Toys,_freedom,_technocracy

title: Toys, Freedom, Technocracy date: 2005-02-19 11:13:27

I haven't posted in a while about work, so I thought I'd put in some updates here. Plus, I've come down with a cold, so I'm too sick to think hard about checksums for router firmware right now. :-)

I've been on the receiving end for some fun toys of late. First off, I've taken delivery of three HP Procurve 2650 managed switches; these are going to replace our dumb (and problematic, though a lot less so since I've been making it a policy to get rid of cheap-ass switches bought from London Drugs) Dlink switches. Not a moment too soon, either; we have 96 ports right now, and I think there are about four free. I think I'm going to have to get some shelves to install them in our current rack; it's one of those telecom ones, so they'd be hanging out behind, and I suspect they'd tip it right over. It'll be nice to be able to do VLANs, track traffic, and so on. My MRTG page is already getting big; this'll push it up to 11.

Next, I've received two Adaptec SCSI cards and some rack rails. Doesn't sound like much fun until you combine it with the Promise RAID array and the new four-post rack that's coming next week (allegedly). This'll take care of our disk space problems for a year or two; right now, I've got the home directories of our Windows users spread over four disks in two servers, and I'm running out of room on all of them. There's some stuff that could be cleaned up, but for the most part it's needed; we've got some wicked big log files for regression tests that, for example, have taken up the lion's share of a 200GB disk. The Promise array holds, what, 15 disks? At the very least I should be able to get a couple terabyte, which should be good for a while. (I did some calculations a while back; for as long as I've been at this company (2 years in April), our storage requirements have doubled about every 6-8 months, and there's no sign that it's slowing down.)

After that, we've got an evaluation copy of VMware 5. Just like the last time I checked out VMware, I'm using it to try out some Windows changes. Right now I'm trying out Daisy, a GPL'd automatic patch applier thingy for W2K. (XP support past SP2 will come with version 3; we're nearly all W2K, so it's not a big deal right now.) For the most part, I'm happy. There's a couple little things that are funky (W.Update sez no patches needed, Daisy sez 4 are needed) but it's a fuck of a lot better than going in every month and running W.Update manually (yeah, I know). So far I've been spending my time downloading all the fucking patches (<rant> Why the fuck doesn't MS have some sort of pattern for patch URLS? WTF is with these random strings of letters between "download.microsoft.com" and "W2K-patch-ENU.exe"? And why the fuck did they wait so long to standardize switches for non-interactive, non-forced rebooting application? </rant>); the next step is seeing how well Daisy works w/o interaction. (Probably just fine, from what I've seen.) Man, it'll be nice to drop patches on the FTP server, then tell everyone their computer will reboot at midnight...

As for VMware itself, it's a huge help. It's absolutely amazing to be able to revert to a snapshot; I don't even want to think about how long it'd take to duplicate that with a real machine, even if I had a fully automated install (which is my next goal after automated patch management). Aside from the little oops (and hey, it's beta), I've got no complaints at all about VMware as a program. I'm not really stress-testing it, though, so I don't know how well it'd do for some of the bigger programs we need to run at work. Of course, I don't really have any way of finding out, either; the EULA sez "You may not disclose the results of any benchmark test of the Software to any third party without VMware's prior written approval." Ah, proprietary software...

...which segues nicely into another toy I got this week: my membership package from the Free Software Foundation. I got my LNX-BBC-based bootable membership card (#2961!), plus another CD with the source code...of course. Browsed through it just to look at the code, since it seemed like I really should (and also because I wanted to see if I could understand the source code for cksum...at 10 o'clock at night while waiting for cold medicine to kick in. Uh-huh).

I also got my copy of Larence Lessig's Free Culture, a welcome letter that spent its first paragraph talking about the tax implications of that free book and looked like it was typeset with Tex (interesting -- it reminded me so much of everything I saw that came out of the University of Waterloo's math department...tests, newsletters, for-sale posters, everything), and the last two newsletters, including one with a picture of a very unimpressed-looking Bradley Kuhn (who has a poker journal. Who knew?) posing for the camera with SCO's subpoena.

I admit to being a bit unsettled reading one of RMS' essay/editorials for the newsletter, in which he said we were all working toward a future where all software would be Free. The religious overtones were hard to avoid, not to mention the similarities to exhortations from the left about when the workers would overthrow the shackles of capitalism. I'm NOT saying "RMS is a commie" or anything like that; it's the...I don't know, the feel of a small group of people desperately trying to make changes they believe in that's familiar. I used to get the same feeling when I came across the Technocracy newsletters at the library. (Bring back the Technocracy fliers, whoever you are...they're sorely missed.)

But then I remember EULAs like VMware's, or like the one for a program we use at work that said something like "Despite whatever rights you have under law, you give them all up by using this software" and "You're not allowed to tell anyone the terms of this EULA" (fuzzy on that last one, so don't quote me -- but I'm pretty sure it was something like that). And I realize just how much Freedom I take for granted, how much of it is due to the FSF and many others, and how that freedom is important enough to be capitalized.

Anyhow...qemu booted the membership card very nicely. It seemed astonishingly quick to start, until I realized that it wasn't simulating the usual BIOS check -- I hadn't thought before about how long that can add to boot times. Memory check, disk detection (IDE), disk detection (SCSI), bootloader...it adds up. One of these days I'd love to get some real server hardware to play with; I've heard very good stuff about Sun machines, and it'd be interesting to play with some non-x86 hardware (besides the router, I mean). I really should go see Cal and get a SparcStation...of course, they are a lot cheaper on eBay.

I also got a desktop machine of my own at work. Ever since I started, I've been using a machine that's been used as many different servers: spam filtering, backup NIS, backup, FreeBSD source code repository... I'd put in a request for a machine of my own, but (since I'm the one who had to buy it) nothing much got done.

A couple of weeks ago, I got a request for a developer sandbox, so I ordered it in, got it set up, then was told that it was no longer needed. Well, sweet! It's a Shuttle, P4, 1GB of memory and a 200GB hard drive. This means a) I can run stuff like VMWare on Debian and b) I no longer have to start full backups on the weekend to make sure my desktop is actually usable on Monday: I can just start full backups on Monday morning, and continue hitting refresh on Slashdot. Oh yeah!

Finally, my wife got a toy too: a new LCD monitor. She had been using this 15" CRT I picked up at a swap meet for $50, but it had started to make ominous brrrZZAAP! electrical noises. Picked up a Benq (you know it's a Benq because when you turn it on, it says "Benq!" for a second or two before you get your desktop) 17" FP 731 on sale after reading the reviews (cheap but decent seemed to be the consensus). No complaints so far, and man I can't belive how big it looks.

Damn tempted to get one for myself...but I think I might order one of these instead while I still can. The situation in Canada doesn't seem quite so dire as down there, but then again where the hell am I going to pick up a Canadian made HDTV encoder card?

...Good god, 1500 words. Post this puppy.