Tag: JustMigrated

Oktoberfest without beer.

The cellular network was overloaded at the Wiesn yesterday and I could not find people. Instead I took advantage of great lighting conditions and took some more pictures of people at Oktoberfest. The complete album is in my gallery. Some snippets here.
No idea who these girls were, but they seemed keen to pose.

A random fight that broke out at the “Hogarthian Scenes” back of the tents

She had great glasses

Oktoberfest nearly ready

I just cycled over to the Wiesn and it looks like the Oktoberfest tents (if you can call them that) are mostly built. The rollercoasters were only half done and looked like they were being assembled by a drunkard. I believe that many of the workers responsible for the Oktoberfest setup are paid partly in beer so this wouldn’t be surprising.

Looking forward to a couple of afternoons with a mass in hand “prost"ing away.

Disk upgrade

Yesterday evening I finished the big disk upgrade. As evidenced by my last post, I have been suffering through the death of some of IBMs old “Pixie Dust” disks. Both of them finally died and forced me into an earlier than planned disk upgrade. But this time I wanted to make sure that future upgrades would be easier. LVM and the Linux software raid tools have improved since my last big disk upgrade but were still horribly complicated. I dream of storage that provides raid 5 reliability, easy expandability (add a disk and the storage grows), and simple management. I guess I will have to wait for ZFS to make it’s way to Linux from Solaris. Apparently there are still some outstanding license restrictions that are holding this up and the port is being done through the FUSE layer.

Difficulties and rants aside, bunker is now up and running with 4 x 400GB disks sliced into 3 partitions (boot, main, testing). Boot is a simple partition at the start of each disk running in raid 1 (2 active, 2 spare), main is raid 5 with LVM on top and testing is a simple 5 GB at the end of each disk for, well, testing raid configurations like growing.

The LVM raid slice (1.1TB) is then setup with some operating partitions on top. The real difficulty came in setting up a initrd that would booth the LVM logical volume correctly. Part of this was that I was using an existing raid array and this confused the mkinirramfs program.

It’s done now and I can get on with my life knowing that I have reliable storage for mythtv recordings, mail and music.

Far too early

I was awoken with a hangover and what sounded like an alarm in the background. Strange I don’t have one that sounds like that. I was hungover from Reitschule but not that hungover as to forget what my alarm sounds like. Next I thought it was my laptop beeping. No, that was next to me on the bed and in sleep mode. I got up, the head hurt even more and figured the building’s fire alarm must have gone off. The noise was coming from bunker, my main server. It was the sound of a disk drive continuously resetting:

recording of the disk dying in mp3 format

I shut of the power to the offending disk and it now rests in peace. 3 years of of a Cyrus mail spool have taken their toll.

Acutally I think it has been the heat of this summer that has been cruel to the disks. I thank the RAID gods every day for the way in which my disks have failed over so smoothly:

[simon@bunker[ttypts/4]~]$ sudo mdadm --misc --detail /dev/md2
/dev/md2:
Version : 00.90.03
Creation Time : Tue Aug  9 10:40:33 2005
Raid Level : raid1
Array Size : 1465024 (1430.93 MiB 1500.18 MB)
Device Size : 1465024 (1430.93 MiB 1500.18 MB)
Raid Devices : 2
Total Devices : 2
Preferred Minor : 2
Persistence : Superblock is persistent
Update Time : Fri Aug 11 06:39:36 2006
State : clean, degraded
Active Devices : 1
Working Devices : 1
Failed Devices : 1
Spare Devices : 0
UUID : b715e21a:0ac688c2:156d41bc:4263e71c
Events : 0.13856
Number   Major   Minor   RaidDevice State
0       0        0        0      removed
1      22        3        1      active sync   /dev/hdc3
2       3        3        -      faulty spare  /dev/hda3

I don’t like doing any big system changes before I go away and I am in Austria this weekend. I’ve been planning on doing the “big disk upgrade of 2006” afterwards, have the disks priced up and just need to pick them up from Bauers on Monday. The net result should be 1.2TB (4 x 400GB in RAID 5) of usable storage on the “/mnt/vault” array and 200 GB on “/” (3 x 200Gb in RAID 1 with hot standby). In the mean time I am going to hope that the single disk failed raid array holds up over the weekend.

Why isn’t the UK working?

9 years in power and the Labour government has done nothing for London. I used to love being in London and indeed believe that it is still one of the great cities of the world. But it’s creaking under the weight of an un-maintained and never-replaced infrastructure and a half-assed approach that seems to permeate through so much of the UK’s public services. Perhaps I notice this more after having lived in Germany for a while. On this last trip I became acutely aware signs stuck around stations: “Machine out of Order”, “Toilets closed” (during office hours), “Due to signal failure… …not running” Why can’t this shit bloody work properly. It’s really not difficult to run a metro network system (most of the world manages somehow) or have spare parts for ticket machines. Improving your service through “We are pleased to announce that all tube lines are running normally” announcements is an embarrassment. What else should they be doing? I am picking on specific examples but feel that they reflect the surface of a far greater problem, which is Labour’s lack recognition of London’s importance in the economy, and the lack of investment in the city’s infrastructure to reflect it’s wealth generation.

The city still has not even broken ground in the Cross London rail link. This is a project that has been on the books for 16 years. Instead people have to make do with a Victorian rail network that is packed and where temperatures rise into the 40s in the summer. Shockingly only now are moves afoot to try and cool down the tube tunnels.

Unfortunately improving infrastructure type projects take time and even if the Labour government is finally kicked out, it’s going to be many more years until projects are started to fix London and ordinary residents (and exiles like myself) start seeing the benefit. For the moment, living in Munich is appealing.

I have noticed a real pride when I speak to people in Munich who work for the city’s administration. Yes, people in Germany attach more cachet to working for the civil service but it goes beyond this. One woman from my gym works in the city works department and spoke with real pride about her promotion of the city’s pools and was genuinely interested in my experience of using them. I can’t imagine Kevin from Essex asking me passionately about what I thought of his outsourcing of the parks and pools (are there even any left in London?) to Capita Resources.

I’m also the last person to advocate the state running services but also don’t want to be living in a society of “Computer says no” attitude and lack of responsibility for things working. In Munich they do.