Today, immediately after lunch, I got IO errors from my laptop hard drive (ironically while attempting a file system dump). Words to the affect of “oh gosh and bother” exiting my mouth and the decision was made to go get a new drive.

Well… one “shortcut” to the computer store later, have new HD (will travel).

Backup from previous night, xfsrestore here I come. And a good number of hours later… about 1.5million files restored.

I do wish file systems had REPEATABLE_READ though… that would be nice.

http://www.dolphinics.com/ make this cool SCI socket hardware that can be used with MySQL Cluster (for example, like their example setup).

Their tech provides high performance (350MB/sec avail to the user) and low latency (worst case is like 2 or 3 micro seconds to send 512bytes to another node). So can pretty much kick the butt of gig-e.

We could probably do some really cool stuff with boosting performance (even further) when using SCI with some of the things I have in mind for multithreaded ndb kernel - basically changing some of the ways we do sending and receiving signals and improvements in shared memory stuff.

Big points from the presentation are:

• small messages sent using basic CPU …

Mike Hillyer?s Personal Web Space » Blog Archive » It?s Alive!!

Mike’s laptop went funny, but he had a backup of his presentation.

So, something about my backup strategy.

I have a policy that anything that I really care about is backed up. If it’s not backed up, I don’t care about it.

e.g. while I’d be sad if my mythtv box suddenly had a disk failure, I can always put in a blank disk and I don’t loose too much.

My email is fetched onto a server at home, and I use offlineimap to keep an up to date (nearly) copy on my laptop. I also, at least weekly, burn the entire thing to DVD (it still fits, when bzip2 compressed).

Also, for all that other stuff that is pretty important (/home), I do a xfsdump to external disk.

I also now (on a paranoid spending trip at Fry’s) have a small …

I bought a new toy yesterday (and about time I did). A Logitech presentation clicker thingy:

It has the laser pointer, the forward and backwards slide buttons and, arguably most interestingly, a built-in timer with vibrate alert.

What’s annoying is that the forward/back is done by page up and page down - and this doesn’t work for the “appear on click” thing for OO.org. Luckily for me, I just about never use that “feature” as the in version of OOo that Ubuntu ships in their stable release (5.04) is just too darn buggy in that area. I do sometimes wonder if people use the stable release of their product for any real work.

But it’s a nice little device and seems to be an improvement of the using the remote control feature of my phone to do the same thing (if you didn’t do …

I’m currently watching a Solaris 10 install under QEMU on my laptop. It seems to be taking a while, but getting there.

(I got a Solaris 10 DVD in my AUUG shwag)

Basically, I want to play with DTrace and see how easy it is to do things with it. Solaris seems to be the requirement. I don’t want to have a partition for it nor run it as a primary OS. So, qemu it is.

I can also then use the funky disk image foo with qemu so that i don’t waste a lot of space (mmm… sparse disk images).

For a 7GB qemu-img created filesystem, used intirely as /, it seems that there’s 128MB overhead for having the file system. The installer is chugging away writing things and this seems to be constant.

So, all in all i should end up using a bit less than 3GB of real disk …

GNU/Linux and the K750i Bluetooth Remote

Works with my K700i too. Useful to know that the remote control stuff works. will be great for presentations :)

So I picked up my new laptop on friday. It’s an ASUS V6V - nice and fast, light, good resolution screen and lots of disk and RAM (it came with 1GB, I’ve got 2GB).

Anyway, the transfer of data from my PowerBook went fine. I waited for xfsdump to dump /home from the powerbook to a firewire drive (and for “waiting” I do mean going out and seeing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - which was very good).

Installing Ubuntu on the ASUS went like a dream. Everything, and i do mean everything worked out-of-the-box with only one tweak. That was uncommented the ACPI sleep configuration option do-dad in /etc/default/acpi-something-foo to get suspend to ram working.

The WEP didn’t work in the installer, so I initially just used the GigE adapter until the first reboot.

The firewire drivers don’t really behave with this laptop atm… that dreaded “aborted sbp2 …