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year one the good the bad and the weird

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Since I/we (the family) have made a fairly drastic change in our lives, I thought I would give the “Year One” run down. In pictures only. HAHAHUGOSHORTCODE-0xc0010e8000-1-HBHB My first day at work, and the last time I showed up before 8am! HAHAHUGOSHORTCODE-0xc0010e8000-2-HBHB The room I rented while the family was in antioch was a real gem. The manager of the home ripped the bathroom out after he cashed my first check. Read More...

bacula framework on github

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I’m pretty happy with the Bacula environment I’ve created. It has gone through a few iterations, and I’ve learned a lot since I started using it a few years ago. I think its only appropriate to share the evolution of my environment with as many people as possible, and I hope it can help save new bacula administrators some time. Enough of the preamble, here is my github project page: https://github. Read More...

atlassian tools and nginx

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Atlassian has a wonderful set of tools. I’ve been using Jira with Fisheye for the last few months, but I recently came across Stash. Stash is a nice git repository and project manager than provides easy access to creating new Git repo’s with User and Group access controls. I’m considering phasing out FishEye in favor of Stash. I only wanted FishEye as a source code browser, that integrated issues tracking. Read More...

puppet module to update freebsd passwd has

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LinkedIn’s users database was leaked, and while passwords were not stored in plain text, they were hashed with the MD5 algorithm. Not salted, just hashed. MD5 is no longer as secure as it once was, not with all of these GPU’s lying around. Well, the FreeBSD community has not let this go unnoticed. First off, FreeBSD has defaulted to MD5 for a while, but it has had support for Blow-Fish, and (this is new to me) SHA-256 and SHA-512. Read More...

poor samba performance

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If you have google’d for smb.conf settings to max your 1Gb (or 10Gb) ethernet based network and you still cannot seem to get beyond 30MB/sec, make sure you have this option: socket options = SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192 Either commented it out, or set the buffer size to 128K (131072). Or larger. I was helping a friend of mine troubleshoot his ZFS + Samba environment. He was running FreeBSD 9.0 and Samba 3. Read More...

zfs and acls with samba

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I’ve been using ZFS on FreeBSD since it was first made available in 7.0, and it was not until FreeBSD 8.2 when NFSv4 ACL’s were implemented. At $oldJob, I had a list of “To do’s”, really cool things like: “Integrate Puppet into CMDB”, “Rewrite the Bacula addClient script”, “Build a MooseFS Cluster”… At the top though, I had: Implement ACL’s on ZFS/Samba fileserver Anyway my $newJob always has a high demand for storage and sharing data. Read More...

mailman with nginx on freebsd

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I like Nginx a lot. Not because I’m some sort of hipster sysadmin either. I like it because it is small, fast, and as a FreeBSD port, it compiles and updates quickly. What I also like is the separation of services and processes. For example, if I want to run a PHP script, I don’t load “mod_php” like you would with Apache. Instead, you have a PHP processor, like php-fpm, running (on localhost, or, another server that only processes PHP scripts). Read More...

google ads coming

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HAHAHUGOSHORTCODE-0xc0008b9400-1-HBHB Owen and Caralyne playing at the beach I always felt very proud that this site was “free” to everyone. I think its great when you can go to a site that isn’t laden with advertisements or pop-ups that try to sell you more things you don’t need. Sort of like how the internet used to be. I regret to say, I’m going to compromise my ideology and give Google Adsense a try. Read More...

not giving up the dream

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Glenn and I have kept up with our Tuesday nights band practice. Every Tuesday with rare exceptions, which is usually some form of vehicular issue on my end. Both Michele and I have had a slew of minor vehicle issues, mostly dead batteries. Our motivation has not been the more difficult part, nor has our muse left us ( The two of us have been able to work out some really fun segments ). Read More...

xen and convirture

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My previous experience with a large virtual “enterprise” environment was with VMWare’s ESXi and vSphere. Performance wise, I was always fairly happy with ESXi knowing that it was a virtual machine of course. There were a few issues I recall: silent data corruption (fsck’ing Linux and FreeBSD volumes would reveal inconsistent filesystem information, but there were never any errors reported to the VM) Live migrations were not always stable. In fact, most of the time it would result in an unexpected shutdown I doubt it was solely VMWares fault, as it could have been a series of mis-configurations and poor implementation descisions. Read More...

skynet began in a kitchen

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Over the past year or so, Caralyne has become increasingly interested in scientastical things like computers, Minecraft, Robots, Mythbusters, and specifically, Mythbusters! I’ve been using our TV for my own nefarious deeds, unbeknownst to Caralyne, as an educational tool in science and skepticism. Between Good Eats, Mythbusters and a few PBS clips of Neil Degrasse Tyson being awesome, something was bound to stick. Also, as a daughter and child of mine, she is constantly seeking my affection and approval… which I am not above exploiting these features she no doubt got from me, so I give her a LOT of positive feedback and attention when we are watching these shows. Read More...

using couchdb with puppet and bacula

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On aspect that I was never happy with the Bacula environment I built while at LLNL was the fact that I could no look up certain values for each client. Values like: * Passwords * Storage Devices * Certificates (if you are using Encryption) Well, over the past few week’s I’ve been able to work around this problem by storing additional information in a CouchDB DB. It is not the ideal solution, but it is a start and I’m okay with that. Read More...

hello bay photo lab

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HAHAHUGOSHORTCODE-0xc000cf4500-1-HBHB From one Lab to another After 9.5 years with one employer (LLNL), I joined Bay Photo Lab in Santa Cruz. This has brought on many changes, not just a career change but a significant change in my way of life. First off, I’m renting a room until my family gets down here. I have this weird double life now, where during the week I live alone in a small room with no heating, and then I go back home on the weekend. Read More...

coal

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I’m absolutely crushed. I’ve lost a great friend and member of our family, Coal. He escaped our backyard and was hit by car between the A and G street freeway on-ramps. He turned two on 11⁄16. Coal was the dog I dreamed of having; he was the combination of all the Aussies I’ve had growing up. He was the best. That dog never seemed to have a down moment. He was always happy, and always looking for trouble. Read More...

goodbye llnl

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HAHAHUGOSHORTCODE-0xc00154a500-1-HBHB Well, after about 9 and a half years with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 11⁄09 was my last day. Now, I wasn’t the only admin besides Jenny (thats the aquilino1@llnl.gov email you see there), but she was my closest friend and peer while I was there. There was a little poetic license there, but it was accurate. It is hard to quantify the emotions about leaving LLNL. I do not know if I have the appropriate words to describe the feeling. Read More...

welcome to antioch

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For a few reasons, I decided to go through the City of Antioch’s Type I crime reports (available here: http://www.ci.antioch.ca.us/citygov/police/crime-maps/crime-maps.htm). The City only publishes this as a PDF image, comparing the year selected, and the previous year. It also only goes back to 2005. To help view this as a possible trend, and not just a snapshot in time, I typed up all of them in Google Docs - City of Antioch Crime Stats Read More...

freebsd training

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At work I ran a 5 part FreeBSD Administration training course for the Unix team. I enjoyed it a lot, because I really like to share information. It is especially rewarding when it is something I have taken a great interest in, like the FreeBSD Operating System. The design of the course was simple, I did my best to fill in the gap that a Solaris or Linux administrator might have. Read More...

bacula in the enterprise part 2

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Software As mentioned many times, this is a FreeBSD based environment. Some good sysinfo output below: HAHAHUGOSHORTCODE-0xc0009c4a00-1-HBHB Bootloader settings for the Director/Database node: The /boot/loader.conf has the following contents: HAHAHUGOSHORTCODE-0xc0009c4a00-2-HBHB All of the storage nodes and the director are running a GENERIC kernel with very few system tweaking. One of the storage nodes has a Chelsio 10Gb controller, but that hasn’t had a high enough load to crack the 1Gb/sec barrier. Read More...

bacula in the enterprise part 1

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I’ve been using Bacula, the open source backup software, for over a year now. Things have been going well, and I would like to dedicate a post or two to the environment I built. Background Over a year ago, I took it upon myself to replace a single Legato Networker server with Bacula. One of our collaborators had decided to ship us (for no reason at all really, I think they were cleaning out their data center) a Sun X4200 AMD server, and two StorageTek/Sun NAS servers. Read More...

cheap two factor authentication with google

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I can be a glutton for punishment for a nearly trivial amount of gain. So lets bring on the two-factor authentication for my personal FreeBSD server. I’ve been using Google’s 2-step verification since Jenny told me about it, along with my android powered phone. What is nice about Google’s Authenticator app is its availability for multiple smartphone platforms: Android version 1.5 or later BlackBerry OS 4.2 - 4.7 iPhone iOS 4 or later How it works is pretty simple. Read More...

buckethead live gamh

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HAHAHUGOSHORTCODE-0xc0010ce000-1-HBHB Since I say this after almost every concert I go to, I’ll not forget to repeat it again: This was the BEST show I’ve ever seen. There are many aspects why: smaller venue, and our seats were on the balcony. This gave us a great view of the show, and we were pretty darn close to everything. Oh, and you know, it is one of my favorite artist doing what he does best. Read More...

couchdb and ruby on freebsd

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I’ve been using Puppet at work for the handful of FreeBSD and, recently, Ubuntu desktops. Aside from some very simple system configuration management (I’ve not yet dived too deep into puppet. I mostly use it for configuring system authentication and ensuring a particular computer security baseline), I though it would have been great to store the client’s “facts” into a accessable database. Sometime last year, Puppet added the ability to store facts into a Couch Database: http://www. Read More...

nlit 2011 vail colorado

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Every year, for the last 12 years or so, the National Laboratories have held a technical conference for IT. A different lab hosts it each year, and the National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado was nice enough to volunteer. I should point out, this conference is not in any way funded by the Department of Energy. It is sponsored by Vendors. I have never been to NLIT before, but this year I felt I had a significant contribution to make and it was worth the effort of submitting an abstract and putting together a nice presentation. Read More...

zoey

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We lost a great companion on Friday. Our super awesome dog, Zoey, passed away due to a heart complication (cardiomyopathy). She was just over 6 years old ( 05-04-2005 to 06-10-2011). She was diagnosed two weeks ago, and we knew what to expect. It was terribly sad to see her in such poor shape, however, I’m glad I had two weeks to hug her, feed her delicious food, and tell her that I love her. Read More...

test drive the cloud drive

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HAHAHUGOSHORTCODE-0xc000e48000-1-HBHB Amazon recently announced their Cloud Drive, and I feel it is interesting for the following reasons: The ability to play the same music from my phone, my computer at work, my computer at home is pretty cool Everyone gets 5GB of space for free, and you can pay for more When you purchase (DRM free) mp3’s from Amazon, it does not count against your Cloud Drive storage The player is web based, and the tools to download purchased music are usable on Windows, OS X and Linux So, I uploaded some music, bought two songs from the comfort of my phone to play around with it. Read More...

chabot space and science center

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HAHAHUGOSHORTCODE-0xc000835900-1-HBHB We did a night hike, and spent the night at the Chabot Space Center in Oakland the other week. The weather did not permit us to use the large telescopes they have there, but we did get to see the perigee-syzygy of the Moon. It was quite large and nice looking, but too bad the camera does not duplicate the same optical illusion our brains produce by making it look REALLY big: HAHAHUGOSHORTCODE-0xc000835900-2-HBHB Read More...

music for you dad

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Hey Dad, lets chat. We’ve spent a good amount of time traveling in either a car or a big rig, listening to music. I remember waking up at 4am during my summer vacation so I could accompany you to help deliver lots and lots of boxes to U-Hauls around California. Or, our trips to Santa Cruz/Mission Springs, (despite the fact that you maliciously left the AC off for the entire trip just so we would really appreciate that cool Mision Springs air :) ), it was always a lot of fun and I really expanded my musical palette. Read More...

roger waters the wall tour

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As I’ve mentioned many times, I’m a big Pink Floyd fan. The Wall was the first DVD I bought, and pretty much the reason WHY I got a DVD player in the first place :) I’ve always been sore that the band broke up before I ever had a chance. Seeing this live though, that really made me feel like I really got to see what it might have been like. Read More...

my wtf moment with marc maron

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I’ve been a big fan of Marc Maron for a while, since I heard his “Not Sold Out” album, and I’ve been a happy WTFPod listener as well. Okay, I won’t down play this.. Marc Maron is possibly my favorite comedian. Imagine that, I identify with a insecure, needy, narcissistic, neurotic, head-case who has cats. I’m one step away from apologizing out of anger just for admitting that. The last two times he’s had a show in SF, I found out too late and was not able to make it. Read More...

meetbsd 2010

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I love the BSD community. How cool is it to have developers and end users from the various BSD projects in one location, there to talk about the various cool projects and technical challenges that face us now. Cool I tell you! Chris, Corrigan and I went to Google in 2008 for MeetBSD. We had a great time, so when I saw the announcement earlier this year for MeetBSD 2010, I rallied the troops. Read More...

the redeem team rose peak

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If you want to refresh your memory of why Rose Peak is my Moby-Dick, you can (re-)read last years post. In short, I didn’t make it to the top. I’ll hold you in suspense no longer, I made it to the top, and back down, without any physical issues like cramping. The hike was in fact, very pleasent, and it rained on us but it was nice. Last year’s experience was a really good learning experience, and it made me a lot more aware of the warning signs of fatigue. Read More...

freebsd and multipath

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I didn’t find any blog posts of discussions on FreeBSD and multipath (for storage) that wasn’t a man page. That means it is up to me to write about it :) Hardware CPU Machine class: amd64 CPU Model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5530 @ 2.40GHz No. of Cores: 16 Memory Total real memory available: 65511 MB Logically used memory: 3945 MB Logically available memory: 61565 MB Storage The storage is a large ~90TB Enterprise class Fibre Channel array, a Data Direct Networks S2A9900. Read More...

freebsd 8 0 a great nas server

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I need to share this. When I google for “Samba performance”, I never see real numbers, real configuration files, or real hardware environments. All I read are anecdotal recollections, and that is not good enough. I like numbers, and I’ll let the numbers speak for themselves: > netstat -I em0 -w 1 input (em0) output packets errs bytes packets errs bytes colls 90166 0 98762637 95363 0 5332847 0 18131 0 24713156 20042 0 1123684 0 4 0 310 1 0 178 0 8 0 518 1 0 178 0 10153 0 10952920 10696 0 598129 0 92990 0 102837002 98476 0 5514994 0 92025 0 102680574 97277 0 5439496 0 92080 0 101799874 97403 0 5448637 0 75348 0 90861608 80972 0 4537737 0 90895 0 100323946 95781 0 5360948 0 89313 0 97371154 94364 0 5278618 0 81363 0 89229738 85861 0 4803589 0 2 0 126 3 0 286 0 I was so shocked that I had to use gstat and zpool iostat to verify the information: Read More...

david gilmour a night to remember

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Let’s get this out of the way: My favorite band is Pink Floyd, and Sir David Gilmour’s guitar work still gives me goose-bumps. There will be little criticism of this concert, in fact, there will be only high praise. With once exception, there was a TERRIBLE audio delay on the concert disc. That really annoyed me, mostly since I pay very close attention to how he plays the guitar. The show itself was good, it wasn’t the typical Pink Floyd production (no large circular projections screen, crazy laser lights and flying pigs), it was very basic. Read More...