January 25, 2008: Just Another Manic Friday

I knew that today was going to be a crazy day. They told me yesterday that I had an abnormally large number of deployments scheduled for this evening. So I wasn’t exactly excited rolling out of bed this morning. Not that I don’t like deployments – it’s just that I don’t like them when there are so many that you have to start jumping from one to another which makes you likely to get confused and to make a mistake. It isn’t like they get spaced out evenly throughout the day. They hit all at once around five thirty.

I go in late on Fridays because I always have to stay late and normally no one needs me in the morning. But my BlackBerry was dead today so I decided to log in and check out my mail before heading in just to be on the safe side. I ended up working for two hours before heading out to catch the train.

Josh didn’t leave the apartment until eleven or so so that gave us a chance to hang out while I did some work. It was before ten when I left and he just dropped off my keys with the front desk. It was a short visit but more than most anyone else does. So far, other than our parents and siblings, only Josh and the Ralstons has come down from back home to visit us here. We have been here for two years now!

I grabbed breakfast from Airlie and got onto the PATH. I learned today that the PATH system is actually older than the New York City Subway and is the oldest underground train system in the New York City Metro area. Josh was planning to hit Food for Life for breakfast before heading off to Jersey City to work.

Work was quite busy. I was going crazy all day and was stuck working until rather late. But nothing that I wasn’t expecting so it was okay.

Before leaving the office, Kevin called to see if Dominica and I wanted to do dinner in Jersey City. He and Pam had run into Dominica on her way home so they had already talked to her. It was about twenty minutes before I got to leave the office so we planned to meet at the Newport/Pavona PATH station in Jersey City. That trip is really easy as it is a direct connection from World Trade Center where I get onto the train.

We all had dinner at Raaz, an Indian restaurant right across the street from the train station. Jersey City is so easy to deal with via the PATH. The PATH is almost a dedicated subway system for Jersey City and Hoboken with commuter connections to Newark and Manhattan.

Dinner was really good. Having lived in Newark for so long (Newark isn’t really a part of New Jersey) we have forgotten about the “New Jersey restaurant bill” problem where every restaurant in the state is happy to bring you food but then never brings you the bill and just forgets that you are there. Since we moved to New Jersey it has been completely consistent that no restaurant will ever bring you a bill no matter how much you try to get one. They just refuse to let you leave and yet they completely stop serving you so they don’t make any more money. In fact, it lowers their tips. And worse than that, in cases like tonight, the restaurant was completely full without any seats available and people were turning around at the door and deciding not to eat there even though there were multiple tables waiting half an hour or more to pay and leave after they were done and bored. It is one of the most bizarre business traditions I have ever seen. In New York the bill comes with dinner and if you want coffee and dessert they take the bill back and add that to it. They never take a risk of you taking up valuable real estate if you don’t want to. They don’t kick you out but they sure don’t do anything to make you stay against your will – and I appreciate that.

After dinner we came home and took care of Oreo. Then it was off to bed. I have a lot of work to do this weekend so I am going to be quite busy. No D&D tomorrow, unfortunately.

January 24, 2008: Josh Visits Again

I got to sleep in a little this morning. Oreo stayed in bed until almost nine but I was working by eight or earlier. What a lazy dog he is. His capacity for “taking the day off” is truly astounding.

Last night, I forgot to mention, we got two orders from Amazon. One was a book order that I have had on its way for some time with cool D&D supplies like the Complete Adventurer and Unearthed Arcana along with two lower level adventures to learn from plus a Bill Bryson book, “Bill Bryson’s African Diary” and the fifth season of the Cosby Show on DVD. The other order that came was Dominica’s new handheld GPS device that she needs for her GPS and the New Geography class at Empire State. That order can overnight even though we did normal shipping. We ordered it on Tuesday and it arrived on Wednesday. Talk about service.

Today was quite slow at the “office” but as slow as yesterday.  I managed to get a lot of cleaning done around the apartment which was good because Josh Relyea arrived at the apartment around four in the afternoon.  We hung out until Dominica got home.

While I was walking Oreo tonight we went past “The Spot”, the new nightclub due to open in a few weeks on Commerce in Newark right down the street from us.  Oreo has been inside before a few months ago.  Everyone working there thought that he was the cutest and invited him in and gave him a look around and we chatted about what the place was going to be like.  So we were walking by today and they saw him and invited us in to check the place out.  It has really come a long way and is looking like it is going to be a really nice place.  They will have food and they have a full bar and they are very, very close to us.  Far less than half the walking distance that it takes to get to Sculley’s.

Josh wasn’t up for much tonight so we just walked next door to Food for Life to get ourselves a simple dinner.  It was good.  We took along a bottle of wine to enjoy while we were there too.

We spent the evening, what was left of it, just lounging around the apartment.  Josh and I stayed up until eleven or so.  Josh is taking off tomorrow.  He is just here for one night.

There is no Dungeons and Dragons game this weekend, we didn’t manage to arrange it.

January 23, 2008: Errands and Wine

I got up nice and early this morning and was into the office in the wee hours of the morning.  It worked out well because it gave me a chance to get caught up after yesterday was so busy.  I really prefer to get to work early but it is hard to pull yourself out of bed most days especially when it is only for three days a week because I work from home on Thursdays and don’t get up until it is actually work time and Fridays are shifted late.

I had to run an errand this morning.  So I took a very early lunch and ran out to take care of that.  I am learning to get around Manhattan pretty efficiently now.  It is starting to feel more and more like a place that I live rather than a place that I visit. I grabbed two falafel pitas upon returning to the office and ate at my desk.  The timing worked out perfectly for lunch and everything since I was up so early and, for some reason, everything was exceptionally silent at work today so the early lunch wasn’t a problem at all.  (People expect you to lunch at a certain time and expect emails not to be returned promptly but an early lunch and they might still expect you to get right back to them.  The fact that it is early isn’t actually a problem.)

The whole day ended up being quite slow and I was thankful for the break.  I headed for home around five thirty.  I was in early but my lunch was on the long side so I felt that I should put in some extra time since I don’t plan to log in and work from home this evening.  Tomorrow is a work from home day with Oreo.

I got home and Ryan and Linnea came up to the apartment and we all ordered Nino’s for dinner.  Ryan did the ordering and totally forgot all of my food so we ended up having to place a second order once the first one arrived.

Ryan’s eyes were bothering him so he took off early as he is a little allergic to Oreo.  Oreo just wants to be loved.  He doesn’t want people to be allergic to him!  Linnea hung out for a while and enjoyed some Cabernet Franc with us and talked about D&D.  She is interested in checking out one of our gaming sessions and might want to jump in and try playing.

We were up a little late but not too bad.  Since I am home tomorrow it is fine for me.  Josh is coming to visit tomorrow evening so I have all day to clean and get ready.

January 22, 2008: Back to Work

Back to work today.  It was great having a three day weekend without being on call at all.  I really got a chance to just kick back and relax.  But now going back to work is tough.

I am on Wall Street today and the day turned out to be incredibly busy.  But really, this is to be expected since I had yesterday off but the people that I primarily support are in the United Kingdom where it wasn’t a holiday so I have quite backlog of stuff to take care of.

So my day was crazy and I didn’t get a chance to eat lunch until around three.  I ran over and grabbed a falafel pita sandwich from one of the “Halal” trucks near the office.  (Halal is Arabic for “allowed”.  In Arab countries it is a more general term but in the United States it generally means that the food meets Islamic dietary restrictions.  Roughly analogous to Kosher for Jewish food.  Kosher is not limited to being dietary in meaning in Israel either.)  The food was excellent and quite healthy.  I will be eating that a lot more often.

I headed for home a bit later than usual because there was just so much to do and I didn’t come in extra early this morning like I often try to do.  So I started my chilly walk home around six thirty.

Ryan txt’d me as I was coming into Newark on the train so I txt’d him and Min to call each other and to make plans for dinner.  But Min’s cell phone was dead and the house phone was unplugged from my mid term exam yesterday.  So we didn’t manage to make any plans until I was physically home.  Ryan really wanted to go to Sculley’s so we just walked over there for some food.  Normally Kevin is free tonight but his schedule is all messed up because of the holiday yesterday.  Otherwise we might have attempted squeezing in a D&D game tonight since everyone else was free.

Sculley’s was much better tonight than it has been in the past.  Service was actually very snappy.  We were pleasantly surprised.

It was off to bed on the early side for Dominica and I.  I am going into the office nice and early tomorrow and I don’t want to be exhausted.

How-To Simple Linux Bonding

Bonding or channel aggregation is a means by which multiple Ethernet connections can be used as a single connection with a single IP Address. This is very handy both for performance but also for failure protection. Bonding is accomplished using the Linux Bonding Driver.

This How To will address basic bonding on the Red Hat and SUSE platforms. This is actually very easy. Be aware, however, that if you are connected to a machine remotely over the network that making changes to your networking configuration could cause you to lose your connection. You have been warned.

The first step is to add the Linux Bonding Driver to the modules list. Depending on the version of Linux that you are using this will either be /etc/modules.conf (Red Hat 3 or older) or /etc/modprobe.conf (Red Hat 4 or newer.) You will need to add an alias to the bonding driver. It is traditional to call the first bonded driver instance bond0 which is what we will do here. Add the following line to your /etc/modprobe.conf file:

alias bond0 bonding

To make configurations to this driver you will need to add another line. In our example we are going to use the very simple “Mode 6” bonding method. (Learn about Linux Bonding Modes.) This type of bonding requires no support from your switch which makes it very easy to use. I prefer mode 6 because it accomplishes bidirectional load balancing without any switch configuration. This is a more general purpose type of bonding than most of the other forms. All configuration is taken care of at the server. Add the following line also to /etc/modprobe.conf:

options bond0 miimon=100 mode=6 downdelay=200 updelay=200

This is a good, general purpose set of options for bonding. It is a good place to start. Once you are comfortable with bonding you can tweak it as is appropriate for your needs. Now we need to set up the configuration for the bond0 interface. The file that we will be creating/editing is /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0:

DEVICE=bond0
IPADDR=192.168.0.2
NETWORK=192.168.0.0
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
BROADCAST=192.168.0.255
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROTO=none
USERCTL=no

We will break this down for you. IPADDR is your IP address. This is a generic example. You have to put in your own IP address for this particular Linux host here. NETWORK is the network address of your network. This is not always needed but good to have. If you don’t know your network address it is most likely your IP address but ending with the final octet in zero (in cases when your subnet mask is 255.255.255.0 or /24.) Your NETMASK is your subnet mask. Commonly as shown here. BROADCAST is, again, network dependent but likely your IP address but with the final octet ending in 255 (again in /24 subnets.) ONBOOT should be “yes” unless you do not want the interface to start when the machine starts. BOOTPROTO is “none” unless you are using DHCP or BOOTP for this address which I expect that you are not as that is very uncommon for bonded interfaces. USERCTL is for “user control” and you can do what you like here. For security reasons I leave this as “no”.

Finally some basic configurations of your regular Ethernet interfaces and you will be all set. Here is a sample of /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0:

DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=none
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Ethernet
SLAVE=yes
MASTER=bond0

This is even simpler than the bond0 configuration file. Here we specify the DEVICE name (eth1, eth2, etc. to suit your needs), BOOTPROTO is “none”, ONBOOT should be the same as for bond0. Type as appropriate but almost always “Ethernet”. The most important bits of the file are SLAVE which must be “yes” and MASTER which must be the DEVICE name that you are enslaving to.

At this point your bonded interface is configured. You can now restart your networking to test it out.

/etc/init.d/network restart

For more general installation instructions and for more details check out the great Linux Bonding Mini How To from Kernel.org.