Computers on Evan Hoffman

Macbook Pro locks up with SSD installed.

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 12:04:54 +0000

A few weeks ago I switched from my trusty old HP nc8430 to a Macbook Pro (MC118LL/A) that was left spare when another employee left. I mostly enjoyed using Linux but I was tired of dealing with weird quirks like having X lock up, essentially forcing me to do a hard reboot.

To transition, I copied my documents from Linux to Mac, then turned off the Linux laptop. Surprisingly I found I didn’t need to turn Linux back on at all. Last week, I decided to put the final nail in Linux’s coffin by taking the SSD (Corsair CMFSSD-128GBG2D)out of it and putting it in my Macbook. The Macbook was pretty fast (Core 2 Duo @ 2.5 GHz) but some things were noticeably slower on its 7200RPM disk than on Linux with an SSD, especially running Windows VMs.

JavaScript: The Good Parts

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 17:20:21 +0000

I just finished reading JavaScript: The Good Parts, one of the best programming books I’ve read. The ending is fantastic:

We see a lot of feature-driven product design in which the cost of features is not properly accounted. Features can have a negative value to consumers because they make the products more difficult to understand and use. We are finding that people like products that just work. It turns out that designs that just work are much harder to produce than designs that assemble long lists of features.

The bright side of Compellent

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 16:07:46 +0000

Since I was bemoaning Compellent’s pricing recently I figured it would be unfair of me not to highlight the upside. Their tagline is (or was when we purchased it) “The only SAN so sophisticated it’s simple.” While I can’t say whether they’re the ONLY one, the idea is definitely true. This is the first SAN I’ve ever used, and aside from the learning curve for iSCSI itself (targets, spinup delay, etc.) it’s totally simple and intuitive. Create LUNs, map them to servers. Don’t worry about things like RAID levels or hot disks. We’re into our second year with Compellent and it’s definitely lived up to its promise of simplicity.

Oh, Compellent... again with the disk prices.

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:57:04 +0000

Time to expand the SAN again.

I planned and budgeted for this this year but it still pisses me off. Look, I realize these guys have to make money, but the bottom line is they’re charging over $1.40/GB for SATA storage. There are 7200 RPM 2TB SATA drives on Amazon and Newegg ranging in price from $130 to $220. That’s as low as $0.065/GB. There was even a 2TB WD “Green” drive (sub-7200 RPM, I think 5900 RPM) on Slickdeals today for $99. That’s 5 cents per gig.

I almost forgot that I hate computers.

Mon, 31 May 2010 23:29:39 +0000

I’d almost forgotten that I hate computers. Then I came home from Memorial Day weekend and woke my desktop up from Sleep in order to extract the pics I’d taken. The computer looked ok for about 15 seconds, then kind of froze. The cursor would move but it didn’t do anything. I watched it do (apparently) nothing for about 2 minutes when I hit the hard-reboot button. It hung at POST with the HDD light on solid. I couldn’t get into the BIOS, so I tried plugging into a different SATA port on the mobo, and finally got the thing to post by … unplugging the drive completely. I got into the bios, did a “load failsafe defaults” and tried plugging the drive back in and booting. It made it through POST this time but gave me the “INSERT SYSTEM DISK” error. After about an hour of messing around with it I turned it off and came upstairs to go to bed. The drive is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11, 1000 GB, purchased less than 18 months ago (Christmas 2008). I know things die, but this is just dumb. Maybe tomorrow I’ll see if anything shows up using a USB-to-SATA adapter. Sigh.

Generate a report of Exchange mailbox sizes broken out by department and location

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 11:44:44 +0000

I found a script a few months ago that generated a CSV report of mailbox size, which included the Mailbox Name (usually the user’s name), size in Kbytes, number of items, which server it’s on, etc. This was very helpful, but I wanted to see which department within the company used the most space on the mail server, and the department wasn’t one of the pieces of data included in the report. It took a while but I figured out how to do LDAP lookups in vbscript and was able to add that info, so the report now has the user’s department, office location, and quota limit in it as well as the other fields. This makes it very easy to do a PivotChart in Excel to generate a pie chart of the size by department. The script is attached - change the extension to .vbs to run it. You’ll need to plug in your Exchange server and domain controller where the placeholders currently are.

Upgraded to Fedora Core 12

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 17:24:14 +0000

I upgraded my work laptop from FC11 to FC12 yesterday using the “preupgrade” tool. It was pretty simple, though it took a lot longer than I expected. There was some funkiness with my screen going crazy after the upgrade - my external monitor and the laptop’s LCD both did this crazy wavy-line thing. I tried changing the refresh rate, running system-config-display, nothing worked. I found a post that suggested passing “nomodeset” to the kernel boot options - that solved it. Yay!

Passwordless SSH Everywhere

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 15:18:22 +0000

I’ve known about ssh keys for a long time and frequently use them, most frequently so that a script can transfer a file between two servers without having to do some mumbo-jumbo where I try to pipe a password into it or some other wacky thing. I hadn’t fully embraced ssh keys, though, because I didn’t like the idea that if I lost my laptop, I’d be losing a free key into my servers. Then I discovered ssh-agent. This isn’t new, so I’m kind of embarrassed I didn’t know about it, but I’ve been using it for a few months now and I can’t imagine going back.

Lotsa downtime.

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 02:23:02 +0000

Lots of power outages lately. Not the greatest time to move my site. :P Good thing I don’t need 99.99%+ uptime. Or even 95%…

Sped up Wordpress by adding 1 index.

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 04:35:41 +0000

I noticed WP was taking a long time to load since I moved it. I added an index to the “autoload” column on wp_options and it seems to be much faster.

I still hate MySQL though. Postgres is so much better.

More fun with ovftool

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 14:28:11 +0000

I tried restoring my .ova into vCenter and it failed. It said something like “Device ‘virtual disk’ uses a controller that is not supported. this is a general limitation of the virtual hardware version.” This kind of pissed me off, especially when I couldn’t really find anything in Google about what the error meant, but it turned out to be pretty easy to fix - I just clicked “upgrade virtual hardware” in VMWare Server to upgrade the hardware version from 4 to 7. I then created another .ova, uploaded it to the datacenter and successfully deployed it in vCenter in its own resource pool. Yay!

Exporting VMWare Server VMs to OVA/OVF with ovftool

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 18:56:25 +0000

Well, I thought this was going to be a huge pain in the ass, but it turns out not to be a really big deal. I found this post which includes instructions and a link to download VMWare’s “ovftool”. There’s a win32 version and a 32-bit and 64-bit linux version:

-rwxr--r-- 1 evan evan 19326184 Sep 11 17:16 VMware-ovftool-installer-1.0.0-166674-lin.i386.sh*
-rwxr--r-- 1 evan evan 17212108 Sep 11 17:16 VMware-ovftool-installer-1.0.0-166674-lin.x86_64.sh*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 evan evan 43833393 Sep 11 17:33 jdk-1_5_0_13-linux-amd64.bin*

I installed JDK 1.5.0_r13 because that’s what I had laying around. The 64-bit installer for ovftool ran without a hitch. I haven’t yet tried importing the .ova to my vCenter cluster (the export was from our Vmware Server (free) environment) but the conversion itself seemed fine. The one problem I encountered was that it was complaining that the cdrom was connected. The VM in question had an ISO configured as its cdrom drive, but it wasn’t connected, yet the ovftool still complained about it. I shutdown the VM, deleted the device completely, and then the conversion went fine.

Windows 7 RC - day 1

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 10:12:30 +0000

So I’ve been having problems with my computer since I built it. In particular the screen will freeze up from time to time with this checkerboard of black and normal. I can’t really describe it, and since the computer’s frozen when it happens, I can’t screenshot it. Anyway, I reinstalled XP a while ago and that didn’t do anything to solve it.

On Thursday my computer started really pissing me off because when I plugged in my camera, the Canon CameraWindow app that I use to transfer stuff off wasn’t autostarting. When I then tried starting it manually it still wouldn’t start. When I opened “My Computer” what greeted me was a flashlight, apparently searching for the innards of my system. It searched for about 60 seconds before showing me the correct contents of the computer, but when I closed My Computer and reopened it, it did the same thing. This persisted through a reboot. So I had a bad feeling that maybe the computer was about to do something unpleasant.