purg.atory

Just FYI, the immediate issue that led me to seek a server replacement was a lack of backups for the data. I host stuff for other people, and although in theory they should be backing up their own stuff, the reality is that they probably aren’t.

My initial survey of my storage situation led me to believe that I didn’t have adequate resources to back things up, but I started digging deeper and found several gigabytes of useless data I could delete. I have now set up a backup solution that ensures only one day’s worth of data is lost in the event of a problem.

There are still some improvements that I want to make to the system to enable direct snapshots, but to do it I will have to completely rebuild all the filesystems. To do this without downtime means I need another server, so if someone happens across an awesome deal, let me know.

I’m in the market for a server replacement for the machine that runs this blog and a number of other domains. It needs to be as cheap as possible

What I’ve got now:

Pentium Celeron 1.7Ghz
one 80 GB drive
one 200 GB drive
1.5GB RAM

The drives are set up with an 80GB software RAID1 and a 120 GB extra partition that I use to hold my copy of the Debian archive.

Does anyone know where a decent machine could be found for this role? It does not need any kind of fancy graphics, but it does need to be very reliable, and not suck a ton of power. Dual core CPU and SATA2 would be nice, but not required. RAID redundancy is critical, but I do not need fancy hardware for this, just two drives.

Naturally I want to spend as little as possible, so used is better than new. Hardware donations are most definitely acceptable, if anyone is feeling so generous.

Today’s xkcd comic is a good reminder that there is always a person with real feelings at the other end of the wire. As usual, there is great hover text.

For the record, I am not in the catch and release camp. I love to eat fish, and the best-tasting fish is one that you’ve pulled out of the water in the last hour. If I have to put back what I catch regardless of its size, there’s not much point in me putting the fish through it.

I used to think I knew what it meant to find peace through fishing. Perhaps you’ve heard the famous tagline “my worst day fishing beats my best day at work.” It turns out that until last year, I really didn’t have a clue. At least one of you will find no surprise in this admission. Intellectually I understood it and felt it to some degree, but it didn’t pervade my being in the way it should. I’ve learned what I was missing recently.

I hear in the back of the audience a muffled question… “What was your epiphany?” It’s stupid, really. I finally learned enough about fishing that I can actually catch the little buggers with some reliability. I used to go on multiple fishing trips in a year and never get a single bite, much less catch something. Although I did enjoy getting out in nature and being away from civilization, the act of fishing would leave me with an almost undefined feeling of frustration.

At this point in my life, I believe I could probably go most of a year without catching a fish and still find contentment. I no longer have the intense frustration of years without a nibble. I know in my gut that the fish really are there, they just aren’t in the mood today.

That’s the sound of more mutters out there, isn’t it? The serenity you get from fishing is not supposed to be dependent on catching anything, right? Well, you could be right. I do believe that if a seasoned fisherman were to suddenly find himself unable to get a nibble or catch a fish for two or three years solid, he might lose faith too.

If all this really does mean that I don’t “get it” then I can live with that. I’ve found the happy place that works for me, and if I’m the only one there, so much the better. I’ll probably catch more fish.

What you find below is a quote from an email from Jeff Gelbach on the opennms mailing list earlier this year. It’s a very well-stated fundamental fact of life.

If you want to build a house that is enormously adaptable and reconfigurable, you do that by making the foundation go down to the bedrock and using pillars instead of load-bearing walls to bear the weight of the roof. Then you can move around all the walls to suit your needs, because they’re all non-structural partitions. To have support for DNS names in place of IP addresses would be akin to making the foundation shallow and reconfigurable and every wall load-bearing — it can be done, but the foundation will not be as solid, and you might not be able to build a house with this design at all in a location that has sandy soil. OpenNMS has a deep foundation and a few thick pillars holding up the roof. The price you pay for the ability to move the walls around is that you’ll sometimes have a pillar in an inconvenient location. Hang some fine art on the pillar if its presence bothers you

The Move Networks video player used by FOX and ABC for their streaming video doesn’t work with Firefox 3. It still works in IE7, so I am now faced with a choice - downgrade or just use IE7 to watch that video. I can’t find any information about when they expect this problem to be addressed. The full release of FF3 is supposed to be on track for this month, so I’m hoping that there are folks hard at work to fix the problem.

I just discovered that the player used by NBC and the SciFi channel still works - and that there’s a new episode of Battlestar Galactica up on the ‘net.

One of my favorite plugins - Cookiesafe - was not supported when I did the browser upgrade yesterday, and they removed an important feature from its replacement, CS Lite.

Last night, I posted a question about this change on the author’s forum. I then followed up my post with the realization that there’s a clumsy workaround. The author responded to my post by telling me that he’d updated the full plugin to work with FF3.

The forum also has another topic with a more complete explanation of why the behavior I loved was removed. I posted a followup this morning.

I have just upgraded my work machine to Firefox 3 Release Candidate 2. Initial impressions:

It sure looks different. Right away I noticed a major change when typing in the address bar - the auto-complete using entries from your browsing history is far better, and someone told me it also searches your bookmarks. It does seem to respond faster than FF2 did. We’ll see with further usage whether they have fixed the rampant memory leaks for which Firefox is famous.

One of my plugins was incompatible - Cookiesafe. I quickly learned that this plugin has been supplanted by CS lite, which seems to be adequate for my needs.

I think I’ll install it at home too.

I really like Cringely’s blog. Once a year, he makes 15 predictions relating to various technology fields, and has a relatively good track record. Other than that, he writes substantial columns once a week, and they are always interesting. He’s a staple on my RSS reader.

This week’s article is about the energy crisis. I thought it was interesting enough to share.

I was just reading an article linked from slashdot - an interview with one of the top guys at MySQL.

The thing that jumped out at me was what he was saying about how the sudden rise of multi-core CPUs and solid-state disk storage affects software design.

A database program allows you to store incredibly large amounts of data in a way that allows you to search it, manipulate it, and retrieve information from it, in theory as fast as lightning. If you think about it, all the complexity and the different tuning parameters in a database program comes from a set of facts about computers in general.

Hard disks, the only reasonable way to actually store the data, are incredibly slow when compared to any other subsystem in the computer. The speed disadvantage of hard drives is multiplied when the data is access randomly. There have been a few short-lived instances where common hard drive technology managed to eclipse common communication architectures and common network technologies, but there were always faster technologies just around the corner. When those systems went mainstream, they once again left hard drives in the dust.

RAM is lightning fast in comparison to everything on the system. The CPU contains a largish piece of memory called the level2 cache, which is immensely faster than standard RAM. It also contains a very small piece of memory called the level1 cache, which makes the level2 cache look like molasses.

The idea in computer and software design is to make each of these levels of storage found in a computer big enough that it can fully contain one or more levels of software and data abstraction. If you can keep all of the lowest level bits in the level 1 cache, processes at that level will not need to access the relatively glacial level2 cache. If you can keep all of the code that makes up the currently executing loop in your program inside the level2 cache, it will not need to slow down very often to access the main system RAM. If you can keep all your programs and the majority of the commonly accessed data cached in RAM, you will not need to board the three week luxury cruise that it takes to read a chunk of data off the hard drive. Buying enough RAM for perfection at all levels with a large database is prohibitively expensive for just about anyone.

Multiple core CPUs are now the norm, and the cache sizes on those CPUs is becoming insane. Level2 cache sizes in the 8-16MB range are becoming common. If that seems small when you think about computers having gigabytes of RAM, think about this: It’s only been recently that CPUs hit 1MB of L2 cache. I believe for Intel, the first mainstream processor to do so was the Pentium 4 Prescott core in 2004.

Solid state disk drives offer the greatest potential for seriously speeding up large systems like databases. At this time, the actual bulk transfer rate of flash-based disks is not a lot faster than most hard drives, and in some cases is actually slower. It’s in random disk access that they really shine. They have no moving parts - retrieving scattered data is just as fast as retrieving sequential data. The problem is that it currently costs about ten times as much for solid state storage as it does for hard drives, greatly increasing the cost of a computer. They are appearing in high end laptops because they offer awesome speed and low power draw.

Now we just have to wait for compiler technology and software writing practices to catch up with all these advancements, especially the 64-bit multi-core CPUs. Because it’s only recently become so common, there’s a boatload of legacy software that doesn’t utilize multiple CPUs efficiently, and 64-bit versions are rare.

On my way to work this morning, I was thinking about the fact that most technological innovations have names that are in English, and wondering what it is about England and America that makes us such a hotbed of innovation. I think I figured it out.

I believe it’s mostly one thing - the cultural melting pot. We have been willing to accept just about anything and anyone. Different people with different ways of doing things all come together, and then compare notes. Each can see improvements in the other guy’s way of doing things, and deficits in their own way, so everyone benefits from coming up with a whole new way. Innovation has also tended to follow the frontier, because a frontier situation requires a constant influx of people and ideas.

There is very little frontier left, because pretty much all the earth is mapped and owned by somebody. The only real frontiers left to us are the other bits of rock in our solar system. Isaac Asimov has said that unless we manage to beat the speed of light, we cannot have a galactic empire. The time lag involved in communication just to the nearest star makes central governance impossible.

I’d bet that if you went back and looked at how all the super-successful civilizations in history got their start, you’d find that there was a coming together of many different cultures. I’d also be willing to bet that if you looked at the downfall of those civilizations, you’ll find that most of them coincided with cultural inflexibility, a relative unwillingness to accept anything from outside themselves. I’ve heard it said that America cannot afford to withdraw from worldwide affairs. It seems this is an accurate statement.

I believe that if our world’s large oil resources were in a different place, Islam would be a very different religion than it is today. The only reason they have been able to be as exclusionary as they are for this long is because they have what everyone else wants - they can afford the price of not changing.

I don’t know enough about Nazi Germany to comment very far, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that their purist stance had a lot to do with them resorting to war for success.

If you look at places in America where one culture rules and excludes others, like Chinatown, the barrio, etc., you’ll find that they tend to be less affluent and anachronistic. The other side of the coin, yuppie suburbia, is also fairly monocultural, but like Islam, this uniformity is supported by external financial means.

Japan is financially successful and very modern, but there’s not really any Japanese words in the technological lexicon. They are not inflexible within themselves, which is why they are successful, but very little real innovation happens there because they are socially monocultural and resistant to immigration.

It will be very interesting to see where things go in the future. China shows no signs that they are willing to integrate with the rest of the world. If that continues, they will find themselves in a bad situation as their economy grows. Most (or all) wars are economic in nature, so if the oil crisis doesn’t get us there first, the next world war may be in China.