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General IT issues

Snow Leopard upgrade

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Snow Leopard has been released for a while (like a year, dude) so I am taking the leap, and doing the upgrade of my MacBook 2.16GHz. I managed a bit of a backup to my old Maxstor drive, and was still amazed at the speed of firewire 400 over USB 2.0. No contest, with the 50G backup I did, it would still be at it.

What really made my decision for me, the upgrade that is, was my dersire to get dirty into programing with Xcode. And of course that required Snow Leopard to use the newest compilers and QT.

So now I’m counting down the next hour with the hope my old macbook will survive.


UPDATE1: I love this just when I get up to date Apple prepares an new Cat . However I don’t think this is likely as the version I how have after the DVD install, and updates only puts Snow Leopard at 10.6.3, quite a bit short of a 10.7.x update.

Google begins to crumble

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With all the press at MWC and for that matter, everyplace else, Google is King of the internet. But it’s crumbling. Right in front of everyone, their entire infrastructure is beginning to fail. Not in the obvious way like a server outage or service unavailability. It’s the control structure.

I’ve never been a big user of Google, I only really got a Google Mail account when I started searching for a smartphone, which may have been an Android model. I had heard that this gmail account was needed to be set up in advance to load contacts and what not. But then the office IT manager thought Google Wave was a great way to keep all our remote activities documented, in other words, a tool to herd cats. Then he discovered Google Docs and gee isn’t that a great way to share document creation. Now there’s Google Buzz …. and then … and then. Google just can’t stop, and beyond that, they can’t integrate either. All these systems seem disjointed to the point I can’t even sign on and get to them, they must each be logged on to, no single sign-on. THE single most important step in services, and they can’t seem to make it work. It’s quite apparent that there is no single share point in the login process where all the services can be accessed, in a way, Google is competing against itself. And to quote verse:

‘A house divided, cannot stand’

Google is crumbling.

They have grown so fast and so broad, they have not built out the infrastructure required to support the entire breadth of their development groups. Which from empirical evidence, seems to need some method of communication, not currently visible to the outside world. To quote again;

The right hand does not know what the left hand is doing

Google is stumbling

Watching fall will not be pretty.

SEO and the Robot Races

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If you have been paying attention to this site and my attempts to join the ranks of the super wealthy.
I created a DIY Server which sets under my desk at home, connected to a modest DSL line with crappy uplink speeds. It currently hosts five (5) domains, but is essentially unadvertised on the internet and yet I still get visited by up to 10 Robots repeatedly every day (see below) in the form of GoogleBot, Yahoo Slurp, MSN, MSN-Mobile, Baidu and other miscellaneous Curl and Java skimmers.

So what is it that a SEO specialist do, that won’t happen completely natural just by putting any domain up on the internet?

Creating ANY content, or rather interesting content will draw down the bots onto you site, the job of SEO is easy, content creation is the hard part. Let me know what you think.


robot_bots

Weather or worries

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I’ve been in afoul mood, depressed, cranky and touchy. Just the thing for a Cranky Blogger. Between the recession, NAMA, Lousy Politicians, crummy weather I’m just about dun in. And to top it all off, no one seems to want to Twitter @querynet, contribute Ideas to ideaforcasting.com, or store thoughts at @fleetthoughts. When I have an Idea, why do the seem Poor. Hope the Cork Open Beer manages to improve my mood!

When having a Fleeting Thought, spell check.

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I was thinking, or rather having, a Fleeting Thought and decided that I had a great idea, so I sought to buy the domain fleetingthought.com, and didn’t realize I’d mistyped the name, so now I’m the proud owner of fleetingthoght.com, 🙂 you can see now, how Fleeting my thoughts have been lately. It actually might work out anyway as the real domain owner of fleetingthought.com is little more than a squatter.

The substance of the Idea is sound, and I’m building out the Thought now as another project. It’ll be associated with the Twitter Client @fleetthoughts. And when I finally organize my thoughts properly, I’ll write more about it.

ZFS, Boot Zones and data loss

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Note to Self: One must remember not to accidently pull the power cord out of your OpenSolaris server.

Somewhere between the sudden power down, and booting into different Boot Zones my MySQL database has lost records and the Apache HTTP server logs are missing whole time periods in the access logs. I have been digging through the OpenSolaris Bible looking for a reason the data is missing. There appears to be no ZFS snapshots missing, and MySQL show there have been no deletions from the tables and they aren’t corrupt, the Data in the logs and MyISAM records are just missing.

I can point to the File buffering of the file system for the loss, except for the fact that the MySQL database records have been in the database for days, and the Apache Logs have lost whole days worth of records.

I’ll keep you posted, if I find out, as this does not bode well for OpenSolaris if it looses data. In the mean time I’ll be more careful of the power and switch the power connection to the Telecom USP.

Legacy Unix always works

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Great, I now have a printer that works, but not due to any fancy new features, and also not due to my brilliance, though it should have. But again I am reminded (via Google) to remember the one thing that Unix is, it’s files everything in /dev is a pointer to the device, which for all intents and purposes is just a file. So to print, just cp to /dev/printers/1 which in my case was the USB printer. So by bypassing the fancy stuff, you just call it a file and point at it.

Webmin back door

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NOTE: Do not accidently drop your own permissions to su to root.

{Unless you happen to remember to have Webmin running. }

This weekend while trying to get CUPS to print on my DYI-Server I managed to grant myself ‘CUPS management’ and lost all other permissions, including the ability to su to root. If you aren’t a sysadmin this is roughly the equivalent of locking your keys in your house. OpenSolaris, and most of the modern Linux distro’s don’t allow root login. So I thought I was thoughly screwed, until I calmed down, and realized that I had Webmin running, so permissions repaired. Yet another harrowing learning experience.

I’m learning too much that a classic, easy to administer desktop operating system might be beyond Linux and OpenSolaris. Windows and MacOSX have just managed to hide most of the pain involved from the average user. And believe me, there is a lot to hide. Unfortunately for Linux and OpenSolaris, the developers and discussion groups associated with these OS’s ARE NOT end users for the most part, and have little interest in the area of user experience. So if printers don’t print and webcams only work ‘sometimes’ that’s Ok, something of interest, just not a serious impact on their development or their perceptions of the impact to the end user experience.

I appreciate that OpenSolaris is reasonably stable, and features are abundant. I’d just like to snap a picture off the webcam, and play a DVD movie once in a while and not just marvel at ZFS time shifting and what not.

Now back to the books….;-)

A different thing in a real OS.

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Through the weekend I believed that I had managed to screw up my OpenSolaris installation. So serious was my suspicion I was planning to erase the disk and reinstall the entire system. The sound system that I’d manage to get working wasn’t, the ZFS snapshot system kept failing into maintenance mode and the NetBeans IDE that I installed disappeared. Perhaps living in a windows world tainted me but in my ignorance, I recognized my lack of understanding and started Googling.

Sometimes panic can instill reason, and so with some illustrations and illumination from the OpenSolaris.org site, I discovered that the issue was the multiple packages that I had been downloading. The ZFS file system had been doing boot snapshots and I was rebooting into one of many boot ‘pools’ that were ‘confusing’ the system, when I was shown the tool for selecting the correct boot environment, and deleting the others, everything became stable. The sound works, the tools were there and it all works.

One note, the ZFS file system in OpenSolaris will surprise you, it takes a ‘snapshot’ of the ‘partitions’ you choose, and performs a type of backup journal of all the files there. Given that, the file manager, using a slide bar, allows you to ‘time slide’ the directory through the entire snapshot history to display the changes that have happened. Very interesting, but it takes a bit of getting used to. I have ‘time machine‘ on my Mac, though I have not used it, so I suspect this behaves in a similar fashion.

There was one issue, of course created by myself, in and effort to get video on the system I purchased a Logitech 3500 video class webcam with built-in Mike. And while the Ekiga VoIP and video conferencing application could detect and use the video from the camera, the built-in mike would kill the sound system. So I’m operating without the camera, hoping for a bugfix.

The conclusion, more or less, is that the fixes I perform, did not require a drastic rebuild and the loss of my work. Only some understanding, and some learning on my part. Learning about how a real OS operates, and protects itself. Something toy OS’s from the past have made us all believe don’t exist.

Time to learn that something old, is new again.

No good thing goes unpunished

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I just got the home server running on a dynamic dns server, and sure enough, we are already getting spam comments on the wordpress software I installed there. I knew our server wasn’t going to to go unnoticed when both Google and Yahoo found it Friday. But really, spam?


http://rwjordan.homeunix.org/
http://mjordan.blogsite.org/

The distributed Internet

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A posting from Bernie Goldbach Powering the Information Age reminded me about the nature of the Internet. The underlying structure of the Internet is distributed, fault tolerant networking, initially intended to continue operating after a nuclear war. In the current climate, it routes around ‘damages’ like ‘censorship’ firewalls, and corporate throttling of bandwidth.

But one of the other things it’s good at is distributed computing, two nodes in the same domain can be geographically separated by an entire planet. This seems to escape the mindset of current datacenter deployment. While it might make sense to concentrate servers into small areas, in an energy constrained world perhaps powered by distributed power sources, it doesn’t. the loss or degradation of the power source to a datacenter places it on the back foot operationally, constrained to secondary generation, it server’s, all the server’s in the datacenter become vulnerable to the same ‘outage’ which the Internet will also treat as ‘damaged’ and route around.

Given a properly functional broadband infrastructure, servers located at the endpoints of the networks will as a whole, be less likely to be dropped from the Internet as damage. The likelihood of power being eliminated from a large distributed server domain is also contained. In a potential alternative energy future where solar and wind could be the primary source, distributed ‘green’ servers fit the requirement.