My thoughts on life, the universe and beer

Howdy all,

Happy new year all, hopefully this is going to be a better year then 2009 was to our lovely world!

I’ve already migrated my email from Dreamhost to GMail, something i didn’t ever think i would do. So far so good, hopefully i will never Google my own name and find my mail in the search results
The web interface is awesome, searching email is blazing fast, and the spam filter is probably one of the best I have ever tried.

This really is the future for many companies. There is really no need to host your own Exchange/Domino server anymore unless you have some crazy 7-year no-delete policy (for example, financial companies). This is much more effective, has proper Blackberry/Active Sync support and costs 50$ a year per user with a 20GB mailbox.

Well….I’m off to read up on few things.
Laters,
Finnzi

Hi all,

Well…It’s Christmas time again. This year has gone by like a bloody rocket.

It didn’t really start out as a good year, the Icelandic government has had it’s share of problems due to the recession. However things didn’t really turn out as bad as we thought except for the price of alcohol and tobacco has skyrocketed.

Hopefully the next year will be a better year thought for everyone as the world’s economy tries to recover .

Well, just wanted to wish everybody a merry Christmas!

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Howdy all,

Was searching for a multi-platform mind mapping application and found FreeMind. Check it out, it’s free, multiplatform and quite easy to use

A friend pointed out it is a Java application, and everybody who knows me know how much i looove Java! However running it on my Macbook is pretty darn smooth and this app has everything i really need from a mind mapping application.

I’ll try to map some of my projects this week and see if it helps me out, i have already mapped some projects in the past but most of that was just from brainstorming about a specific project, not to create a work schedule out of it.

Well, off to do something!
Bgrds,
Finnzi

Howdy all,

I upgraded my home workstation from Fedora 11 to Rawhide last week, and with the updates this morning i got the F12 release package. The release rocks! KVM is awesome! Had to do some testing with Windows servers and loaded up two on the F12 box and they seem to run pretty fast. Everything has been stable so far, and it looks awesome .

Also i have installed the Firefox 3.6 betas on my work laptop and my Macbook at home. It runs pretty fast, has some cool theme options (for those who like that) and Windows 7 integration features along with the option of installing addons without restarting the browser! See the full feature list here.

Red Hat has released it’s new virtualization platform, RHEV, and I’ve asked them for a evaluation version since it has all the features i expect from a hypervisor, and it costs half of what VMWare vSphere costs. Hopefully our evaluation goes as planned.

Well, I’m off to drink more coffee and work on a small project.
Laters!
Finnzi

Howdy all,

This week has been pretty darn bad….It started with my son being sick so i had to work mostly from home, and then i got sick on Wednesday and am still sitting in my living room….Hopefully i will feel good enough to go to work tomorrow

Bleh, just felt like whining here on the internet where nobody cares!

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Bah!

A Seagate 320GB sata HDD started giving me bad sector recently. I am currently cloning it to a 500GB disk i had in the same computer with a tool called CloneZilla. I have used it quite a few times to create a image of a disk before OS upgrades and also for cloning hdd’s between drives.

If you need a replacement for Norton Ghost please check it out. It even has the possibility to multicast images on a large network!

Bgrds,
Finnzi

YAY!

See this link: http://dag.wieers.com/blog/red-hat-backported-io-accounting-to-rhel5 and http://www.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5.4/html-single/Release_Notes/

We’re getting I/O Accounting (per process I/O accounting) in the next month or two! This is a much needed feature for the Linux Enterprise platforms. Personally i have been waiting for this feature since i first saw my first Glance Plus install…..;)

Linux has been proofing it self as a big player in the Enterprise area, and with the I/O accounting code added this will make my life a lot easier when debugging multi-oracle instances performance issues

Well…just wanted to brag about this sweet feature of the RHEL kernel

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Howdy all,

I am still alive people, you can stop looking for me…:)

Lately i have been writing a document. Technically it sounds simple, a single document. Sure….i thought so too! But my problem is that I have multiple computers. One with MacOS X, one with Fedora and one with Vista. None of them had the same word processor. Sure, you will all go yelling at me and tell me to use OpenOffice on them all. Well….i won’t….so shoot me!

Well, to make the story short, I had Office 2007 on the Vista laptop, Pages on the MacOS X laptop and OpenOffice on my Fedora box. The document i was writing was in the DOC format. Every single time i moved to another computer my formatting got screwed! Bah! Interoperability in word processing applications is none-existent!

Moral of the story? Interoperability stinks! Make sure you choose your word processing application wisely!

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Howdy,

Yesterday at work i had to extend a disk on a Lotus Domino server that i was not able to stop. Since the LUN was on a LVM group i knew i could extend the VG without disrupting the Domino server but i did not just want to add a new LUN to the VG since that tends to get messy after a while.

So i decided to try out pvmove. I had heard some horror stories that it would take ages etc, but since Red Hat supports the tool i decided to try it.

Amazingly i was able to add a new LUN to the VG (one without a partition for a easy resize experience later). The original PV was around 128GB, and it took about 25-35 minutes to move all the data of the PV!

While HP-UX administrators tend to tell you to just use mirroring instead of pvmove, and then just break the mirror and remove the smaller LUN, i found out that what pvmove really does is to create a mirror, and then copy the extends and in the end, remove the mirror. Just make sure you either background the pvmove task or run it in a screen session, preferably with -i 5!

I’m off to watch some telly….

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Man …

I was asked to work today on a holiday. Why? I have to extend a filesystem on a HP-UX 11.31 machine.

Amazingly HP does not include online resizing in the base install of HP-UX. Common people! You have to buy IA64 machines from HP, you have to buy the foundation operating system (minimalistic feature version of HP-UX), but you can not extend filesystems on the fly.

This is one of the reason i think Linux is going to rule the future. RHEL includes this. Hell, OpenSolaris gives you the features needed to extend ZFS free. Even IBM includes these features in AIX!

My point is, that in my free (or paid for subscription of RHEL) install of Linux (even on a IA64 machine) i can mirror disks with LVM, i can resize filesystems, i can even migrate data between disk arrays on-the-fly.

HP really needs to start taking care of they’re customers and stop charging for such a simple feature. Enterprise customers will probably start looking into other operating systems now when the budgets are getting tighter.

Hell, why am i even crying about this, i get my overtime, Linux ends up gaining more respect with enterprise customers and everybody wins!

Well, i have to get going, work calls….

*UPDATE*: While doing some partition resizing on my Macbook i realized that i can resize hfs+ on-the-fly (both shrink and extend). I do realize hfs+ is not the most advanced filesystem out there but common, this is a operating system mainly focused on home usage! HP-UX is a enterprise grade UNIX operating system. C’mon HP!

Bgrds,
Finnzi