$foo =~ s/baz/bum/;
The saga of the UPS continues. Yesterday I got the SNMP card set up and working. I also found this Cacti template, which promised lots of pretty graphs. But there were a few bumps along the way.
First, Cacti was convinced that the UPS was down. Actually, it took me a while to figure this out because the logs didn't say anything abou this host at all. Eventually I tracked it down to Cacti using SNMP queries to see if it was up; turns out that this machine doesn't like being queried at the OID 0.1, and just doesn't respond. Changing the upness-detecting algorithm (heh) to TCP ping did the trick nicely.
Next, the graphs for the UPS were still not being produced, even
though the RRDs were now being updated. I got the debug info for a
graph and ran the rrdtool command by hand. The RRD does not contain
an RRA matching the chosen CF was the response.
This thread showed a lot of people having the same problem. Since
some of these problems were fixed by an upgrade, I did so; there were
a few CentOS updates waiting for that machine anyhow. That made it
worse: no graphs were being shown now. rrdtool said that there were
no fonts present, so maybe fontconfig was out of order. Installing
dejavu-lgc-fonts did the trick nicely, and I got my graphs back.
Well, all except the UPS ones I was after in the first place. I was still getting the error about not containing the chosen CF. Well, when all else fails keep reading the forum, right?
The rrdtool command used the LAST function; this was the culprit. If
I ran s/LAST/AVERAGE/g on the command, it worked a treat. Thus, one
option would have been to edit the template. However, I decided on an
alternate approach, suggested in the forum: I removed the UPS RRDs,
went to Data Sources -> RRAs in the Console menu, selected each RRA
in turn and added LAST to the consolidation function.
Finally! Whee! Except for one: the graph of voltage vs input frequency. I still don't know what this means to me, but I wasn't about to give up now.
Again, rrdtool provided the error: "For a logarithmic yaxis you must
specify a lower limit > 0". Bug reports to the rescue: Console
-> Graph Templates -> Voltage/Freq, and set Lower Limit to 0.1.
All that and I'm still the only one looking at these graphs. Man, I should frame them.
I'm back at work after a week off. The UPS control panel continues to work (!), but there is no word back from the manufacturer (says the contractor who installed the thing and filed the ticket). I find this troubling; either the manufacturer really hasn't got back to us yet (bad), or I should have insisted on being a contact for the ticket. I'll have tos ort this out tomorrow.
Spent much of my day tearing my hair out over mod_proxy_html. Turns out that, by default, it strips the DTD from the HTML it proxies; this is a problem for one app that we're proxying. Not only that, the DTDs it does support are HTML, XHTML, and either with a "Transitional"/Legacy flag — but no URI to a DTD, like the one pointing to the Loose DTD that our app uses and the damned thing threw to the floor. (Sorry, brain cells on strike today and my ability to write clearly is going downhill.)
You can specify your own DTD, including a URI (undocumented feature, whee!), and thus put back in the original — but it doesn't append a newline, there's no way to append a newline that I could figure out, and so it mushes the DTD together with the first html opening tag and makes baby Firefox cry and render the page badly.
My rule of thumb for a long time was that if I start lppooking at
source code, I'm in over my head. I'm starting to think that may not
be entirely true anymore, that I've advanced to the point where I can
read C (say) and generally understand what's going on. But when I
start looking for API documentation for Apache 2.2 (surprisingly hard
to find) to find out if, say, ap_fputs or apr_pstrdup chomp
newlines or something (near as I can tell, they don't), or just what
AP_INIT_TAKE12 takes as arguments…well, then I am in over my
head. If nothing else, I don't want to make some silly error
because I don't know what the hell I'm doing. (That's not a slam
against the Debian folks; I just mean that I felt shivers when I read
about that, because I dread making the same sort of highly-visible,
catastrophic error) (unlike the rest of the planet, you understand).
I can't believe it...my youngest son, after nearly three weeks of being up four or five times each night, slept nearly all the way through without a break: he only woke up at 1am and 5:15am, which is close enough to my usual wakeup time as makes no difference. It was wonderful to have a bit of sleep.
This comes after staying up late (11pm!) on Sunday bottling the latest batch of beer, a Grapefruit Bitter recipe from the local homebrew shop. You know, it really does taste like grapefruit, and even this early I'm really looking forward to this beer.
My laptop has a broken hinge, dammit. I carry it around in my backpack without any padding, so I guess I'm lucky it's lasted this long. Fortunately the monitor still works and mostly stays upright. I've had a look at some directions on how to replace it; it looks fiddly, but spending $20 on a new set of hinges from eBay is a lot more attractive than spending $100. Of course, the other consideration is whether I can get three hours to work on it….But in the meantime, I've got it on the SkyTrain for the first time in a week; it's been hard to want to do anything but sleep lately.
Work is still busy:
I'm trying to get tinyMCE and img_assist to work with Drupal
Contacting vendors to look at backup hardware. So far we're looking at the Dell ML6010 and the Sun SL500. They're both modular, which is nice; we've got (low) tens of TB now but that'll ramp up quickly. The SL500 seems to have some weird things; according to this post, it takes up to 30 minutes to boot (!) and you can't change its IP address without a visit from the service engineer (!!). Those posts are two years old, so perhaps things have changed.
Trying to figure out what we want for backup software, too. I'm used to Bacula (which works well with the ML6010) and Amanda, but I've been working a little bit with Tivoli lately. One of the advantages of Tivoli is the ease of restoring it gives to the users…very nice. I'm reading Backup and Recovery again, trying to get a sense of what we want, and reviewing Preston's presentation at LISA06 called "Seriously, tape-only backup systems are dead". So what do we put in front of this thing? Not sure yet…
Speaking of Tivoli, it's suddenly stopped working for us: it backed up filesystems on our Thumper just fine (though we had to point it at individual ZFS filesystems, rather than telling it to just go), then stopped; it hangs on files over a certain size (somewhere around 500kb or so) and just sits there, trying to renew the connection over and over again. I've been suspecting firewall problems, but I haven't changed anything and I can't see any logged blocked packets. Weird.
Update: turned out to be an MTU problem:
I had no idea there were GigE NICs that did not support Jumbo frames. Though maybe that's just the OpenBSD driver for it. Hm.
At last: I'm finally coming to the end of working with the verdammnt web registration forms. We're going from our awful hack of a glued-together mess of Mambo and custom PHP, to something that'll mainly be Drupal with no custom code. Allegedly it's six weeks 'til launch date; the registration forms in use right now will limp along 'til they're no longer needed (end of the summer).
The registration form I'm working on now is not complicated in the absolute sense, but it's the most complicated one we've got. Last year I was afraid to touch the (old, legacy, ugly) code, and mostly just changed dates. This year I thought "fuck it" and rewrote nearly all of it, using the tools and skills I'd picked up in the meantime. (I'm still not a great programmer, understand, but I have improved some over last year.)
After a full day banging my head against it, I'm finally coming to the point where I'm pretty confident that the code will do what it's supposed to. And that's a relief. Therefore, in the stylee du Chromatic, I give thanks to:
In other news...just downloaded the second dev preview of Indiana, which I'd managed to not hear about at all (the preview releases, that is). I love university bandwidth; 640MB in about 1 minute. Sweet. I'll give it a try at home and see how it feels.
I've just finished reading the summaries of LISA '07 in the latest issue of ;login:. I feel…incredibly left out. I'm starting to think this profession might not be such a simple thing, you know, man? Sir? The presentations on autonomic computing have left me feeling a bit like a buggy whip maker with his nose to the grindstone.
And yes, it's a way off, and yes, small shops and generalists will probably be around for a while to come. But I'm not sure how much I want to keep being at a small shop. Which means learning the big stuff. Which, natch, is hard to do when you're trying to figure out how to properly test registration forms. Sigh.
But: I just stuck my head out a door at work and saw a chickadee. It chirped for a while, sitting on a tree near our building, then flew off. On a rare sunny day in Vancouver in Frebruary, after a week of messed-up sleep and feeling like I've been spinning my wheels, this is nice.
https://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=292329&cid=20539853 (NSFW, probably)
This is how I imagine Samuel L. Jackson leading off a conversation with the writers of the PHP language (edited to be less obscene and offensive).
In the name of all that is holy and right, please explain to me why
the fuck PHP's preg_replace() takes delimiters for the first
argument, but not the second. IOW, Perl's
$foo =~ s/baz/bum/;
becomes
preg_replace('/baz/', 'bum', $foo);Yes, I should've just RTFM. You're completely right. But this just bit me in the ass, after spending 10 minutes wondering WTF was going wrong, and a little fucking consistency goes a long fucking way.
One of the things I've been doing at work is writing registration forms for conferences. Natch, each one is slightly different, and I've never been quite sure I've been doing it right. Thus, WWW::Mechanize has been a fucking godsend to me.
But, as each of the forms are slightly different, each script is slightly different as well. If only my test script could parse the form's configuration file. Too bad the config file, like the form itself, is written in PHP.
Or is it? For what to my lumbering (yes, they lumber) eyes should appear, but CPAN's PHP parser and PHP::Include, which I think is more my size. Sweet!