it’s unix, not eunuchs

Solid State Drives are on the way to Sun.  Some of us in mid-range computing have been dying for this development to come to prime time and frankly I’m excited.  Currently, most Solaris servers are using Solaris Disksuite or Veritas in order to mirror the root drive.  This provides the ability for the computer to still boot and return to service, even if one of the hard drives has failed.

But if you had a SSD for a rootdisk, it would consume about 25% of the power that the current drives do.  Also, they’re much faster, cutting boot time in half.  And ultimately the most important feature is that they last 7 times longer between failures.  Statistics were taken from this post.

Also, SSDs tend to not actually actually catastrophically fail instead they begin to throw more and more read errors.  This error rate would be accommodated for by any modern filesystem and would result in a minor slow down and an error being thrown to the kernel.  After enough gradual degradation, I’m sure Sun would agree that the drive is toast and then agree to replace it.

But think about this for a moment, it’s entirely possible that SSDs would become the defacto platinum spark plug for servers.  If a Solid State rootdisk lasts seven times longer than current rootdisks, it’s entirely possible that most Sun servers will meet their End Of Life schedule before the hard drive actually even fails.

I’d love to talk to anyone who’s had some hands on time with some of this hardware.

My hard drive woes are fixed. Remember that hard drive I bought for the DVR? Finally got it returned to newegg(it died shortly after I started using it.) Now I tossed it in my main computer that’s been running poorly lately. So I mounted it up on my sata channel. At first it wouldn’t mount. Checked the manual and find that I have to set a DIP switch. Got that knocked out and then the OS blue screened. Crossed my fingers and just tried again. It booted.

And surprise surprise….it turns out I have on-board SATA raid. So install the drivers and get moving. In the meanwhile I pull up the PDF on the hardware. Even better. The system doesn’t have to build a RAID from scratch. I can move data to this drive then add a backup drive later on and it will migrate the data to the new drive. So next paycheck I’ll dump $110 into another Seagate Barracuda at newegg and I’ll be sporting two RAIDs on the same system. Plus I can put a new XP load on this system(it’s 30 months old.) and really enjoy life.

http://www.fcw.com/article88262

Using commercial, off-the-shelf hardware, to support government communication needs is how purchases should be made. Assigning law enforcement specific radio spectrum and then having them buy new hardware across the nation, plus put up new towers is patently absurd. My city, Belton, is asking that we nearly double our taxes in order to purchase a half-million dollar tower so that they can use new spectrum that’s been freed up by some TV stations going to HDTV. If it was the county sheriff asking for this allotment I MIGHT understand as coverage in the countryside is spotty. But this is for the city police. That is absurd. Buy them all a mobile phone and be done with it. Stupid politicians.

did a little more analysis on the messed up system. I did install new hardware recently, so I disconnected it and it’s not solved the problem. I also installed some new drivers recently, but I backed them out and the reliability is still not high. I think I’m going to roll my system restore points all the way back to last Sunday and see what that gets me.

I’m also looking at the firmware level on the motherboard and it’s pretty old. They have a new revision available, but I’d like to back out my system restore points and see what I get. Then I guess I could attack the firmware upgrade and then possibly install the new hardware again.

Works kind of annoying at the moment. I’m on a 3 person team now. I don’t really like being on small teams. The on-call is pretty tight and if you’re the technical guy you’re basically on-call all of the time. Then this holiday my boss decides to head to South Dakota and my other co-worker takes off for the whole weekend too. I’m on-call, so I shouldn’t gripe so much, but seriously we’re in the middle of a horrendous migration and we have several outstanding production issues. There’s a time to step up to the plate and no one did.

I mean, basically at this point my days go kind of like this.

1. Wake up. This can happen at any time. It happened at 3AM today.
2. Figure out what broke while I was asleep. This may take a while. I try and eat if I can while I’m figuring it out.
3. Triage. Fix things that are horribly wrong.
4. Work-out. This usually means go for a run. This seems to be upsetting my co-workers but seriously I’m working a ton of hours. If I don’t get in the early morning run it just won’t happen. Only problem is that some nights I’m up to 3AM working on problems and then I sleep in(if I can.) but I still go running after my triage.
5. Official work begins. Most days this is where I make it into the office. If the boss is in then I’ll review with him what I’ve recently found and am concerned about. I get my priorities from him and then go work them.
6. Eating. It occurs at my desk as the day progresses. If I don’t pack a bunch of food it’s guaranteed that I’ll be stuck at work and grumpy. Menu plans are really helping me with this.
7. Second Workout. This doesn’t happen too often, but if things seem in hand and I’m feeling good I’ll jaunt out on the bike or swim or something.
8. Work some more. At this point I’m trying to shut the day down. By now we need to know what work we have to do tonight, who’s going to do it, do we have procedures, and figure out who’s going to be in the next day.
9. Drive home. Before this happens I usually have something to kick off. Some job that’s not done yet. So I start it running and head home.
10. Work more. I get home, login and see how things are going. I may be able to grab food at this point, just sort of depends on how the task is going.
11. Chores. Yeah right. Some nights I get stuff done. Most I don’t. The house stinks of cat, dog, and me and I don’t even notice anymore. Friends don’t come over too often.
12. Work more. I’m running about 70% of the events at this point. So if there’s night work to be done, I’ll be up doing it. I don’t sleep well early in the evening so it’s rare for me to nap before the work gets done.
13. Send out my final emails for the night. They detail what happened and let everyone know that YES I’m still up and working. I don’t even state that I’ll be in late the next day anymore. If they can’t figure that out I’ll rip their heads off.
14. Sleep. Fitfully and usually on the couch.
15. (REPEAT AS NECESSARY)

Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy to be gainfully employed, but I wish my co-workers would pick up a bit of the slack too. I think one thing that really pissed me off last weekend is my co-worker Chris asked if I could cover his on-call on Sunday because they’re celebrating Thanksgiving. And yet I’m stuck being on-call and can’t visit with my parents during the official on-call rotation. I mean my parents piss me off and all, but I’d like to see them occasionally. It helps them to not nag me for a few months. They can verify that I’m alive and not dead in the bottom of a barrel. Somehow the telephone can’t fix that fear with them.

But back to Chris. I figure, hey, if you’re doing Thanksgiving a week early, why don’t we just trade the whole week. You’d not have on-call during your family celebration and likewise for me. Oh no, that’s no good because he really NEEDS his vacation. Also, he wasn’t asking to just swap one day of on-call with me, he was flat out asking that I work one of his days with no retribution.

At that point I pretty much just said, NOPE, sorry I’m going hunting on Sunday I can’t help you. And despite all that I still got called on Sunday to work a problem. And it’s a problem that I had already worked once and wrote a document on how to fix it. I published the document to the group. This is what I mean about small teams and being the technical guy.

And seriously the guys don’t really understand that this isn’t going to work in the long-run. I’m running a good bit now. But wait until it warms up and I’m riding 5 hours each weekend. But hey, that’s a management problem I suppose. Well, I’ve ranted enough. It’s time for me to go check and see if any of my processes need attention. Maybe I’ll have some breakfast. A little protein shake or something.

it’s to fix up my wireless woes. So I’m going to give Fedora 3 a shot… It’s still in beta so hopefully it’s not awful. I only had 32MB in the box and Fedora puked on that. So I threw in a big stick of 256M Viking memory, but it’s crap and threw errors immediately on memtest86. So I moved it around to make sure it’s not a slot issue. And it wasn’t the slot so I tossed that stick. Then I cannibalized another box and upped it to 64m. That seemed to make it happy. I’m going to let it run on memtest for a bit before I invest any more time in it…perhaps till tomorrow evening.