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 …

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 …

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!

I’m kinda inventive and lazy guy. When I can automate something, I don’t bother to do it. This is very annoying when I’m flying. Especially annoying when I have to recall some details. Some of these details are … Takeoff and Landing time records.

As an ex. in mastering C++ with QT on Maemo ( and I believe all other QT platforms like Symbian ) I have started developing a small help tool for myself.

At the moment it is dirt simple ( took me 3h to write and test ) , with a touch of a button it records take off time and with another touch of a button, landing time.
It’s usable now, if you wanna try ( just drop a comment ).

I will be adding also recording of this data to a text file, with basic calculations :

• conversion to decimal
• time for pilot logbook
• tech log

So it’s just a beginning for me. And what a fruitful one. I never expected that I still remember that much C++ to scribble something that quickly with unknown API.

I have just this to say : It’s brilliant and I will encourage all my peers to see it. Sooo good and real!

I’m still setting things up there, I’m using VirtualBox to host certain functionalities on separate VMs.

So far there are :

• mta1 for incoming mail, running ESVA , love it! (had experience built with that when Importing to VBox)
• web1 for web sites hosting, running Cherokee!

Still need to get my VPN concentrator, Asterisk, Mail Storage moved there from other systems. Not forgetting move my mobygeek.net site as well!

This will allow me to drop my VM in US, as well as remove some of the services from my home server as my Internet access from home is rubbish in a new place.

the time has come, I will be leaving my current hosting provider www.1and1.com . Why ? I simply see no value in using hosting providers. I am my self working in that industry and that means I know how it works and stuff and because I have my own servers serving my email, vpns, dns for long time now I am just cutting off some unnecessary spendings.

First, my yllq.net domain got transfered to GKG – why ? Cost and they allow IPv6 glue, as well as they are reasonably technical towards customers.

Next it will be firmahrp.com and then mobygeek.net and blackue.net as I still didn’t decided which server to use for WWW hosting.

Solaris and OpenSolaris does not include SmartArray drivers, these need to be download from HP Website

After that, extract the .pkg directory onto a USB stick

Then start the LiveCD, open terminal and type :

 pfexec touch /ADD_DRV_IGNORE_ROOT_BASEDIR

after that install the driver :

 pfexec pkgadd -d path/to/pkgdir

Now you can start installation, it should see the array.

It’s amazing , a while back we heard about Quake Live.  A game, a Quake which you can play for free online. It had a few glitches , hanged a few times, works only on Windows. Still it was some fun.

Now, as we know, id software has opensources the Q3 engine. So why not create an Open Source equivalent to proprietary Quake Live.

I think, this is how Arena Live came to life.

Arena Live is free, open source and very much playable( even if they say it’s in Alpha stage). What really got my attention is the main platform for it’s development.  Not Windows, not Mac (they will come later), but Linux is the first one with a working client available.

Second thing what surprised me is that it’s IPv6 enabled – It’s the first game I ever played over IPv6.

All you oldschool Quake fans, join the game and we may even have a match.

I’ve found my self a Juniper SSG 20 which is not that expensive ( comparing to other Juniper stuff , especially brand new ) for training.

One thing which I’ve noticed strait away was the registration process. I simply couldn’t find any link on www.juniper.net which would let me create an account. I had to mistype the user and password and then system suggested to create one!! What on earth?!

Also access to ScreenOS technical documentation, I really had to dig around to find that gem. But nothing really substitutes a good book.

I’ve opted for :

• ScreenOS Cookbook
• Configuring Juniper Networks NetScreen & SSG Firewalls

Hope they will give me nice reference point for my trip into the strange world of NOT CISCO Network System