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I had read about the transparent compression that zfs offers. I wanted to verify it so I did, and sent my results off.

As we all know no experiment is valid unless verifiable. I wanted be sure that the transparent compression was actually working so I set up a sample zfs volume and purposefully made some files that i knew would compress really well. I grabbed their sizes, transferred them to another machine without zfs, and compared the size. It works.

1. Create the zfs filesystem
root@machine1:~# zfs create rpool/ztest
root@machine1:~# zfs set mountpoint=/ztest rpool/ztest

as soon as you do this /ztest shows up in the filesystem
root@machine1:~# ls /ztest/

2. enable compression and set it use gzip at level 6 (default)
root@machine1:/ztest# zfs set compression=gzip rpool/ztest

3. create some files you know will compress well
time for i in $(seq 1 3); do echo -n “file${i} “; echo $(seq 1 10000000) >> file${i} 2>&1; done

4. check the compression ratio
root@machine1:/ztest# zfs get compressratio rpool/ztest
NAME         PROPERTY       VALUE        SOURCE
rpool/ztest  compressratio  3.69x        -

5. verify the compression is working by transferring the file to a machine without such an awesome FS, and checking the filesize there
root@machine1:/ztest# du -sh file1
23M     file1
scp -rvp /ztest/file1 root@machine2:/root/file1

root@machine2]# du -sh file1
83M    file1

Conclusion: transparent compression is working, and working rather well on a file I made to be easily compressed.

I figured out how to remotely power cycle the two poweredge 850’s I have remotely. I used dells ipmitool rpms and a little help from the internet.
1. Install the rpms
2. load the needed modules
modprobe ipmi_si
modprobe ipmi_devintf
3. configure the network, and auth as seen here
4. test xxxx

Splunk is google for logfiles. Even the free license is all I would ever need with syslog configured properly on each server.

It seems like a quick way to diagnose system performance problems. Link.

Here is is. I have decided to use a mac mini as my mythtv frontend.

I know I am very late to the Xen party. I try to stay on top of the life changing software, but there have just been so many new things out there over the past two years or so. I tried running a Xen kernel a while back under fedora core 6, but there were serious problems with xen and the ivtv kernel module driving my pvr500. I was using that for my mythtv backend, which the wife had gotten used to. Guess which had to go. FF >> 2007. I am priming my hardware for a complete replacement, and have already ebayed the tuner card. I figured what the heck; I have a free afternoon. Why not install a xen kernel, and experiment? Good times. Between xen and perl I blew the weekend. I started to write a screen scraper for surfthechannel.com but I got bored. Here is what I have so far….

(more…)

They have sample code and videos on the website. The points that I have gathered so far include…

1. Android applications are meant to be coded in java. They used eclipse in the sample video. I can learn java; this should be fun.
2. There is support for Opengl ES; this means if the hardware supports it you can get interfaces that are as good looking as anything on my iphone. (clutter??)
3. There is a high level java layer method to interface with the dialer. The sample app video shows one example.
4. There is a ton of available documentation already, and of coarse a google group.
5. Google is holding a contest for the best application. I for one am going to enter.

Last night I rediscovered wifiroamd. I had been using OS X for so long that I had forgotten what it was like trying to configure wireless under linux; let alone have some form of functional roaming from work to home. I used to always make two scripts.

1. for connecting to my wireless network at home
2. for connecting to the wireless network at work

These scripts would always bring the wireless adapter to a usable state via ifconfig, use iwconfig to get on the right channel, essid, etc… then run dhclient, ping something, and echo “OK”. When I was at neither location I would have to get the list of available networks with iwlist then use iwconfig + wpa_supplicant (if it was a wpa enabled network) + dhclient to get a connection. Frankly thats a pain the the ass. Wifiroamd handles all of that and things are seamless. By default it connects to the first unencrypted network with the highest signal reported by iwlist. But that behavior is easily modified.

After initial configuration it “just works”. I have it set up to start on boot. It finds my home network, starts wpa_supplicant, connects to it on the 802.11x layer, gets an ip, and tries to ping the gateway to check for connectivity. If I plug in my cat5, then the two connections are automatically bonded. You read correctly, automatically bonded, not bringing one down and using the other. It comes with samples to do other things like start an opnevpn tunnel on connection. I wonder if it could be extended to help with my other projects??

I know its been a while. I got an RHCE, got a new job, and moved to NYC. I want to build a GSM -> UMA tool. I can use wifiroamd.

Port upgrade all, installs all ie. tells darwinports to install everything in the tree.
Port upgrade installed; naturally just upgrades the ports you have installed.