Jeff’s Blog

This weekend I was at the South Coast Plaza and stopped off at the Apple store to check out the much hyped Iphone.  This was Sunday afternoon mind you and they had the phone in stock, so there was no need to wait hours for this thing Friday afternoon.  They had a half dozen demo units and I had to wait and 20 seconds to get my turn at one.

The interface I must say is amazing.  It is the best I have ever seen for a smart phone.  Everything flows fluidly and there is hardly any noticeable lag when switching between applications.  The web browser is great, you can zoom in by double clicking and use your finger to drag around the page.  The orientation changes from portrait to landscape automatically as you flip the phone down or up.  I did notice that it got a little confused when I switched between the modes quickly 5 or 6 times, but it did recover in a few seconds without crashing.

The picture mode was equally as good, with much the same interface.  You had albums and you use your finger to flip between the pictures.  The next picture flows onto the screen as the old picture flows off of the screen as if you were looking through a negative roll.  The built in camera was alright; it was more responsive than most camera phones and the image quality was about on par as others.  There is however no video mode.

I checked out the Ipod mode and it continued the trend, but I must admit I didn’t try it out all that much.  I watched a short section of Lost and it looked fantastic and filled the entire wide screen.

Now onto the negatives of this phone.  Number one is the price $600 for the 8 gig model and $500 for the 4 gig model. You also have to sign up for a 2 year AT&T contract.  Considering that the phone is unsubsidized, as far as I can tell, this is ridiculous price.   Also the storage size is way too small for me.  I have a 30 gig 5G Ipod and it is too small for all of my music.  Considering this is the first Ipod I would consider watching videos on that 8 gigs would go real fast.  Also there is no memory card slot so you can’t add any memory.  The sim card is also hidden in the guts of the phone, so if one wanted to sell their Iphone it would be a royal pain to switch the SIM out.

The on screen key board was also a royle pain.  I have large fingers and I had lots of trouble typing.  The data is also EDGE or 802.11 WI-FI.  That is a real oversight as far as I am concerned.  I know the 3G HSDPA network isn’t as large as the existing edge network but the speed difference is huge. Instead of focusing efforts on improving their EDGE network they should have rolled out for HSDPA coverage and included it instead of EDGE.  The lack of A2DP is also a major oversight.  I want a wireless stereo head set with my $600 Iphone, but no dice for the first generation Iphone.  Also they should have throw in a car charger considering the battery life on these things and the insane price.  The biggest downside though is that it is a closed environment with no way to install 3rd party applications.  There are certain applications I need like a SSH client. It would also be nice to use Skype or some other SIP client to save some plan minutes.

So I will not be picking one of these up as I am a poor poor network admin, but even if I were rich I would wait until the phone is revised to have HSDPA support and support for third party applications even if those applications had to be apple approved.  I hold high hopes for Openmoko the Linux based open smart phone, but we will see how it fairs when it is released in October. I can’t seeing it being completive given the equally ridiculous price of $600.00.  It does have the advantage of being unencumbered and not locked to 1 carrier.

I rarely touch MS SQL but I have to administer 2 instances, so I have had to learn some of the administrative tasks that have to be done from time to time. One of the less obvious task is truncating transaction logs. The MS SQLs transaction logs can get out of hand on databases that do a lot of writes. MS SQL does not purge transactions that have been committed in case you want to roll the database back to a point in time.  At some point after a back up you will probably want to get rid of the old data as it can quickly fill your hard drive. You have to manually truncated the old transactions by running

The easiest way to do this is to open up query optimizer and run it from there.

That will flush out all the old transactions that have already been committed to the database.  This however does not resize the file.  You will have to manually do this in enterprise manager by choosing shrink database.  If you have a scheduled maintenance plan that covers resizing; it will take place on its own the next time it is scheduled.

I am in El Segundo next to LAX at AIX training.  luckily my employer sprung for a hotel so its a 5 minute drive or else it would have been a 2 1/2 hour gauntlet each way.  This way its a vacation compared to my usual 2 hour a day commute.  What a mess today, the image wasn’t set up so half the lab didn’t work.  luckily it was a stupid brainless lab.  Hopefully I will learn something but it isn’t looking good.

I set up a group on the VPN at work to tunnel everything.  That way I don’t have to deal with the suck hotel captive portal and don’t have to worry about man in the middle attacks.  Hopefully the bandwidth will hold up to watching a streaming netflix movie.

I am redoing the IDS system at work.  The current IDS uses snort and BASE.  Base just isn’t able to keep up under the current load.  We got a new quad core server with 4 gigs of ram that should do nicely for base.  I also decided to redo the sensors at the same time.  They were both running FreeBSD and I wanted to go to CentOS 5 because I am much more familiar with it than FreeBSD.  I installed CentOS 5 and did a test run with tcpdump.   It just can’t keep up the kernel is dropping packets even when loging just the raw packets to a file.  The traffic isn’t huge its about 3000 packets per second (around 32 Mbps).  Even after tunning some kernel parameters and some network parameters it was still dropping packets.

From what I have read the FreeBSD network stack is a lot better at this type of thing.  I am testing another FreeBSD box to see if it can keep up without dropping packets.  If it can keep up then I am going to use freeBSD for the sensors and stick with CentOS for the BASE front end.

UPDATE:  FreeBSD took it like a champ 0 dropped packets, so it looks like its FreeBSD for snort

Linux has come a long way in the 9 years I have been using it.  I have seen it go from very difficult to set up to a breeze to set up.  I have gone from X windows with some minimal menus to beryl  running gnome.  We now have a halfway decent office suit in open office.  A lot of people say that it is ready from the average user.

I have to say it is no where near ready for the average user.  I have come to this realization while trying to install feisty on my Dell Inspiron laptop.  X windows didn’t work out of the box so I had to use the text install and get the fglrx driver installed. That problem is nothing compared to my wireless problems.  The built in card is an unsupported broadcom card which can be made to work without WPA support with ndis wrapper, but I need native support for WPA and also to use in kismet.  So I found a spare  linksys WUSB54GC card which is supposedly supported.  I see access points but I can’t connect to any so I do some googling and it seems you need to recompile the driver.  Unfortunately I couldn’t get it to compile in Fiesty but apparently it worked in edgy.

Where am I going with this?  If I with 9 years of linux admin experience, a RHCE, and a CS grad can’t get a wireless card working what chance does my mom have?  The open source community has failed at making the hardware easy to setup and configure.  The community bickers and fights and is all ego driven, and projects fork when someone gets their feelings hurt.  I am all for the open source movement, but just like communism human nature will always get in the way.  Linux has been around for over 10 years and still the desktop percentage must be less than 1% of the total desktop market.  Just look at the leaps and bounds apple has made coming out of no where with OS X.  Just think how much bigger the open source development community is.  If we could have been this focused and driven we could be much better off.

The number 1 thing I think that has hurt the linux community over the years is the number of distributions.  We have fedora core, Ubuntu, suse, and many many many more.  None of which have a consistancy of where system files are located.  The biggest hurtle to linux adoption is lack of commercial applications.  The small business of the world needs to be able to run office, access, excel, quick books, etc.  I know it is a chicken and egg problem but it is made that much worse by all of the distributions.  A company looking to release its software on linux will have to support dozens of different distributions, instead of just 1, like when they ported their software to OS X. This also makes driver support a nightmare as now you have to have the user compile their own drivers every time they upgrade their kernel, not to mention all of the different versions of libraries that are out there.  I don’t blame the hardware and software companies for ignoring the linux desktop market.  It just doesn’t make since at this point.

Do I think that linux is doomed?  No not at all it is a great server product and continues to get more and more market share, and better support of enterprise level hardware.  If the open source community could get its act together and stop bickering, get some consistancy as far as the distribution are concerned.  Also the state of drivers is key.  I am not a developer so can someone tell me why do all the kernel modules have to be recompiled each time a new kernel is installed? I don’t have to reinstall all my drivers when windows updates its kernel. 

I finally got around to loading Ubuntu Fiesty on my lap top.  The installation was not at all painless.   X would not start when I loaded the live CD, so I had to download and used the alternative install CD with the text installer.  The live CD for Edgy worked fine and it was using the VESA X driver so it should have worked just fine with my ATI 1300.  After I got the OS installed X still did not work.  After installing fglrx driver X started to work.  The built in compiz 3D desktop doesn’t work as compositing is not support in the fglrx driver.  I will install the latest Beryl RC and see how that goes.  Other than that everything seems to work except my wireless which has never worked.  I may have to get an add on card as I need native wireless support to use kismet not the ndis wrappered windows driver.

The conversion from below post didn’t go as smoothly as planned.  After the new server was online no one could modify their Frontpage sites.  None of the roles or user permissions were showing in the Frontpage Administration site.  I did a recalculate on the web but that didn’t fix anything.  So I just switched back to the old VM server.

I did some research and found this document.  The files that have all the permissions in them are kept in c:\Documents and setting\All Users\…..!  Who designed that?  You would think that would be a common thing on google when you search backup frontpage, but I had to dig to find that.  I wasn’t even backing up that directory but I sure am now.  After restoring that directory then everything was  working as usual. 

So the lessoned learned here is Microsoft programmers smoke the crack and always test your disaster recovery plan.  Especially now that VMware server is free there is no excuse not to test it.  Your family will thank you later when they aren’t starving and sleeping on the street because you were fired.

There is no such thing as redirection in backup exec for a system state recovery.  It will let you do this at least in version 9.1 (yeah I roll old school).  It restores the files just not in the right place.  You must change the name to match the old machine then run the recovery normally without file redirection.  In my case the old machine is still running, but it won’t for the life of me convert from VMware GSX 3.0.0 to VMware server 1.02.  So I just wanted to restore the system state to a new VM I created then restore the date files all the while keeping the old server up and running.

Instead I had to shut down the original server, assume the identity in the fresh install and recover system state.  Then shut it down and change the name and IP and restart the old server.  I am now doing the full recovery of the date files to the new VM.  When I am ready to change to the new VM I will shutdown IIS run a differental backup and restore that to the new server.  All in all less then a half hour of downtime.

I hope the engineers are better than the support at 3ware.  I opened up a web ticket about not being able to use 1 large 6 terabyte  partition  in  windows 2003.  In the mean time I used my google foo and found the answer.  A MBR volume only supports 2 terabyte partitions, a GPT volume support some huge number in the exobytes.  Windows 2003 will only boot off of an MBR volume.  So you must make 1 small boot volume and 1 large data volume.  So when I did the whole 6 terabytes showed up and I was able to make 1 huge partition.  In the meantime I get a response to my support ticket that tells me to upgrade the firmware. Number 1 that will never work wince its a windows limitation, and number 2 the version they suggested that I upgrade to isn’t even on there website. I wish companies would charge a little bit more for their product and actually hire people that know what they are doing.  This support ticket is probably one that they get all the time.  I don’t know why there isn’t a little warning on the front of their support page as this probably happens to 90% of there windows clients that use more than 2 terabytes of space.

It should be fairly easy to write a perl script that will map out a cisco network architecture given access to the core switch and that all connecting devices will allow the core to telnet or ssh to them.  The command show cdp neighbor detail will give you all the info you need.  The ip address, device name, and the port that the connecting device is on.  Then just throw all of those ips on a queue telnet or ssh to them and repeat show cdp neighbor detail on each device making a list of the devices you have already connected to so that you don’t get caught in a loop.  You will also have to query the device to see if it is Cat OS or IOS.  Shouldn’t be too hard with expect and perl.  I will put this on my someday maybe list.