You can read the first 9 ways here: 9 Ways ISPs Screw You Over.

10.  ISPs advertise speeds in a way that only people who have an understanding of how data is stored can translate.  For example, lets say you pay for a “10 meg” connection, thats not actually 10 Megabytes per second you’re capable of, its actually 10 Megabits.  Now, there’s quite the difference between Megabits and Megabits, but not so much a difference in the acronyms.  MBps is for Megabytes and Mbps is for Megabits.  The real issue here is if you pay for a 10 Megabit per second connection, your maximum transfer rate is only going to be 1.25 Megabytes per second (there are 8 bits in a byte).  Thats also theoretical, you can very rarely actually achieve the theoretical bandwidth provided by your ISP, unless you’re trying to load their homepage or hit a url that they detect doesn’t exist and throw you a page full of ads.

I’ve been a long supporter of transparency from ISPs, but we’re likely never to see that up here in Canada – at least not until the CRTC cracks down and decides we, the consumers, need some competition and not more monopolies.

I’ve been reading up on the topic a lot, and it seems as though no one’s really talking about whats going to happen with Sun’s newest acquisition.  I can’t say I’m not just a little concerned, since all of our work here at MRX is powered by MySQL databases.  Thats not to say I’m afriad of Oracle, just its both expensive (as in not free) and complex.  I’d argue, so complex that not many people out there who know Oracle are looking for work.

One interesting point I did find when reading up on the topic that I didn’t really know, is that Oracle does own a number of other database systems including TimesTen, Berkeley DB open source, as well as InnoDB.  However, none of these directly competes with Oracle, whereas MySQL does.  So, the question is, do they monitize MySQL to a lesser degree than Oracle (while maintaining some form of stripped down free version), do they drop MySQL alltogether and provide some form of migration path to Oracle 11g, or do they simply let both co-exist and continue monitizing Oracle.

If I had to guess, I’d say they will likely monitize MySQL to a lesser degree than Oracle, probably in the form of support contracts mostly, and still continue to provide a free open source version of MySQL.  Obviously they would charge for any new features they decide to add to MySQL along the way.  Probably very similar to Redhat Enterprise’s business model – seems to be successful for them.

Anyway, as per usual, the upgrades went more or less flawlessly – minus a few symbolic links that needed to be re-created.  Since I don’t have GUIs on these machines (waste of resources on servers if you ask me), a quick:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install update-manager-core
sudo do-release-upgrade -d

And about half an hour later and I was all upgraded.  No more iSCSI disconnection problems, and one new feature I’ve found that actually changed my whole workflow when it comes to servers.  That being the inclusion of screen-profiles, a sort of profile manager for screen allowing you to create default screens that open when you log in, as well as status bars, clocks and notifiers.  If you haven’t heard of it, I’d highly recommend you check it out.

Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope – Alpha 3 | Ubuntu.

In any case, there are two types of ads I’ve seen, one that features children using Vista to do fun stuff with photos.  Okay, they’re cute, and Vista works for children, I get it.  Thing they forget to mention is that those computers had better be locked down and never connected to the internet, unless of course you want to be exposing your 8 year old child to random porn popups while they’re looking at photos of their dogs.  The other type being the ones where people are sent out looking for low price laptops and pass over Macs because they’re either too “cool” or too “expensive”.  Both of which are silly propositions to make, since if you were to compare hardware in any recent apple laptop to an equivalent Dell or HP, you’ll come out at about the same price (last time I did it, I think I was $50 in).

Now again, I’d like to caution that I really enjoy Apple’s – I work on one all day – that said, I grew up on PCs and when I finally did make the switch after working at Barking Dog Studios, I decided that the platform fit me much better.  What I’m really trying to say is that someone at Microsoft should take a good hard look at your advertising campaign, and perhaps give it a once-over to remove all the BS you’re pushing on people.  Or better yet, instead of spending millions on an advertising campaign, build a product that works and works well that people will want to spend exhorbitant amounts of money on.

In the beginning, Intel created the 8086 and its first 16-bit microprocessor.
And Intel said, Let there be x86: and there was x86.
And Intel saw the x86, that it was good.

Its amazing to think that in only 31 years we have come so far as a technologically advanced species.  Just stop to think for a minute, 30 years ago, not a single person in the world could even begin to imagine the depth and breadth of information we have at our fingertips, real-time communication without boundaries or borders.

Always amazes me to some extent.  Anyway, here’s the original article if anyone’s interested.

A Brief History of CPUs: 31 Awesome Years of x86 | Maximum PC.

Bluetooth 3.0 prepped for launch on April 21 – Ars Technica.

I’m curious though, how do they intend on dealing with frequency crossover from actual wifi networks.  In my experience, bluetooth networks are horribly prone to interferance and hopefully that doesn’t translate to the new specification.

Converting RAID1 to RAID5 with no data loss | scott.wallace.sh

When you record and download lots of TV, movies, music, etc. it can chew up the disk space pretty quickly. If you don’t keep on top of your DVD burning you will end up running out of disk space, like me. That’s okay, I have two 200GB drives mirrored in a RAID1 array. If I break the mirror and concatenate the drives I could use all 400GB of space available to me… but if one drive died, I would lose everything that was not backed up.

Buying two more drives isn’t the answer as I only have one more PATA drive connection available. Perhaps I could back everything up, buy two bigger drives, install a new RAID1 array and copy everything back over. That means giving up two perfectly servicable 200GB drives.

If only I could add a third drive and convert the RAID1 array to a RAID5 array. Then I would get the full 400GB of space, and still retain the redundancy. Yeah, right.

… Then I stumbled across this blog entry in which a guy creates some experimental loopback devices, creates a RAID1 array and then converts it to a RAID5 array with no data loss. I was intrigued.

The theory says that the RAID5 algorithm, when applied to 2 disks only, ends up looking like a RAID1 array except for the RAID metadata. If you overwrite the RAID1 metadata with the RAID5 metadata, mdadm should recognise the 2 disk RAID5 array and not mess with the contents. Once the metadata is updated, you can then add a third partition to the array and grow the RAID5 array to utilise it. All that remains is to then resize the filesystem to fill the new space.

The main question is, am I brave enough to try it?

You bet I am!

Of course, everything is caveated with the usual “back everything up before you attempt this procedure” and, like a good boy, I borrowed a 400GB external drive from work and rsync’d all the important stuff across… and, with heart in mouth, followed the procedure…

Boot from a Fedora Core 6 rescue CDROM and get to a command prompt. You must ensure you have a recent kernel (> 2.6.17) and that you have a recent version of the mdadm software:

# uname -a
Linux localhost.localdomain 2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 #1 SMP Mon Oct 16 14:54:20 EDT 2006 i686 unknown

# mdadm --version
mdadm - v2.5.4 - 13 Ocotober 2006

Stop the array:

# mdadm --stop /dev/md0

Overwrite the RAID1 metadata with the RAID5 metadata:

# mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=5 -n 2 /dev/hda1 /dev/hdb1
mdadm: /dev/hda1 appears to contain an ext2fs file system
size=1946592K  mtime=Sat Apr 14 07:18:32 2007
mdadm: /dev/hda1 appears to be part of a raid array:
level=1 devices=2 ctime=Sat Sep 17 16:17:45 2005
mdadm: /dev/hdb1 appears to contain an ext2fs file system
size=1946592K  mtime=Sat Apr 17 07:18:32 2007
mdadm: /dev/hdb1 appears to be part of a raid array:
level=1 devices=2 ctime=Sat Sep 17 16:17:45 2005
Continue creating array? y
mdadm: array /dev/md0 started.

At this point the RAID software decided it wanted to rebuild the array. Uh-oh, there goes my data… I quickly mounted /dev/md0 and had a look… all my data is still intact! Oh well, let the software do it’s thing. Who am I to argue?

Add in the third, new partition:

# mdadm --add /dev/md0 /dev/hdd1

So far, so good. Once the rebuild is complete, grow the RAID5 onto the new partition: (NB: use the –backup-file option in case the grow is interrupted. It will allow a safe recovery.)

# mdadm --grow /dev/md0 --raid-disks=3 --backup-file=/mnt/tmp/raid1-5.backup.file
mdadm: Need to backup 128K of critical section ..
mdadm: ... critical section passed.

I’m impressed that I’ve had no problems so far. The reshaping of the RAID5 from a 2 disk to a 3 disk array takes quite a while (about 6.5 hours for around 200GB of raw data) but the filesystem resize shouldn’t take anywhere near as long:


# e2fsck -f /dev/md0

# resize2fs -p /dev/md0

Apart from the modification of the RAID metadata, the whole operation can be done “online”. I chose to do it from single-user/rescue mode as I wanted to make sure there was no data loss. If you’re not too bothered then you could leave the whole thing up and running.

Sam Lesher » Ubuntu 7.04 – Enable/Disable Remote Desktop from the Command Line

To enable remote desktop from the command line, issue this command:

$ gconftool-2 -s -t bool /desktop/gnome/remote_access/enabled true

To disable remote desktop from the command line, issue this command:

$ gconftool-2 -s -t bool /desktop/gnome/remote_access/enabled false

Unfortunately, this only works if you have previously configured remote desktop with a password, which would in theory require physical access to the machine.  That being said though, I want to set it up remotely, and so to add to Sam’s guide, I’d like to add that you can X-Forward a gnome session through SSH which will allow you to change this option.  I’m working on a how-to which I will post shortly.

As it would appear, the motherboard finally died, the system simply refused to boot if any SATA drive was plugged into it – obviously a problem. I went out to the local computer shop and picked up a new motherboard, processor and ram. Specially, I got myself an ASUS M3N78-EMH HDMI motherboard, and I know, I have absolutely no use for an HDMI motherboard, but it fullfilled my main requirements of being under $100 and having more than 4 sata ports (specifically it has 6), bringing my total available sata connections up to 8 (I have a PCI card).

So, I get it all home, rip apart tank – dust off as much as I possibly can, and I go to town unpacking, reconfiguring the case and generally getting everything set up. So, I’m sitting there going through the checklist, processor mounted… check, processor fan mounted… check, ram mounted… check, hard drives plugged in… check, *CRAP*… well, it would appear my 4 year old Thermaltake power-supply is only a 20-pin, and this new motherboard is a 24-pin. Now this is at 9:30pm on a Sunday night… no computer supply shops are open.

So, just a quick note to anyone looking to upgrade, check your freaking PSU before you buy a new motherboard!