FYT

FYT #1: New Firefox 1.5 Beta. It's great: wicked fast, and they've added drag-n-drop tabs. Slashdot comment pages render in a heartbeat. But it's pissing me off right now for two reasons. First, the Profile Manager only seems to come up if no other Firefox window is running. If there is another window running, it comes up with that profile no matter what arguments you pass (-P, -ProfileManager, -P Profile Name, ). (When I was first writing this entry, I tried that last one just to make sure. When the current profile came up yet again I closed it -- but closed the browser window that had this entry, too. I'm writing this in vi in an xterm now.)

This is irritating because I have two profiles: Default and Wide Open. Default is where I spend nearly all my time; Java, JavaScript, pop-up windows and flash are turned off; AdBlock shoots to kill; animations go once and then stop; I'm asked about cookies. I hate dancing baloney. Wide Open is where I go if I need to visit my bank's website (it's not that wide open, of course), or if there's something that won't work in my Default profile that I'm convinced is worth the effort (which doesn't happen often). Keeping two profiles is much easier than toggling all that nonsense each time.

Second, a lot of the extensions I love aren't yet ready for 1.5 (or at least, don't say they're ready...I seem to remember when the upgrade to 1.0 happened that you could edit some of the extensions directly and just lie about what version was required). Adblock is running -- if it wasn't for that, I don't think I'd be using the new version at all. But Session Saver, Sage and Mozex aren't, and I've come to rely on them. We'll have to see.

FYT #2: I went into work this morning to reboot a couple of servers. I'd let everyone know about it, and got up with my wife at 4.45am. But when I got to the building, the card that let me in the front door would not make the elevators go -- they just sat in the lobby waiting for, I don't know, drugs or Jesus. (Double punishment!) I'd used the card before to make the elevators go, so WTF? (Stairwells are not an option; you can't get into your floor [or any other] using your key or any access card.)

After failing to find a security guard anywhere, I called tenant services for the building. They said that the elevators might be turned off, but they couldn't be sure; I could get a better answer calling back during the week. (Fair enough, since our building's managed by a company that owns buildings all across Canada.) Oh, and security starts at 8am. Fuck. I'll have to reschedule for during the week, but after making sure that I can get in at 6am. Double fuck!

FYT #3: Why am I rebooting servers? Good question: they're running FreeBSD, after all, so it's not like it should need to happen all that often. The answer is: because amd sucks ass through straws. Not only does amd:

1. create a mess of symlinks (people who complain about SysV init symlinks messes need to look at amd: /home/foo symlinked to /net/machine/home/foo symlinked to /.amd/_mnt/machine/host/home/foo, the only place the directory is actually mounted) (interesting: quick Google for sysv init symlink turns up this post by my namesake)

2. interact badly with FreeBSD symlink caching (okay, FreeBSD's fault maybe)

but it will also get wedged sometimes, requiring a reboot -- and don't talk to me about the -r option for amd, because that simply doesn't work.

F'r instance: a while back one guy at worked moved from FreeBSD to Linux. I took the opportunity to give him a bigger hard drive; he'd had a second one, mounted at /home/foo/scratch, because he'd run out of room on the first. Unfortunately, one of the servers in question had /home/foo/scratch mounted at the time through amd -- and when his machine came back online w/no scratch directory, amd/NFS refused to umount it and refused to mount his home directory, because the bogus /home/foo/scratch was blocking it. That's what this morning's reboot was meant to get around. Okay, again, not all amd's fault -- NFS and me, not in that order -- but still.

I mentioned two servers, though, so what about the second? Aha, that's the symlink caching thing. We get around this by running a newer version of amd than is supplied w/FreeBSD; it doesn't have quite so many problems. But I'd missed the second server, and it didn't have the pointer to the newer version of amd. Again, my fault -- I should've caught this a long time ago -- but dangit, it shouldn't be necessary to do this just to restart amd. (I'm setting up cfengine to catch this sort of thing. cfengine rox.)

Minor update re: earlier problems with Vinum and a Maxtor IDE card: I picked up a new RocketRaid 454 that was reputed to work much better, plus had four controllers rather than two. Cheap, too -- $135. Long story short is that it still caused problems, I think; the machine seized up again in the middle of backups, apropos of nothing and with no message or panic. (Took a while for this to happen, though, so it was an improvement. I think I should've taken to heart the warning I got a while back that Vinum was not the most stable of code.