Fooblog

Just like about every year…

We’re going with at least 8 people from #eth0, so that should be quite entertaining.

After having been frustrated for 2 weeks about the performance of my new raid-array, and spending an evening trying to pinpoint the issue, something that hasn’t happened to me in the 20 years I’ve been working with computers occurred. The magic smoke of a device was released upon connecting it.

I had pinpointed the performance-issue to a single disk in the array, which was acting weird. It would be detected as 500GB a single time, and as 1500GB the next. It’s read performance on sequential reads would fluctuate between ~80MB/sec (as the other disks) and < 1M/sec. Sometimes sticking at the snail-pace for minutes before going back to 80M/sec. After removing the disk from the array and trying it on a different controller it worked again for a while, but I cheered too soon, as the performance dropped again after a few minutes.

I finally decided to connect the disk to a second machine, so I could run a long performance-test on it without impacting my normal use on the system it came from. So I plugged in the SATA and power-cables, turned the 2nd computer on, and was greeted by a sizable puff of gray smoke coming from the PCB of the drive. A nasty smell accompanied the smoke and signaled that this troublesome disk had spinned it’s last cycles.

There is no directly visible damage or burns, as the smoke came from the side of the PCB that’s facing the disk, the smell probably largely coming from the foam that separates the disk housing and the PCB.

Naturally the disk was no longer recognized by any system from this point forward… so I have to run back to the store (again) tomorrow to replace the disk (the 2nd in the batch of 4 I bought 2 weeks ago).

Oh well…. let’s just hope this is the first and last time this happens ;P

Yesterday I went to see the Laibach/Juno Reactor concert at Metropool Hengelo. Laibach was nice, but we were really there for Juno Reactor, who gave a perfect show. The entire room was dancing along to the great music.

12►

And some vids:

• Video 1.3gp
• Video 2.3gp
• Video 3.3gp
• Video 4.3gp

Deze week kreeg in onderstaande brief in de mailbox…

Beste inschrijver,

In mei van dit jaar zijn een aantal enthousiaste initiatiefnemers in Zoetermeer gestart om de
belangstelling voor glasvezel te peilen. Veel inwoners uit Zoetermeer lieten weten graag een
aansluiting te willen. Op dit moment hebben zich circa tien procent van de totale
huishoudens van Zoetermeer zich ingeschreven bij Fiberpoint. Dit is zoals u weet nog niet
genoeg om onderhandelingen met dienstenleveranciers en vervolgens met een
investeerder op te starten. Daarnaast zijn wij op zoek naar ambassadeurs op wijk en/of
straatniveau in Zoetermeer ten einde een hoger inschrijvingspercentage te kunnen behalen.
Wij zullen op korte termijn alle kritische opmerkingen aangaande onze website daar waar
mogelijk verwerken en aanpassen. Voorts zijn wij van plan om een informatie avond te
houden in wijkcentra of wellicht het stadhuis te Zoetermeer. Waar het in essentie om gaat,
is dat men er zich van bewust moet worden dat als er een open netwerk in Zoetermeer
komt, u niet meer verplicht bent om bij de aangewezen dienstenleverancier uw diensten af
te nemen. Meerdere dienstenleveranciers kunnen hun diensten aanbieden op het open
netwerk, omdat ze hier vrijelijk toegang verkrijgen. U kunt zelf bepalen wat u wilt en bij wie
u dat wilt.
Een open netwerk, ondergebracht in de Stichting Fiberpoint Zoetermeer waardoor de
inwoners van Zoetermeer de “baas” zijn over het netwerk, maakt Wijk TV mogelijk, maar
ook tal van andere zaken, omdat de zeggenschap dan ligt bij de abonnee en NIET de
eigenaar cq exploitant. Als men zich hiervan bewust is, gaat het eigenlijk nog maar om één
ding, namelijk:

“wilt u hetzelfde als u nu heeft, alleen sneller en voordeliger?”

Indien u het bewoners initiatief wilt ondersteunen en hiermee actief in uw wijk aan de slag
wilt, laat het ons dan weten, immers buren nemen onderling sneller barrières weg dan een
“vreemde eend in de bijt”. Laten we gezamenlijk een signaal afgeven dat de gevestigde orde
van kabelexploitanten op haar grondvesten doet schudden, zonder onze inzet zal er geen
glasvezelnetwerk in Zoetermeer worden aangelegd en blijft alles bij het oude voor in ieder
geval de komende 20 jaar.

Wij houden u op de hoogte van de ontwikkelingen.

Met vriendelijke groet,
Namens Team Fiberpoint Zoetermeer

Eric Vos

Ze hebben nog een lange weg te gaan, en het beoogde doel-percentage lijkt mij extreem hoog, zeker gezien de recente promotie-activiteiten van Ziggo die een flink tegen-offensief zijn gestart om zo te proberen FttH zo lang mogelijk te blokkeren.

So, I finally replaced by aging Nokia E70 with a brand new HTC Hero White Android phone. The touchscreen keyboard is still something I have to get used to, and the batterylife the last few days has been limiting (but I play a lot with it… but I must remember to recharge it when possible).
I’ve installed quite a few applications on it, and have now also gotten my voipbuster account working on it and have made some voip test-calls to and from my other voip numbers. I’ve also gotten voip to work over the telfort 3G connection I’m using, and will probably be using a lot of that in the future.
Other notable apps I will enjoy a lot are:

Google Skymaps. Uses the compass and position sensors so display a star-map of the area that you are pointing at
Google places. Should list all kinds of local restaurants, bars, banks and gas stations… but how well this works in the Netherlands is yet to be seen.
Twidroid. My current twitter-app of choice, Peep just didn’t pull it.

Some stuff I figured out, but that wasn’t too obvious initially:

• Press ‘home’ for 2-3 seconds and release for a list of running applications and click them to switch to them
• Telfort network is always considered to be ‘roaming’, because it doesn’t really exist anymore, and I am technically on the KPN network.
• …

So… it was my 0×20′th birthday, and there was a party.

The pictures can be found below, thnx to all those who came around and had some drinks to celebrate.

Also thanks to Earle for taking the pictures, and bringing the weird Thai energy-drinks

I’ve decided that my PGP key could use some updating after 9 years. I have created a new (longer) and better-hashed PGP key. Now using 4096 bits of RSA, and using sha2 from now on

And the new key is:

pub 4096R/C4F69BD2 2009-05-11 [expires: 2019-05-09]
Key fingerprint = 6AFC 0D83 5346 C729 6754 113F D867 4D8F C4F6 9BD2

I have placed the key on my server: http://www.maniac.nl/maniac.gpg and uploaded it to the pgp keyserver(s).

I have also created a transition document, which is signed by my old and new keys, located on http://www.maniac.nl/key-transition.txt. If you have signed my old key (0×357D2178) please consider re-signing my new key after verifying the signatures on this document.

If you prefer to meet me face-to-face for a key verification, that shouldn’t be too hard to arrange. I’ll try to keep some keyslips on my at all times.

Update 2009/05/18: The file was signed first with my old key, and the result was signed with my new key. This gave some problems, and the file is now replaced by a new version which is signed by both keys simultaniously. This should verify correctly.

curl -s http://www.maniac.nl/key-transition.txt | gpg –verify
gpg: Signature made Mon 18 May 2009 11:00:17 AM CEST using RSA key ID C4F69BD2
gpg: Good signature from “Mark M. Janssen <maniac@maniac.nl>”
gpg: aka “[jpeg image of size 1522]”
gpg: Signature made Mon 18 May 2009 11:00:17 AM CEST using DSA key ID 357D2178
gpg: Good signature from “Mark Janssen (Maniac) <maniac@maniac.nl>”
gpg: aka “Mark Janssen <maniac@maniac.nl>”
gpg: aka “Mark Janssen <markj@markjanssen.nl>”
gpg: aka “[jpeg image of size 1522]”

I have also updated the old key to expire on 2009/12/31

Someone asked if there was a way for diff to only show lines that are the same between 2 files. A little digging in the manpage for gnu diff got me this nice result:

diff --unchanged-line-format=%L --old-line-format= --new-line-format= FILE1 FILE2


This seems to work… but i’m open to other suggestions

I gave a presentation about LDAP at this years Easterhegg in Hamburg.
The slides to the presentation can be found in the pentabarf system, or in this post:

• ldap slides

I’m back from a weekend of Fosdem 2009, filled with Belgian beers, open source and meeting developers. I visited a few interesting talks and have some new items on my ‘Todo’ list now…

• Looking at Puppet and Cobbler
• Creating a LDAP presentation/workshop (to improve on what Geerd-Dietger Hoffmann did) for Easterhegg/Froscon/HAR2009.
• Work on LPI 301/302 exam prep.
• Improve my syslinux boot-anything usb-stick
• Study SELinux and AppArmor