Derek Bodner’s Blog

Found this on Kenny’s LiveJournal page.

From GNOME to KDE and back again: old computing habits are hard to break.

Amen. You don’t realize it until you actually sit down and think about it. You think you’re better than your average computer user, because you make your living working on them. But in the end, we’re all set in our ways. I remember when I switched to Xfce at the recommendation of a friend (previously mentioned Kenny), and at first I rejected it and went back with gnome. After winning me over and using Xfce 4.4+ for 1.5 years, it would be incredibly hard to get me away from my current setup. Not because there aren’t other viable options, but because this is what I know. This is what I’m used to. This is what I like.

As much as I sometimes push people to use what I like, you sometimes forget that they have their own preferences and habits as well. You can make recommendations to someone who’s looking to change, but you cannot change someone who’s happy.

I recently broke down and bought a tivo. I don’t really watch much TV, but I mainly wanted one for sports. I tend to not always get out of work on time, and miss the first half of a lot of Sixers games. It’s also nice to be able to tape college games (It’s going to make tournament time infinitely better), and for the rare shows I do watch, it’ll be nice to know I won’t miss any.

Anyway, I ended up getting a series 2 tivo, mainly because I didn’t feel like paying for a series 3, who are still comparatively expensive. I found a really, really good deal on an 80 hour series 2, so I went with it.

I originally set it up in our bedroom, as my main use for it wasn’t so much for live tv (fast forwarding live tv would be nice, though), but to record stuff when I’m away. The TV in our bedroom was pretty much only used in the mornings, and since the series 2 is only a single tuner, I didn’t want to tie up the TV at prime time recording my sixers games and prevent Elyssa from watching TV during that time.

I then decided to take the cable box out of the bedroom, as we really only watch stations we can get on basic cable in there. I brought that into the living room, and hooked the tivo up to that. I have the cable box without the tivo going to input1 in the tv, and the cable box with tivo going to input2 on the tv. The cable box with the tivo hooked up is on the ground and turned around, as I don’t need to change it since the tivo controls it, and the two boxes signals never get crossed up. So now I can have something recording on the tivo, switch inputs, and still be able to watch live tv. The ghetto dual tuner tivo for a third of the price. All in all, the setups nice. It’s nice not missing the first half of sixers games, that’s for sure. And I’ve been extremely impressed with the tivo interface. I don’t even care if that makes me a non-gnu/linux purist.

nba.com has stats pages for each team (i.e. nba.com/sixers/stats, nba.com/hawks/stats, etc). Visited this morning and the SQL queries were being echo’d out. Oops!

Screenshot.

I’ve spent some time in the Web Hosting Industry, both running my own (small) operation, then working for two years for HostMySite. During this time, I’ve come to frequent various message boards, as I enjoy the industry as a whole. I still browse and take part in these forums, even though I’m not currently actively involved in the industry (except as a client).

However, these forums sometimes scares me. This is a post I saw from the owner of a Web Hosting company that offers managed dedicated servers. Who knows the size of their operation (I had never heard of them before today), but just the fact that someone may fall into the trap of buying a dedicated server and expecting support from them scares me. I saw a thread titled “Large MySQL Migration”. So I click, expecting multi-gig databases, high traffic databases, migrating a replicated setup. Something of the sort. I click on the thread, and here’s his question:

I need to migrate a MySQL DB, in the past I have just created an SQL file and used that method (sometimes having to split the SQL file up) but now the DB is about 50 meg and 733,233 records.

Seriously? A whole 50 megs? That might take you a whole two commands and 30 seconds to complete.

No doubt he had probably only ever used phpMyAdmin, hence his comment about splitting up the files.

It’s irresponsible to provide managed services if your level of competence is that low. You can’t support something you don’t know, and please don’t try to trick people into thinking you can.

Dell’s support has always been unavailable when I’ve tried to get help from them, at least. This is just proof. Click to enlarge.

At home I have an old computer setup with a pair of 500 GB drives running a samba server that I use to store documents, photos, music, etc on so that I can easily access all my stuff from my desktop and laptop, so my girlfriend can access them, anyone else that comes over can access them, etc. I also have vmware server setup with a Windows XP VM running on the server, partly so I have a windows testing environment with IE, and partly so I can rdp into it when I’m out somewhere else so I can access all my documents (I’d rather not setup VNC or X to allow remote connections to my desktop). Well, in the past I’ve connected with rdesktop from my Gentoo workstation at work and tried playing my music collection from work, only to get a DirectSound error in winamp. Tried the same from my Gentoo desktop at work, and got the same result. I never really worried about it too much, because it was never a top priority. I just figured I screwed something up in the VM.

So today I was at a relatives house who runs Windows XP. I remoted into the VPS, and lo and behold, the music played fine. Hrm. Weird. I know sound works on my desktop.

So I try connecting from my Gentoo desktop again, and sound plays fine. Odd. After testing with my Laptop (which dual boots windows) and my desktop, what I’ve found is:
If I startup vmware, and connect to it from Linux first, I get the DirectSound error.
If I startup vmware, connect to it from a windows computer, disconnect, then connect to it from a linux computer, sound works.

I’m sure there’s a logical explanation for this, but it’s escaping me at this time. Eh, whatever. I’ll just be happy sounds working and be happy listening to my full mp3 collection from work.

Notice the dock in the bottom left….
Avant-window-navigator screenshot

I have to say, I actually like it. Not just from an eye-candy perspective, but from a usability perspective as well.

I hope I’m not the only one to get a chuckle out of this:

November 24, 2007 · The MS Explorer, a small cruise ship strikes an iceberg and sinks hours later in icy waters off Antarctica.

I have a server at home that I used as a Samba server, so I can access my stuff from my desktop/laptop, as well as share stuff with Elyssa. I have it setup with two drives, one that I store the primary stuff on (shares, home dir’s, etc), and the other that I rsync the data to every night. I don’t want to set this up as a RAID1. The server only has 2 drive slots, so I don’t want it to be a RAID 1 in case there’s corruption, or in case of the “oh shit” deletion. Now if either of these happen, I have until the wee hours of the morning to catch it and restore from last night’s sync.

Anywho, I wanted to do a re-install, for various reasons (not the least of which was my growing dislike of CentOS). So I did one final sync over to the backup drive, booted off a livecd, and formated the primary drive (as I’ve got everything on the backup drive). Booted into my new environment, set everything up, went to mount the backup drive, only to see that I didn’t notice that CentOS had originally formated both as LVM’s. I haven’t used LVM’s much before, but didn’t think it would be a problem. I ran lvscan, saw the volume was being recognized, went to mount it, and it yelled at me to define the partition type. o_O. It was an ext3 partition … it should have mounted just fine. So I tried to defined the ext3 type, and said it couldn’t mount it (bad superblock was the error, I believe). Ah crap. I just formated one copy I had to re-install the OS. If this copy was toast, I was screwed. I had everything on this server. Music. Family Photos. Important documents. I just sat there staring at my computer for a good two or three minutes.

After the shock wore off, I took an external drive I had, and immediately created a mirror with dd, just to be safe. I then ran PhotoRec on the drive, just to see what I could recover if all else went bad. I was actually impressed with how much PhotoRec did recover, as it was most of the known file types. It was in completely random names, and I would have spent months going through the Photos figuring out what’s what (there are plenty of programs to rename mp3’s/music from the tags, so that wouldn’t have been a problem). But at least I had my data (for the most part).

Then I went back to playing with the ‘bad’ drive. After a while of trying various things, I just ran an fsck on it. Boom. logical volume mounted no problem. Copied data back to the primary drive, formated the backup drive, sync’d the stuff over, and I was back in business. Turned out to be nothing major, but it certainly had me scared for a little while. A drive failure immediately after I removed the redundant data would just be my luck.

After getting the new OS up and running, I installed smokeping on it, and have it testing google, and my 2 personal external servers I have. Comcast has been having some really high latency in the mornings, and whenever I call them up to complain, all I ever get is “we’re not seeing anything on our end”. Now I have something I can verify it with.

I also then installed vmware-server on my newly installed server. I was going to install VirtualBox, as it kinda irks me that vmware can’t run truly headless, as it is dependent on various X11 libs, but it turns out VirtualBox is as well. I guess I could have gone the Xen route, but I haven’t used it in quite a while, and I wanted something I could setup quickly. OpenVZ was out since I wanted both windows and linux. I currently setup a windows vps that I run 24/7, both for applications I use that may require windows, and for my family to login to so they can access the samba share and see any pictures I place on it. I then setup a ‘gentoo server’ for my brother so he can get his feet wet with Linux (without breaking anything of mine). I have gentoo server in quotes because I really just created the virtual environment, and booted it off a minimal install cd iso. If he’s going to learn, he should do so from the ground up.