.0    0.0    0.0  0.0  0.0    0.0   0   0
lofi2     0.0    0.0    0.0    0.0  0.0  3.0    0.0   0 100
lofi3     0.0    0.0    0.0    0.0  0.0  0.0    0.0   0   0
sd0       0.0    0.0    0.0    0.0  0.0  0.0    0.0   0   0
sd1       0.0    0.0    0.0    0.0  0.0  0.0    0.0   0   0
sd2       0.0    0.0    0.0    0.0  0.0  0.0    0.0   0   0
sd3     226.0    0.0 28742.7    0.0  1.5  0.8   10.3  63  85
sd4     227.0    0.0 29056.7    0.0 19.0  1.0   88.1 100  99

That’s bad, it’s my only Seagate which survived in the box … looks like I will have to start hunting for cheap 1TB hitachi again …

atticgroup.net planet

SpiderStarted doing something with my not so recently acquired domain atticgroup.net installed planet aggregator for all ex attic people who I know.

Boring. It’s boring to try to find out RSS feed addresses for all possible web applications and people, so if you are ex attic and not featured on the page yet, please please send me your RSS address and if you dare, all other whom you know as well.

Creative. oh, and all you creatives out there … design better web template ;)

Some input will also help…

Yeah, like any of this will ever happen… people don’t care anyway…

Chasing weather and bad luck

EGHH AirportI am due PPL skill test for last month… and it’s annoying. If it is not weathers fault, there is no aircraft, if weather and aircraft are nice, examinator decides that he does not want to fly today…

So I have it scheduled for next weekend… but already can see problems as there are other test pencilled in…

Battle of RHEL5.0 with HP G6

redhat and hp logo

RHEL 5.0 on HP G6 Proliant

So, we got a new hardware for testing our product. Great, finally. To make sure that we test as close to what we consider Live, we have produced a system image with all required software pre-installed.

It worked perfectly when we provisioned it on our new dev environment.

However this time, we couldn’t get any more DL360 G5 boxes and had to go with a 6th generation.
Being a bit naive, I thought that HP would be considering but no… they screwed up compatibility between newer SmartArray 410i and slightly older 400i so basically our not so new RedHat didn’t see the new controller.

Simple solution  is to install new kernel and drivers. But how? when your system is not bootable.

Well, tried many things but the thing which worked well, was pulling the drives out from new server and sliding them in to G5 which was conveniently laying around. Installing new kernel and drivers and voila! boots on G6. Oh kernel came courtesy of CentOS 5.4 so that version was supported by HP drivers!