Dec. 5, 2009
Telco analyst calls out the lying ISPs about bandwidth hogs
Benoit Felten, an Telco analyst Yankee Group, calls out ISPs for claiming to suffer the effects of users who hog their precious bandwidth. He points out that no ISP has ever justified the existence of this class of users, nor have they ever released data about the usage of these hogs nor any other subset of their user population. Yet Time Warner Cable, amongst others, uses the "existence" of these users to justify arbitrary, and I would claim exceedingly low, bandwidth caps after which they gouge users with additional fees. It's nice to see someone close to the industry finally saying what a lot of us on the outside have been thinking and trying to shed light on for a long time.
He also lays down a gauntlet in front of the ISPs challenging them to provide him with usage data that he could analyse to understand their assertions a small number of aggressive users have such a large impact on the experience of the many. So he's not just throwing stones, he's asking the ISPs to provide real, raw, hard data to back up their assertions via independent analysis.
Dec. 3, 2009
App Engine and Bloog not getting along
So I noticed that the home page wasn't loading, and apparently a few others noticed too that something in the new version that Google has started pushing to it's servers breaks Bloog. I pushed my fix to github, which disables the Tag list on the hope page for the time being till the issue can be really fixed.
I basically took the AppEngine code for the method that was causing the error, and pulled it into the Bloog code, changing as needed to get it to run there. I can now load my homepage, edit posts (as this proves), etc.
Nov. 30, 2009
Gotchas while migrating an existing Ubuntu install to Software RAID (MDADM)
There are a lot of HOWTOs out there to migrate or setup software RAID on Linux. So here's my two cents on the WTF moments I encountered:
I noticed after moving to booting off the RAID array the first time, edits to /boot/grub/menu.lst were no longer showing up at boot, no matter what combination of grub, root, setup, or grub-install I was running. I then noticed grub-install was printing an odd message about probe issues, but was then saying it ran without errors. I ran grub-probe -v and found it was having a problem on my second drive, which had a yet unformatted extra partition that was not in any way related to the RAID arrays. When it was scanning that second drive it was printing an "unknown filesystem" message. Once I formated that partition to EXT3 grub-install no longer had any suspicious/error looking lines.
The other issue I had was with booting off the new disk. When I'd boot with root (hd1,0) the RAID drive didn't seem to come up right, and the kernel would timeout waiting for /dev/md0 on boot. The directions I'd found always said to run grub and then do the following commands:
root (hd0,0)
setup (hd0)
root (hd1,0)
setup (hd1)
I stumbled upon another set of instructions that said not to change the root between the two setups, and once I did this and rebooted things worked when booting with root(hd1,0):
root (hd0,0)
setup (hd0)
setup (hd1)
I should point out that the second grub menu.lst entry still references root (hd1,0), it's just the grub command line setup that I left root(hd0,0) active.
Sept. 18, 2009
Recovering SQL Server Cluster Resource Types using cluster.exe on the command line
At work we had an issue with a SQL cluster that mysteriously went down, due to the SQL Resources having been deleted. As part of the Server team's efforts to restore functionality, the SQL Resource Types were also deleted. Among the litany of issues we had to work through to get SQL back up and running, we had to piece together how to get the Resource Types back so we could successfully setup the Resources again.
The following steps document what we needed to do and in no way do I promise this will work for you, not break things worse, etc. You should use values from another working SQL cluster if you have one, the ones here were copied from another SQL cluster that was similarly configured.
- cluster.exe RESTYPE "SQL Server" /CREATE /DLLNAME:SQSRVRES.DLL /ISALIVE:60000 /LOOKSALIVE:5000
- cluster.exe RESTYPE "SQL Server Agent" /CREATE /DLLNAME:SQAGTRES.DLL /ISALIVE:60000 /LOOKSALIVE:5000
- Add the SQL Server Resource via the Cluster GUI including the proper dependencies etc.
- Add the SQL Server Agent Resource via the Cluster GUI
- Follow the MS documented registry hacks to get the proper information back to allow the Clustered instances to start. NOTE: This has to be added on all nodes in the cluster individually.
- Verify it runs from the command line: C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Binn>sqlservr.exe -sMSSQLSERVER
- Verify it runs from the command line as the service account using runas.
- The Services should now start correctly on the local machine (not in the cluster).
- Stop the Services and bring them up via the Cluster.
May 5, 2009
Information Week needs to fact check instead of cashing their Intel checks
"The 5500 is really the first chip to escape from the personal computing bias of the original x86 chips. It has a memory controller built onto the chip instead of off-loaded to a separate dedicated chip, reducing latencies encountered as a VM's operating system manages the memory that its application is using."
That's all well and good ... except AMD chips have done this since 2006, so Intel is "cutting edge" by staying 3 years behind the curve. Granted the article doesn't explicitly say "AMD has yet to do this" but it also goes to great lengths not to say "the first Intel chip to not suck by including 20 year old technology."
Makes me wonder just how much ad money comes into Information Week from Intel, considering anyone who knows anything about chip architecture would tell you this has been a huge advantage for AMD the last several years as the CPU was so much faster than everything else in the box you needed to do everything you could to feed it information faster. And when you're talking computers, one speaker at a time 1980s bus technologies are not usually mentioned in the same sentence as "fast."
Of course Information Week targets the people writing the checks, who know nothing about hardware, and will tell their peons "we should buy Intel servers because they made this great technological leap that no one else has yet. Kind of like how at work we moved from Legato backup to CommVault backup (as far as I can tell the only worse backup product than Legato) when suddenly the Legato ads in Information Week stopped and the CommVault adds started up. It's always a sad day when marketing outweighs technology, but if it's good enough for Microsoft why shouldn't everyone else do it too, right? I hope the publish my response to the editors.
April 17, 2009
Time Warner Cable backtracks from evil cap plan
The power of complaining wins yet another battle. MSNBC is reporting that due to public and political outcry Time Warner Cable is abandoning it's efforts to introduced metered and tiered internet services. This is a big win for network neutrality as any limits on what, how much, and who on the internet violate the basic principles it was founded on. This is like if your phone company sold you long distance service, but then told you if you make more than 20 calls a month, regardless of their duration they would start charging you an extra dollar per call. People would never stand for it on the phone network, or road systems, but because normal people don't understand how the internet works, they assume that the providers will do the right thing. History has proven time and time again that's just not the case.
April 14, 2009
Time Warner 0, Eric Massa 1
Wired has coverage of NY's Democratic Congressmen Eric Massa's attempts to pass legislation banning Time Warner Cable from introducting usage caps and tiered pricing for their Roadrunner internet services. TWC has been trying out these caps and pricing structures in various markets and apparently finally stepped on the right person's toes by starting to record usage data in Rochester, New York. Wired points out that while playing the "woe is us" card, TWC has been raking in the profits, with their own annual report showing that their broadband costs were down 12% in 2008 while revenues were up 11%. Makes it a little hard to justify how the power users are beating your service providings into the ground while you're rolling around in Scrouge McDuck's vault.
April 2, 2009
Mr. iTunes DJ woke up on the wrong side of the bed
Stupid new "iTunes DJ" who replaced "Party Shuffle" has a bad attitude when you try to listen to songs he's already got "queued up to spin" as the kids would say
Of course that's only if you "Add to iTunesDJ" because then you might not really want to actually play the songs you just said you wanted to play. If you pick, "Play next in" or "Play in" then the DJ knows you're serious and doesn't ask questions.
I understand building the DJ functionality on top of the existing playlist functionality, but I can only assume that Party Shuffle was the same thing with a different name, and therefore this is a big time annoying regression in the new release. Go go gadget testing.
Feb. 9, 2009
Net Neutrality is not something the founders of the Internet take lightly
Tim Berners Lee sums up Net Neutrality:
"Net Neutrality says: "If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level."
That's all. Its up to the ISPs to make sure they interoperate so that that happens.
Net Neutrality is NOT asking for the internet for free.
Net Neutrality is NOT saying that one shouldn't pay more money for high quality of service. We always have, and we always will."
Written in 2006, unfortunately it's now 2009 and the telcos are still trying to confuse the common consumer into thinking Net Neutrality is Google trying to trick consumers into paying for Google's internet bill.
Jan. 9, 2009
Impact of the New York Times
There's been much brew-ha-ha about the NY Times being in financial trouble, the death of newspapers, and print media in general. For the last couple years, however, the Times has been doing some really great work with flash based visualizations that tie into their print articles, but obviously are available only the web. So maybe the the death of the print newspaper doesn't mean that the big, well known papers will die.
What really interests me is the stuff they've had coming out recently showing that they really are embracing the open concepts that are flourishing on the web. Within a month they've announced Represent and the Congress API, two very cool usages of publicly available data that was previously only available in a mishmash of formats. They're combining, enhancing, analyzing and promoting data in very new and innovative ways.
The Times moving in this direction seems to coencide with a growing call for "open government" which has seemed to start as a grassroots, web powered, effort and will hopefully take hold in the new administration. It seems the Times is uniquely positioning itself within this new world order to become the seminal information source for computers and the autonomous world that it already is for humans. This is a very interesting direction for the Times to take and I'm not sure if it's officially supported from the top. It seems that it either has to be getting discussed in the top echolons or the IT group has a huge amount of freedom to make very bold moves and think well outside the existing dead tree based box. Either way it's the kind of agility and/or forward thinking that could make the Times the Queen of the new web news world.
