Evilcoder.org

Yesterday Rik and I where playing Bob the builders in his new house. We first looked into a network diagram for his house since his internet kit arrived; and a couple of minutes afterwards we needed to find another adventure to follow (networking is a part of my job so easily seen what we should be doing there)…

We found this by assembling wood together to cover up some pipelines, Rik designed the idea around it and that was a really good and solid solution. So we started drawing some crosses to know where to drill for holes, and we attached all the plates together. So far so good.. that was till we realised that the plates where too small. Oeps! Rik made a design flaw (Sorry mate, needed to mention it!), we didn’t take the extra plate along in the design, the plate that we made to made the construction solid. Oeps.. now we needed to remove that and attach the plates a bit differently. After thinking out that logic and attempting it with a smaller piece of wood, we went along and finished a large part of the structure.

Sadly the time went that rapidly that we needed to stop before entirely finishing the job…. After the weekend I might be able to help him on several occassions again

So a little image for Rik below

written by Remko

So, today I "updated" wordpress to match my digital camera. Why did I do this? Well easy! Currently wordpress supports thumbnails for uploaded pictures if the file is <= 3 megapixel in size. Not megabytes or something, megapixel.

I updated the wp-admin/includes/image.php file to be able to upload files (and thumbnail them) if they are bigger then that size. This way I can normally add my digital photos that were created by my Sony Alpha 100 camera.

What did I do?

Edit wp-admin/includes/image.php and search/replace the following line (at the moment of writing this is line 150 with wordpress 2.3.1)

with the following line:

EDIT: Please take notice that you might run into server errors, because of PHP running out of it's allowed memory size. You can set these values in ``php.ini``.

written by Remko

Today Denise, Luca and I traveled to "De Ontdekhoek" in rotterdam ("Pannenkoekenstraat"); which is a discovery place for children between 4 and 14 years old, and ofcourse for mom and dad! Luca really liked it, he made a boat, made a picture, made chips (yeah the real thing), played with electricity, wrote with a feather, made music, helped stopping the water with sandbags etc. etc.

Ofcourse mom and dad also helped along and we also liked it a lot

After that we opted for the Pancake restaurant next to it at the "meent" which was really nice and good food and a good finish for the day. After that we traveled towards Luca's home where I fixed the computer at his place and said goodbye to Denise and Luca, will see them in a couple of days again when Luca is going to spend the weekend at my place

Continue reading »

written by Remko

Today is a day to remember, today 16 years ago the leadsinger of the rockband Queen, Freddy Mercury died in his beloved home in Londen. Just two days after publically announcing that he was infected by aids.

A large part of my life has been under the influence of the Queen music, bringing it over to my brother and Denise and loads of other people that I met over the years. Queen was legendary and will remain so for me. Freddy gave the band a good entertainment person and someone with an awesome voice!

We'll keep remembering him!

written by Remko

Today I upgraded Dartagnan from 6-STABLE (yes not a 6.3-prerelease ;-)) to 7.0-BETA3, all looks good as far as I can see all services are up and running and no strange messages in my logfiles.

So, another one eats his own dogfood!

written by Remko

Another couple of days had just passed by and I am writing a new blog entry again

I was kinda busy lately with helping out Rik on monday and doing some fancy things at work to get a new cluster up and running. It seems that I managed to get that working properly and as expected and all other items that surround it are also going well as far as I know

So not much time to write about things I am seeing and doing but at least it's an update

written by Remko

Today I got a special delivery from the post-office, the sender was "Lucas". For people that are not that aware of the FreeBSD developers (or BSD developers better said), Michael Lucas is one of those developers, and writer of several books, amongst them "The Absolute FreeBSD" and now "The Absolute FreeBSD 2nd edition".

Some time ago Michael started with his 2nd edition of The Absolute FreeBSD, and he sought for reviewers and people that wanted to proofread his work. I was one of them and I read the files with great enthusiasm. Something different then I do normally (working on PR's, secteam, bugmeister, doc team member, VuXML etc) so great to do for a change.

The package contained this second edition of The Absolute FreeBSD, signed by Michael himself I feel honored, because that was not the initial goal the goal was to learn about the book, give practical tips or tell about differences that I saw, and now I also got a signed copy of his book

While reading through the first pages (Yeah ofcourse you look through them if you worked on it :-)) and yeah my name was in the introduction

From experience this is a really great book, if you want to learn about FreeBSD and seek for a good and readable book, please buy this book! You can find more information on the internet ofcourse, one of the links being:

http://www.absolutefreebsd.com

Michael; thanks for the book! It will surely help other people gaining good knowledge!

written by Remko

Jikes, indeed that was the thing I thought this morning. I decided to move out my old shares and copy over all the data (270GB) to my workstation temporary and move over the RAID-5 volume to ZFS (backed by a Highpoint ATA454, yeah cheap-ass stuff, if someone has an idea on an affordable real-hardware raid5 device which supports SATA300, please comment on the post :-)).

The raid5 volume consists for 4x300GB, normally resulting in 1.2TB storage, with the raid5 solution we have redundancy and gain around 900GB of data storage available.

But OK i am loosing track: I did the 270GB in around 6.5hours, roughly 40GB per hour, copy actions did around 13MB/s over the network (peaking at 30% of the GBIT link that is used between the servers) and all went without a glitch.

Since I dont have a binary backed driver at the moment, freebsd recognizes the raid array as ar0, resulting in the following:

[remko@guardian /home]$ zpool status
pool: data
state: ONLINE
scrub: none requested
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
data ONLINE 0 0 0
ar0 ONLINE 0 0 0

errors: No known data errors

Currently the following is available;
[remko@guardian /home]$ zfs list
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
data 133G 741G 25K /data

ofcourse somewhat more but that's my private data et all thus no need to be verbose on that.
This configuration might not be as fancy as others have (multi TB arrays ;-)) but perhaps the future can arrange me the SATA300 controller backed with 4 or more 500GB disks

Currently the data is being copied back, around 200GB had already been copied since the setup; and no creepy things had been found, peaks are again around the 13MB/s which is quite good imo.

I am not very sure whether the attached data is going to help a bit but:

kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.hits: 416906
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.misses: 13678
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.demand_data_hits: 229801
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.demand_data_misses: 249
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.demand_metadata_hits: 173607
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.demand_metadata_misses: 11696
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.prefetch_data_hits: 12366
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.prefetch_data_misses: 0
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.prefetch_metadata_hits: 1132
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.prefetch_metadata_misses: 1733
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.mru_hits: 173761
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.mru_ghost_hits: 5799
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.mfu_hits: 229653
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.mfu_ghost_hits: 2088
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.deleted: 1635502
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.recycle_miss: 920453
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.mutex_miss: 21
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.evict_skip: 189460
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.hash_elements: 13992
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.hash_elements_max: 29668
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.hash_collisions: 336691
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.hash_chains: 2217
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.hash_chain_max: 6
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.p: 295031867
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.c: 295499774
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.c_min: 16777216
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.c_max: 314572800
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.size: 295506432

there it is. Well onward in perhaps writing something for VuXML, a topic on which we still need (continues) help!

written by Remko

OK no updates for a few days, that had several reasons ;-).

I had a few days off in the weekend and made up with a lot of
ongoing FreeBSD work that was still pending, so some people
are happy now again, which is always something nice to see

Beyond that I also relaxed a lot, and tried to do various things
in between that also needed work and attention, and that worked
out very well actually.

Today was my day off and I went to the city with Denise and we
shopped around a bit, ate something and then headed over to pick
up our kid at his school ; he was surprised to see me because
normally he knows when I come around, but this time we didn't
tell him

His reactions where very cute and nice so that melted me away

We (Denise, Luca and myself) went to their house where Luca played
a little game and I surveyed one of the machines there to be able
to get the machine back online again, I think I have enough information
to do so during the weekend; so lets see what we can do to make it
happen.

Today was a nice day, after last weeks troubles etc, it was a good
thing for a change, thanks Luca and Denise for that!

written by Remko

Well a lot had happened again the last few days, somehow I seem to attract it

Sunday we had a nice quiet day with Luca, just doing relaxed ,slowly waking up, washing the car, dusting around (Luca loves to help out!) and things like that. In the end his mother joined us at my house and we drove towards her home with the four of us (my mother also participated in the ride) where I dropped off Luca and Denise. I also started an installation there with good success so next time finishing up the machine I think that marked the end of a very nice and relaxed weekend; something which I really need every now and then (a lot of relaxation and rest).

Monday started horrible, I miscalculated a parking place and wrecked a car I later found out that I had to adjust my mirrors a bit, but that's afterwards. Luckily I could fill in the papers with the owner today to have him repair his car, and for me that I am the guilty one and have my car repaired as well (some bumps and skratches, not a fancy sight, but not the worst thing that could happen either, it's not that easily visible luckily). At work it's busy with all kinds of requests and the build up of a new environment in which I lead one of the environments and my buddy is leading the other part of the environment (We have things under control to say it in a fancy way).

And tonight I removed some old Lyrics that were just crap now and moved the last entries to their final destination. Sadly I saw that I am missing some text every here and there and that I need to remove/update links and that some images are broken now {mosimage} doesn't exist within Wordpress

I am still happy with the application and given the amount of blogs you can see the results of why I am happy onward to the 1 million words

written by Remko