Propeller-heads Unite!

The dedicated hardware for the OVSD servers came in last week. Yay! Time to have some fun wrangling the new hardware.

With Ben’s welcome assistance, we got the boxes racked up and physically connected in record time. In the past I’ve run most of my servers on Ubuntu/Debian or Red Hat/Fedora but the sysadmins at the OSL use Cfengine and Gentoo. No problem, I think, it’s good to learn new things and Cfengine sounds interesting. So the guys stuck a Gentoo LiveCD into the first box for me, I rolled up my sleeves and waded in.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cracked open fdisk and partitioned a system’s drives by hand. Whoa. I think it was sometime in the late ’90s on a floppy-based Slackware install. Not a bad thing, bit it was the first indication of just how lazy I’ve gotten since then. I’d just been booting of the CD, running through the standard boot CD-based utilities (ala Disk Druid and its ilk) to partition/format the drives and install the base OS. Nope, not happening this time. The bootstrapping process isn’t complicated or difficult - and it certainly didn’t require much (beyond the Cfengine-specific stuff) that I haven’t done before - it’s just I haven’t done them manually in years.

Which leads to my little “whoops!” moment. These are HP Proliant servers with Compaq RAID cards in them. Unlilke every other RAID card I’ve dealt with, they don’t show the RAID arrays on /dev/sd(x). Spent a few minutes thrashing around trying to figure out why fdisk /dev/sda wasn’t working before Eric so kindly pointed out the proper /dev/cciss/c0d0 device path. (MutterMutterGrumbleGrumble).

Once I figured that bit out, things went pretty smoothly. I like what Cfengine can do and appreciate just how much work it can save when managing multiple servers. It’s a bit arcane at first, but once I got used to the logic it generally makes sense. Now that I think about it, the same can be said for Gentoo. Logical, very granular control, not necessarily the easiest to learn for an inexperienced user, and ideal for optimizing and securing servers.

Both Gentoo and Cfengine force you to adhere to good admin practices like only installing the bare minimum services and locking down the configs. All definitely Good Things ™ like vegetables and fiber but, dang, it highlights just how lazy one can get when the distro installer and package manager do all the work. So don’t mind all that muttering coming from my cube about emerge and Cfengine configs. It’s just me grumbling about having to eat my vegetables.

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“Gimme your wallet!” or “Where’s Waldo?” … You choose. ;-)

Thank you to the fantastic folks at Google - especially LH, Chris, and Greg - for all your work. The Google Summer of Code program is a magnificent contribution to the open source community for which we are all profoundly thankful. Thank you to all the people and organizations who participated - both in the GSoC program and in the Mentor Summit last weekend. An especially big thanks to all the hard-working (and often under-appreciated) developers out there who contribute to open source projects. Without all of you and your hard work, the world would be a poorer place.

As a first-time GSoC mentor, I found the Mentor Summit to be invaluable. I knew before the summer ended that I had not done as good of a job as a mentor as I could have. But I didn’t have a good grasp on what, specifically, I personally and what we as a mentoring organization needed to do to improve. The Mentor Summit - especially the communication workshop facilitated by Robert Spier - greatly helped me solidify in my mind some concrete steps to take in preparation for next year’s GSoC. But that’s for another, much longer, post. Watch here for more once I get my notes cleaned up a bit.

Nice work everyone! Looking forward to GSoC 2007.

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Note to self: Try to not schedule a bunch of stuff on the next Friday the 13th

Let’s see, today I had:

1. A major dog and pony show for the OVSD stakeholders
2. The second day of GOSCON
3. A flight down to SFO to participate in the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit

#1 of course had plenty of Murphy’s Law moments - meeting room laptop didn’t have the right software and the staff didn’t have admin access to allow us to install anything, video projector misbehavior … you know, the typical, “Hi, my name is Bubba and I be a taychnologee gooroo. Now where is that durned rodent-thing so I can show you what we done through dem Internets tubes?” kind of moments. We survived. No angry mob of teachers with torches and pitchforks chased me out of Salem, so I’ll count that as a “near miss.”

#2 …. well, stuff like that sometimes takes a while to develop. You know, say the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time in the hall between sessions. That whole squishy carbon-based networking thing. I don’t think I fubared anything so I’m calling it a definite “miss” until proven wrong.

#3, however. Oh, my. Part of it I brought on myself, so I can’t blame the curse for it all (as you’ll see). But it’s damn sure … enhanced … it. Walk into the airport - flight delayed. Then Corey and I both walk up to the self-check in kiosk. He strolls right on through no problem. I, however, am told I need to see an agent. Umm … oooookaaaay … same travel agent, same flight, same everything, but I get the “special” treatment. Corey says, “I bet it’s the hyphen.” Bingo. After a lengthy and entertaining monologue involving his third wife and the phrase, “I used to be a software engineer … they dropped all those symbols to save money” from the ticket agent, we learn that yes, indeed, the system barfed because it didn’t like the hyphen in my last name. Sheesh. Off to security. Ummm … remember that Leatherman I thought I lost months ago? Found it! (yay!) In my carry-on. (boo!) Points to the PDX TSA security staff for being so friendly and patient. Individually, nothing worth thinking about. But collectively … oh yes. A palpable “hit”, Mr. Murphey.

To be fair, I did get on an airplane and, even though it was a bit late, it went up in the air, flew a few hundred miles, and came down just exactly as it was supposed to do, so I shouldn’t be complaining. Nope. No complaints here. Just a bit of chagrin and a touch of self-mockery. :-)

P.S. - After watching Wenzel play Burnout over at the Mozilla offices tonight … perhaps I shouldn’t be so sad he’s headed back to driving on German roads instead of somewhere around here. ;-)

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OK, Woz. I can’t believe you have the nerve to claim in this NPR interview that:

The Apple ][ always worked. It never had one bug in the hardware or software.

Dude, get a grip. I love Apple products and agree they are some of the best-designed and thoughtfully-engineered systems available, but don’t be trying to claim something so completely bogus. What’s next? You have the Holy Grail and a functional perpetual motion machine in your basement?

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