February 19, 2009: Email Server Arrives in Canada

The cold weather has returned to downstate New York.  No doubt about that.  This morning wasn’t quite that bad but it was not warm by any stretch.

I got a chance to take Oreo on a nice, long walk today.  There was a break in the weather when the wind was still and the rain stopped and the snow had not started yet when we were able to sneak out and do some walking.  So we walked all the way up the hill to the top of Chapel Hill then down, almost to the main entrance where we took the Nature Trail that we have here in the complex through the Hillside and then down to the back exit and back to the house from the other side.  Oreo had such a good time.  It is the longest walk that we have taken together here, I think, and we covered a bit of territory where I do not believe that he has ever been before.  He was a very happy dog all day after that.  It did not hurt me any to get that extra exercise in either.

We have been doing Weight Watchers here and I am happy to report that I am currently down twenty-five pounds!  I am feeling much better too.  The Weight Watchers diet is not too hard to do and is pretty easy to stick to even after doing it for a while.  The combination of the program and the Nintendo Wii to keep track of my progress really works well for me.

My new Genesee and Wyoming Alco RS-1 N Scale locomotive from Atlas arrived today.  It is part of their less expensive “classic” series which cannot be updated to work with DCC (Digital Command Control or Digital Cab Control) but it is built just as well as their normal line and this particular model really looks great.

I managed to finally get a group of Liesl pictures posted on the Flickr site today.  I have more that should be coming tomorrow as well.  The ones that went up today came from my Nikon D50 SLR and the next batch will be pictures that Dominica took with her Kodak digicam.  I think that I might have some more on my Kodak digicam as well.

The new server arrived in Toronto, Ontario today.  They did not get a chance to rack it and test it out but at least it was signed for and they confirmed over the phone that it had arrived and that they would get to it in the morning.  It would be nice to have it tonight, but it is not like I don’t have plenty of other projects to be working on anyway.

There was no opportunity to do any model railroading at all tonight.  Liesl did not nap a wink all day long today.  That made the day really tough.  She spent most of the evening fussing and complaining.  We really were not able to get anything done.  The most that we were able to do was to spend an hour or more working really hard to keep her entertained so that Dominica would be able to complete one of the chapters / sections in her online course from the O’Reilly School.  This particular piece was a challenging one and it was very difficult for her to get through it with Liesl complaining the whole time.  Very distracting.

We spent the evening sort of watching Murder She Wrote.  We really did not get to watch very much.  We had it on pause most of the evening because we could not hear it over Liesl.

We found out today that I did not get a week’s pay this month.  One of the four weeks for this month apparently got missed no my payroll so we are short twenty-five percent of our income for the month.  February is the shortest month so it is naturally the worst month to have less opportunity to make any money and this month we also got hit with that $1,400 tax mistake from the bank that caused us to have to produce all of that cash without any warning and we also paid, up front, for all of Dominica’s classes so, altogether, we had about $3,000 of surprise expenses this month and lost a quarter of our income for the month.  Paying the bills next week is going to be really painful.  I spoke to work and they were unable to figure out what happened to my pay so, for the moment, we just have to wonder what will happen.  I do know that with their payment process there is no way for them to get me another check until March at the earliest.

Tomorrow our project is to move all of the furniture out of the one half of the living room so that we can shampoo that half of the room in the hopes that sometime on Saturday we can do the same thing to the other half of the room.

Saturday is going to be incredibly busy for me.  I have to be up early, as I often do, to do deployments first thing in the morning.  Then I have my system patching that I do most Saturdays.  Then we have a continuity of business (a.k.a. disaster recovery) test on Saturday afternoon that I am covering for several people because test was scheduled at the same time as a site shutdown for the site where most everyone with whom I work works.  So my day will be crazy.  Then on Sunday we have house guests.  We hope to be able to get the house cleaned, to some degree, before they arrive.  I doubt that we will get anywhere near as much done as we want to get done.

Today Dominica set up our “old” coffee maker – the awesome one that we got as a wedding present in 2003 (it seems new to me but I guess that it is over five years old now) that grinds and brews and filters all in one step.  It’s great.  It makes the best coffee ever.  It got packed away in 2007 when we moved out of the house in Geneseo and we have been using the Keurig one cup at a time machine ever since.  Dad recently brought the good coffee maker to our house in the latest load that he delivered and now we can start using it again.  I prefer the high quality coffee that it brews, but Dominica prefers the one cup flavored coffee that she can do with the Keurig K-cups.

We made it to bed around midnight tonight.  Hopefully tomorrow we will have good news about the email.  I am told that we should expect the new machine to be online and running before lunch.

How To – Easy NTP on Solaris 10

Setting up NTP (the Network Time Protocol) on Solaris 10 is very simple but requires a few less than obvious steps that can trip up someone looking to set up a basic NTP daemon to sync their local machine.

The first step is to install the NTP packages SUNWntpr and SUNWntpu, both of which are available from the first CD of the Solaris 10 installation CDs.  These packages are located, along with the others, are located in /mnt/cdrom/Solaris_10/Product/ assuming that you mounted your Solaris 10 CD 1 or its ISO image to /mnt/cdrom, of course.  Personally, I keep an ISO copy of this CD available on the network for easy access to these packages although they could very easily be copied off into a package directory.  Depends on the number of machines which you need to maintain.

Go ahead and install the two packages.  This can be done easily by moving into the Product directory and using the “pkgadd -d .” command and selecting the two packages from the menu.  There are no options to worry about with these packages so just install and then we are ready to configure.

The “gotcha” with NTP on Solaris is that there is no default configuration to get you up and running automatically and most online information about the installation either leaves out this portion or supplies details unlikely to be used under common scenarios.

Solaris’ NTP comes with two sample configuration files, /etc/inet/ntp.client and /etc/inet/ntp.server.  Confusingly, for the most basic use we are going to want to work from the ntp.server sample file rather than from the ntp.client sample file.  NTP uses /etc/inet/ntp.conf as its actual configuration file and, as you will notice, after a default installation this file does not exist.  So we start by making a copy of ntp.server.

# cp /etc/inet/ntp.server /etc/inet/ntp.conf

Now we can make our changes to the new configuration file that we have just created.  I will ignore any of the commented lines here and only publish those lines actually being used by my configuration.  In this case I have gone with the most simple scenario which includes using an external clock source and ignoring my local clock.  In a production machine you should set up the local clock as a fallback device.

For my example here, I am syncing NTP on Solaris 10 to the same machine pool to which my CentOS Linux machines get their time, the CentOS pool at ntp.org.  You should replace the NTP server names in this sample configuration with the names of the NTP servers in the pool which you will use.

server 0.centos.pool.ntp.org
server 1.centos.pool.ntp.org
server 2.centos.pool.ntp.org
server 3.centos.pool.ntp.org
broadcast 224.0.1.1 ttl 4
enable auth monitor
driftfile /var/ntp/ntp.drift
statsdir /var/ntp/ntpstats/
filegen peerstats file peerstats type day enable
filegen loopstats file loopstats type day enable
filegen clockstats file clockstats type day enable
keys /etc/inet/ntp.keys
trustedkey 0
requestkey 0
controlkey 0

This very standard and simple setup provides you with four servers from which to obtain NTP data and also rebroadcasts this data on the local network via multicast using the NTP standard multicast address of 224.0.1.1.  Feel free to remove or comment out the broadcast line if you have no desire to have any machines locally getting their NTP data from this machine.  The ease of which you can republish NTP locally via multicast is just too simple to pass up.

Now that we have a working configuration file, we need to fire up NTP and let it sync up with our chosen servers.  The best practice here is to use the ntpdate command a few times to get the box date and time as close as reasonable to accurate before turning NTP loose to do its thing.  The NTP daemon is designed to slowly adjust the clock whereas ntpdate will set it correctly immediately so this gets the initial time correct right away.

# ntpdate pool.ntp.org; ntpdate pool.ntp.org

# svcadm enable ntp

At this point, the NTP Daemon should be running and your time should be extremely accurate.  You can verify that NTP is running by looking in the process pool for /usr/lib/inet/xntpd which is the actual name of the NTP Daemon running on Solaris 10.

February 18, 2009: Snow Again

Lots of snow coming down today.  I was starting to feel like winter was tapering off with the nice weather that we have had recently.  Late this morning it started coming down in big, soft flakes at a pretty steady pace.

I got a bit of a late start this morning.  Liesl tends to cause our days to shift very heavily towards staying up late and sleeping in.  She is willing to sleep in in the mornings but is very fussy in the evenings.

Two Buffalo & Pittsburgh N scale open top hoppers from Atlas arrived today that I got at an amazing discount on eBay.

Dominica had a very productive day.  She got a lot of paperwork done and telephone calls made.  I managed to get some bills paid today too.  Not very excited but we both felt good about the day in general.

My big project for the day, other than fixing a server at the office that was offline and being problematic, was dealing with an time synchronization problem on a Linux server running on VMWare Server on Linux.  I never came up with a really good solution and had to resort to running ntpdate via a cron job.  At least it works.

This evening I only got to do a tiny bit of model railroading.  My project for tonight was to add three new rock faces into the plasterwork that we did last night.  This is my first time uses molded plaster rocks so we will see how it turns out.  Since I have never worked with them before I only did so much preparation for them and no planning at all.

We watched two episodes of the first season (1984) of Murder She Wrote. Dominica never watched this show as a kid.  She saw it once or twice and did not really like it.  It was a classic in my home as a child. The show started when I was just eight years old as part of the big lineup of shows that all released around 1984.  That years seems to be the year that ’80s television really began.  Most of the shows running before that time were holdouts from the 1970s but in 1984 there was a large group of shows that really seem to epitomize the culture of the ’80s that all began around the same time.  Taking a snapshot of television programs running in 1983 and those from 1984 would be, if my memory serves, dramatically different from each other.

The snow did not really stick today.  It formed more of a slushing covering all over the place.  You can tell that it snowed all day but there is definitely no build up of snow.  There are some patches of ice here and there that I discovered while walking Oreo and almost falling down in the parking lot.

The event for which I was planning on traveling out to Warren tomorrow has been pushed off again so, most likely, it will be Warren next week rather than this week.  This weekend we have guests coming up from Wallington, New Jersey – Oreo’s daycare friends!  He will be very excited to see them as he has not seen them since we moved and he used to see them for nine hours every day.  They were a major part of his life for two years.  They are bringing their baby boy up to meet Liesl.  They are only several weeks apart in age.

Time Sync on VMWare Based Linux

In many cases it can be quite difficult to accuracy keep time on a virtualized operating system due to the complex interactions between the hardware, host operating system, virtualization layer and the guest operating system.  In my case I found that running Red Hat Linux 5 (CentOS 5) on VMWare Server 1.0.8 resulted in an unstoppable and rapid slowing of the guest clock.

The obvious steps to take include running NTP to control the local clock.  This, however, only works when the clock skews very slowly.  In my case, as in many, the clock drifts too rapidly for NTP to handle.  So we need another solution.  VMWare recommends installing VMWare Tools on the guest operating system and subsequently adding the following to your VMX configuration file:

tools.syncTime = true

This does not always work either.  You should also try changing you guest system clock type.  Most suggestions include adding clock=pit to the kernel options.  None of this worked for me.  I had to resort to a heavyhanded NTP trick – putting manual ntpdate updates into cron.  In my case, I set it to update every two minutes.  The clock still drifts heavily within the two minute interval but for me it is an acceptable amount.  You should adjust the update interval for your own needs.  Every five minutes may easily be enough but more frequently might be necessary.

Using crontab -e under the root user, add the following to your crontab:

*/2 * * * * /usr/sbin/ntpdate 0.centos.pool.ntp.org

For those unfamiliar with the use of */2 in the first column of this cron entry, that designates to run every two minutes.  For every five minutes you would use */5.  Remember that it takes a few minutes before cron changes take effect.  So don’t look for the time to begin syncing for a few minutes.

For me, this worked perfectly.  Ntpdate is not subject to the skew and offset issues that ntpd is.  So we don’t have to worry about the skew becoming too great and the sync process stopping.

If anyone has additional information on syncing Linux in this situation, please comment.  Keep in mind that this is for Red Hat Linux and the kernel with RHEL5 is 2.6.18 which does not include the latest kernel time updates that may be found in some distributions like Ubuntu.  Recent releases of Ubuntu likely do not suffer this issue as I expect OpenSuse 11.1 or the latest Fedora would not either.

Bones Season 3 Episode 7 Massive Amiga Blunder

So today Dominica was watching Bones, season 3 episode 7.  She came down to tell me that they had put an Amiga from 1987 into the show and that I had to take a look.  Of course, no one in Hollywood bothers to check anything at all or to even state the obvious correctly.

They claim that the Amiga is from 1987, the same year that my family bought a Commodore Amiga.  The machine that they show is obviously a Commodore Amiga 1200 (A1200) which was made from late 1992 through 1996.  Almost a full decade more modern than what they are stating.  (To put this in perspective, they say that they are showing a computer used for little more than video games that was made when I was in mid-elementary school but show a high-powered 32bit graphics workstation that was still on the market in my third year of college!!)  But this is just the beginning.

The Amiga machine that they show, the black A1200, is sitting, unplugged, atop an ancient IBM XT that is an entire generation older than the Amiga.  Both machines are so famous and amazingly recognizable at once that it is extremely confusing to watch because it looks like exactly what it is, a mid-90s Amiga 1200 unplugged and used as a dust cover for a worthless, early 80s IBM XT (I learned to program on an IBM XT when they were no longer current in 1985.)

Then, the actors, who apparently aren’t familiar with how computers work and that they need to be plugged in, talk about the specs of the Amiga (an incredibly powerful 32bit workstation worth many thousands of dollars in the mid-90s) but instead quoted the machine has being powered by the pathetic Motorola 6800 processor which was never used in any computer to my knowledge but the series included the 6809 which was used to power the Vectrex home video game system (that Dominica’s family has) and the Radio Shack sold TRS-80 computers of the late 1970s.

They, to add insult to injury, the product a floppy disk that supposedly was used on the Commodore Amiga.  Now the original Amiga came out in 1985 and one of its major selling points was that they had left the legacy world of 5.25″ floppies behind and moved ahead, along with Apple’s Mac and the Atari ST, into the world of 3.5″ floppies which were more stable and had higher storage denisty and better overall performance and capacity.  This was extremely well known at the time.  It was the first fact that anyone would know about any of these machines.  The 5.25″ world included the old IBM compatibles, when they were still called that, the Apple //e and other ancient 8bit machines.  The original Mac, Atari ST and Amiga were 16 bit (but remember that they actually showed a 32bit Amiga that was about seven generations into the series and actually had a hard drive installed.)

Since the Amiga didn’t have a 5.25″ floppy drive, they stuck the floppy into the IBM XT!  Watching the show without sound you can’t even tell that the Amiga is supposed to be being used.  It is only mentioned in the dialogue and the show actually uses the IBM.  Visually the show is completely about the IBM XT but audibly the show is a mismash of dialogue that sounds like a five year old attempting to sound like they know something by spewing gibberish with authority.

Then, they show this IBM XT (a device which normally came with a monochrome green screen) that displayed 80 character columns of text playing a modern, late 90s, 3D rendered video that had more colors in it than the IBM could display (which was like 16), higher resolution than the IBM could produce (by orders of magnitude) and all of that before having it do graphical rendering that was still out of reach of most home video game enthusiasts by 2000.  They made the implication that there has been no hardware advancements since 1984 (when the XT was popular) and that the only differences between then and now is that programmers are smarter now and know how to write 3D games!

What really amazes me is that all of the people involved in producing an expensive show like Bones from writers to producers to actors to stagehands, prop people, etc.  Not one single person figured out that the scene was so wrong as to be confusing to the most casual observer.  How can so little thought be put into a show so expensive to make?  How can so much work be involved in making a scene so inaccurate?  Just having the Amiga in front of them for ten seconds, even if they had never seen a computer before, would have filled them in on what cables to plug in and what type of floppy the would need for the scene.  And the year or manufacture is probably printed on the back.

An eight year old with Google who had never heard of Commodore, Amiga, IBM, floppies, etc. could have researched all of this for them in minutes.  Most of the people working on these shows are older than eight, I would venture to guess, and probably many of them older than me which means that they should be exceedingly aware of all this already without any need for any research at all.  They lived through these eras.  They watched the 5.25″ floppy fade away in 1984.  They should remember computers that only had green screens.  They should know that sitting one computer on top of another looks weird and that everyone would see two computers sitting there and notice that the one they mention isn’t even plugged in and that the floppy was placed into the wrong one.

Seriously people.  Hollywood is so sloppy, why do we watch this stuff?  Why not film Kindergarteners putting on shows at school?  At least then we have some guarantee that those kids at least attended half a year of Kindergarten.  I can’t be so sure about the people making these shows.