Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is housework day.  Originally I was going to be running a UNIX class today but that ended up getting canceled as it was tough on everyone’s schedules.

Before I knew that we were canceling the class today, I got up and worked on Solaris for two hours.  I had meant to sleep in a little more than I did but was paged out by the office at eight in the morning and once I was up I just decided to stay up and to be productive.

I went on to do some serious house cleaning once Dominica and Liesl were awake.  There is a lot of cleaning that always needs to be done.  We did vacuuming – which alone probably took an hour as there was vacuum maintenance to do as well.  And there was at least thirty or forty minutes of down on my hands and knees floor scrubbing with the Little Green.  That never seems to end.  I wind up doing a full cleaning of at least one portion of the carpet on any given day.

I did a little of the dishes then Dominica jumped in and cleaned the kitchen.  The house is looking really good after about two or three hours of solid cleaning.  Feels good to get all of that done.

Jen came over at one because we had failed to convey quickly enough that the class was canceled for today so she was just in time to head on over to IHOP with Dominica, Liesl and I.  So we got lunch and then Jen went back down to the apartment while the Millers headed out to do some serious shopping.  This was our chance to get out and do some shopping that we always need to do and never manage to do.

Our first destination of Academy to try to get some shoes for me.  We ended up getting lost because Dominica was navigating and the GPS took us to the right address in the wrong city.  So we wound up in a really bad part of Dallas while trying to get out to the suburbs.  Oops.

We eventually found Academy and ended up getting quite a haul.  I got two pairs of shoes, two pairs of jeans, a new belt, new wallet and both Dominica and I got new UT slippers to wear around the house.  I have been pretty desperate for new shoes, jeans and belt for about a year or more now.  My old shoes have been in shambles for years now; they are completely falling apart.  I’ve been down to a single pair of jeans for months.  I have been without a belt since the Daddy Dance Off competition in Grapevine.  So this was some important shopping.

We found so much stuff at Academy that we were able to skip going to Casual XL Male on this particular trip which was nice as it was taking us a very long time to get back home.  On the way home we also went to Lowe’s as we had a $10 coupon that needed to be used.

At Lowe’s we bought several more plants, planters, potting soil and other associated indoor gardening paraphernalia.  We are working hard on getting some serious plant life in the new house.

Once we got home we got to work planting plants into the brick planters that separate the living room from the den area where Liesl plays.   We pulled out the ancient, dead whatever plants didn’t make it in there and discovered that the planters are actually incredibly deep, over a foot deep, and full of coil but had had potted plants just sat on top of the soil and some crap and newspapers shoved down in as filler.  It was awesome.

We dug out all of the pots, dead plants, moss, newspaper and more and got it cleaned out to just loose soil.  Then we added in most of a huge bag of Miracle Grow potting soil and transplanted two houseplants into the planter.  That was a bit of work but boy does it look better.  Having those planters full of dead grass and moss looked awful.  Having two, luscious and vibrant plants in there really shows why someone designed that planter in that way.  It looks great.

After doing the first planter we realized that we did not have enough soil to go on to do the second one.  So we decided to go back out to Walmart to get more soil since it was seven thirty at that point and Lowe’s was already closed as it is Sunday night.

It took about an hour to get back out of the house.  Liesl really didn’t want me to leave so we all decided to go out shopping again.  We got what we needed at Walmart and found another plant that we really liked and picked up a movie to watch later.  Then, on the way home, we stopped at Jack in the Box and picked up dinner.

Once we got home we ate dinner and watched Hot Tub Time Machine which Francesca had been raving about.  I had barely heard of it but it had John Cusack who is normally pretty good so we figured that we couldn’t go too wrong.  It was decent.  Not amazing but it was an entertaining movie.  Unfortunately it was not child friendly so we had to put Liesl to bed earlier than she might have wanted but she was pretty tired and did fall right asleep.

It was pretty late by the time that we were done with the movie and so instead of going back and working on the plants again we just decided to head off to bed.

I need to go to work early tomorrow morning as I am coming home early at lunch to meet with the landscaper who is coming to look at our yard and to work up a quote for us on getting our yard into shape.  We are really anxious to make it so that Liesl can actually go outside and play.  One of the big reasons that we bought a house was for Liesl to be able to go outside and, as of this point, the back yard has never been accessible to her.  It’s been cold, so it has been okay.  But pretty soon we are going to be very disappointed if she can’t go outside and play in her enclosed yard.

So you’ve downloaded Solaris 11 Express and you want to try out this awesome new Zones feature.  Zones is Solaris’ powerful virtualization environment and it has been around since Solaris 10 but things change slightly between editions.  In this tutorial we are going to create a very simple, basic zone and go from new install of Solaris 11 to a working Zone that you can access remotely via SSH.  If you don’t have a dedicated machine on which to run Solaris 11, don’t fret, you can do Zones virtualization on top of another virtualization environment.  In my case, I am running Solaris 11 on Oracle’s VirtualBox and then running Zones on top of there.

To get started, we need to create a ZFS mountpoint as Zones now relies on ZFS.  I like using the /zones mountpoint as it is pretty common and very straightforward.  You can, of course, use any mountpoint that you would like – /vm or /images are popular alternatives.  You can use different features, such as compression and deduplication as you feel are applicable for you as well.

zfs create -o mountpoint=/zones -o compression=on -o dedup=on rpool/zones

This should create your mountpoint.  Now we can begin configuring our first Zone.  For our example, we will simply call it myzone.  We will assume that we are on the 192.168.123.o/24 subnet and will add a single network interface that bridges onto this network.  This is a very simple example.  You could do many more advanced things with Zones.

zonecfg -z myzone

Once we run this command we will be dropped into the zonecfg configuration utility which we will use to set features for our zone.  First we will configure the location where the Zone files will be stored.  Generally we want to name this the same as our zone to avoid any confusion.

set zonepath=/zones/myzone

Now we can set our networking to share a connection with the base Solaris environment.  This is the most common scenario.

set ip-type=shared

Now we can add in a network connection.  For this we will need to know the name of the physical connection used in the base Solaris installation.  On my system this is called “e1000g0”.  I will statically set this new server to be 192.168.123.5/24.

add net

set address=192.168.123.5

set physical=e1000g0

set defrouter=255.255.255.0

end

And that is all that we need for a basic configuration.  Now we just need to verify and commit these settings and we are ready to being.

verify

commit

exit

If all has gone well, we can now install and boot our new Zone for the very first time.

zoneadm -z myzone install

zoneadm -z myzone boot

Excellent, we already have a Zone up and running.  Now to enable SSH so that we can reach the machine remotely.

zlogin myzone “svcadm enable ssh”

zlogin myzone “svcadm restart ssh”

To complete the setup of our Zone it will be necessary to log at the console.  This will allow you to step through the setup process as well as to add a user with which you can connect over SSH since the root user is banned from logging in remotely.

zlogin -C myzone

We slept in a little this morning, just until nine thirty.  Liesl’s schedule has been drifting later and later and we have been getting less and less sleep because of it.  Today was our catchup day and as long as Liesl stayed asleep, so did we.

So it was a bit of a rush to get out of the door this morning as we are heading down to Mansfield to hang out with the family.  It is one of Liesl’s second cousin’s birthdays so we are heading down for that.

We had to make a quick pitstop at Walmart for card and gift.  Dominica was on top of things but didn’t want to send me to pick these things up last night as that would be too stressful for me after work to try to make these kinds of decisions.  Best to have her do it today.

It worked out, time wise, as she was able to shop at Walmart while Liesl and I made a quick run back to the house to pick up some stuff that we had forgotten to put into the car.  So it wasn’t wasted time.

We hung out with the family for probably around three hours.  Liesl had an awesome time.  She has gotten completely comfortable now with her second cousins and she just leaves us immediately to go play with them.  There are some older girls that have the best time with her and she, as always, loves having older girls around.  They played with a doll house and explored the house and they even got her outside for quite a long time playing soccer!

It was so adorable watching Liesl run around the yard with the bigger kids chasing the soccer ball.  She loves getting to play with them and being part of the group.  This is so good for her.  Boy is she going to sleep tonight.  She got some serious exercise today.

As we were leaving, Debbie gave us a huge dollhouse for Liesl.  It has never really seen any use and Liesl just loves it.

We got home and put Liesl down for her nap.  She was asleep in the car on the way home too.  The ride is just long enough that she nearly always falls asleep going to and from Mansfield.

The afternoon was pretty empty.  We mostly puttered around. Later on Souder stopped by to drop off my new eight foot ladder and some boxes of Cat5e cabling.  He didn’t hang out for long.  Just dropped stuff off and headed home to sleep.

Watson and Grey came by shortly thereafter and hung out for the evening.  Grey was originally returning to Denver today but had to push his flight off until tomorrow so has tonight off.  We all decided to be adventurous for dinner and discovered an interesting Pakistani restaurant and grocery not far away that does some very brisk business.  We were going to eat there but they were so busy that we had to get the food to go as there were no seats available.  The food was very good though, and very cheap.  We will be back there a bunch, I’m sure.  And great to have a Pakistani and Indian grocery right around the corner.  Very handy.

I did a bit of work on getting Solaris Express 11 up and running.  I ended up working late into the night, until three in the morning, working on Solaris 11 installs, ZFS and Zones stuff to get ready for the class tomorrow.

It is a very cold morning again today in Texas.  This whole week has been quite cold.

I came out into the living room this morning and ever since Dominica took down Liesl’s play hut thing that has dominated the living room the whole space seems so much nicer.  Instead of the “den” being all dark and full of stuff it is not bright and open and most of the stuff in it is pushed out of main view.  The whole public area of the house seems nicer now.  Dominica commented to the same effect last night.

This morning we are waiting to hear about the house although, now that it has gone into a protracted “wait for the bid to be selected” stage we have mostly written it off.  We are assuming that we are not getting it and probably won’t hear about it too promptly.  There were more people out looking at the house this morning.  It has garnered a lot of interest, suddenly.  More people have looked at it this week than have in the months since we started looking at our own house.  Of course, the only angle from which to see the house is from our yard so all of these people trying to get this house instead of us check it out standing in our front yard.

Lunch time rolled around and we did not hear anything about the house.  Since the offers closed at eleven I can only assume that they have been contacting the winners and that that is not us.

After lunch we were contacted by the bank looking for some additional information on our offer for the house.  So apparently we are not completely out of the running.  Although maybe with our answer we are.  Now they are hoping to know something by around Tuesday.  So now we have a fun weekend of waiting to see what has happened.

Of course, on top of not knowing about the house being fun enough, not knowing about the house also impacts our financial situation so we are waiting to begin projects on our existing house while we try to figure out how are finances look in the short term.  Buying a house requires some amount of capital to be in place and ready so we don’t want to overcommit ourselves.  Fun fun.

Lunch was at Rockfish today.  I haven’t been there in a while.

Afternoon was quite busy but worked started to wrap up on the early side and by six I was able to roll out of the office which is great for a Friday.  And very little scheduled for tomorrow either.

Dominica decided to send me out shopping on my way home.  So off to Lowe’s and Walmart I go.

The shopping went pretty quickly.  I picked up the needed supplies and we now have the LED lightbulbs that we need to be able to replace the bulbs that had all burnt out in the hallway, which is very annoying as we use those lights all of the time.  Of course, when I went to change them, we discovered that our stepstool was loaned out and we can’t reach them.

We have  an appointment scheduled on Monday morning with a landscaper to look at our back yard.  It is a total disaster right now – nothing but mud and clumps of clay.  There is barely a patch of real grass and nothing worth keeping.  We need the entire area completely overhauled from top to bottom.  It’s not going to be cheap but it is really making living there tough because except on frozen or very dry, very sunny days it is nothing but a mud pit and we have to give Oreo a quick bath after every trip in or out.  And we can’t pick up anything that he deposits out there because there is so much mud that we can’t go back there ourselves because we have no way to clean up that volume of mud.

We aren’t entirely sure of what we want to do with the yard yet.  Mostly we just want it leveled, drained and sodded.  From there we will figure out what else needs to be done.  We would really like Liesl to be able to go out and play and Oreo to safely be able to walk around and to just be able to enjoy it rather than not wanting to look at the horrid mess.  And we definitely want the two bushes blocking the windows in the den area to be removed as they do nothing but block the light which is not very smart.

This evening we just hung out at the house and watched a made for television Hillary Duff movie Beauty and the Briefcase, I believe it was called.  Not a good movie.  I’d skip it.

We were off to bed at a reasonable time tonight!  UNIX training, originally scheduled for tomorrow, has been postponed.  We will be attempting to do it on Sunday instead.

We are waiting to hear about the offer than we put in on the house next door last night.  We didn’t hear anything this morning until lunch time when, while I was at home having just arrived, our agent called to let us know that we were currently one of two offers in on the house and that offers are only being entertained until eleven in the morning tomorrow.  So one way or another we will know if we got the house at that point.

While we were discussing the house, there were people outside looking at the house as well.  Demand is suddenly picking up now that we are trying to buy it ourselves.  Our only hope is that the other people don’t have good financing, aren’t prepared to wait through a foreclosure sale process or just don’t put in an offer as good as ours is.  We did up our offer to our “best offer” and can only hope for the best from here.  Nothing more to be done until we find out about it tomorrow.

Finding out that we are competing for the house certainly took some of the wind out of our sales.  There is a very good chance that someone will outbid us.  We are not making an extremely good offer and with other offers on the table ours is probably not going to be high enough.  The house has been there for months and months without an offer.  It is awful that we missed being the first one in by a few hours.  Again, I’m not happy with how long it takes to do things in Texas.  But we are treating this as a business decision.  We worked out the numbers that make sense for us and if we can’t get the house for that price, we don’t get it.  It’s that simple.

So now we wait.  It isn’t that long, at least.  And the people that I met looking at the house today seemed really nice.  But I doubt that they have enough time to get an offer in before the decision is made tomorrow.

After work I went over to La Cima for happy hour.  They have a guitar player playing in the lounge today and they wanted to wrangle up people to check it out.  It was really nice.  They normally have live piano in the restaurant but nothing in the lounge.  Having live guitar is a nice addition.  Hopefully they keep this up.

On my way home I swung by Ruchi Palace on Trinity Mills to pick up dinner.  Both Dominica and I were craving it after having it two nights ago.

We didn’t do too much tonight.  Ate dinner, hung out with Liesl, went to bed early.  We are all pretty tired.  I took the trash out and put it by the curb.  After our pick up tomorrow we should be finally caught up for the first time after having moved in to the new house.  We generated so much trash in the move that we are just now catching up with us putting out the maximum amount every week.

My early morning call was canceled for tomorrow so it is a normal work day morning for me.

Today was Liesl’s second day of “home school pre-school.”  Dominica has a ton of activities planned out and has been posting pictures to Flickr of Liesl’s progress.  Liesl is enjoying it too.  It is interactive time and she enjoys learning.  I ask her, when I get home, if she had fun at school today and she says “yes”.