As I mentioned in my previous post, I discussed how to get networking working under Debian Lenny on the new Nehalem systems at SoftLayer. However, it seems like there are lots of users who want to get Virtuozzo on RHEL/CentOS running on these boxes. A guy named Shikhir got ahold of me via a Web Hosting Talk thread, and was able to provide me with a system to build on, and some motivation to get it done for him. I was able to build Intel’s driver RPM and get it working for Virtuozzo.

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I recently had the opportunity to set up a few Nehalem based servers at SoftLayer to replace some older hardware that we were using.. and these servers /rock/. The servers have the E5520 CPU’s, and kick the snot out of the E5430’s that they replaced. We were able to actually able to replace 6 dual-5430’s with 4 dual-5520’s, and lower our costs significantly (by about 25%) — which is nice!

However, I did run into one problem while installing Debian Lenny (5.0) on these systems. The problem is that the on-board Intel Gig-E adapters (PCI ID 8086:10c9) are not supported in the 2.6.26 kernel which Lenny ships with - d’oh! If you are not planning on using Xen on your system, you could install the 2.6.29 kernel from Unstable; however, in my case, I wanted to use Xen, and there is no Xen dom0 support in 2.6.29. I was able to overcome this by re-building Debian’s 2.6.26 kernel (rev 2.6.26-13) with the most recent version of the igb drivers from Intel’s web site.

If you have a similar server and don’t want to go through the same pain I did, read more for directions on how to do this!

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Take a close look at this receipt:

We are in Texas right now.. we stayed at a resort in League City, which had this restaurant (The Harbour Club Restaurant & Bar) in it. I’d give it top reviews for the quality and taste of the food, but the service was.. interesting. I was charged (only $1, but still) for “the rocks” for a Bailey’s on the rocks, where the ice in the water, cokes, and the other drink I ordered was free. The liquor was also quite expensive in general, but that’s to be expected, I suppose. Another member of our party had a $14.13 bill (including 21% mandatory gratuity since we were a party of 10), and when she paid with a $20 bill, she only received $5 in change back. In any case, the food was spectacular, there were just some.. oddities.. in the pricing!

In my last post, I detailed the New York City portion of our trip. Once we were done in the city, we got our rental car out of it’s happy parking spot (no, it wasn’t broken into or anything silly like that), and got on the road to Niagara Falls. For details on the trip, read more!

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Tiff and I haven taken an anniversary trip every summer since we were married in 2003. In 2007, we took a trip to New York City and Niagara Falls. Our initial inspiration was that Laura Osnes, who’s mother attends our church, had won the part of Sandy in the Broadway production of Grease, and we figured we’d go see her in action. We decided that while we were in the area, we might as well take in a few more shows, then drive up to Niagara Falls for a few days. If you are interested in seeing some photos from the trip, read more!

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To the sales person trying to sell me, well, anything:

I am a tough sell. I will ask hard questions. I will not take anything you tell me at face value, you will have to prove it to me. If I think your product sucks, I will tell you that, and tell you why. If I don’t see the value you add, I will tell you that, and tell you why. If I think your product is great, I probably won’t tell you, because that would make it harder to get a good price.

If you can sell me, however, your job is mostly done - I will sell it up the chain.

Yes, I’ve heard lots of sales pitches lately. A lot of the products have been lame. A few have been cool.

In my previous post, I discussed how to get automatic procmail integration working with Plesk, to let you set up procmailrc rules to sort mail into folders. At the end of the post, I mentioned that it would be nice to figure out how to get Plesk’s version of Ingo set up to generate the rules for us automatically. Well, turns out it’s pretty easy! Once you set up procmail (as described in my previous post), and make the changes after the break to your Ingo config, any filters that users define via Plesk’s Horde/Imp/Ingo implementation will become server-side rules automatically. It’s surprisingly easy, and extremely versatile! The one downside is that if you edit the procmailrc files by hand, and then save rules in Ingo, your changes will be overwritten.

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For many years now, I’ve been maintaining a separate mail server, web server, and shell server. I’m getting busy these days, and just don’t have the time to dedicate to this maintenance. About a year and a half ago, I purchased a 30-domain Plesk license, which I am using for all the sites I host for friends and family, but I haven’t cut my own sites over to it yet. I’m finally getting to the point where I want to stop having to worry about all the VM’s, and thinking about moving my sites and e-mail over to Plesk. The one big downside for me is that Plesk, by default, does not support server-side mail sorting or filtering. I am on about 50 different mailing lists, etc, and really don’t want to have to deal with sorting out that e-mail by hand. So, I did a bit of searching, and found that there are ways of getting Plesk to use Procmail - here are a few blog posts that discuss the subject:

http://www.russwittmann.com/2007/07/14/server-side-mail-filtering-using-qmailprocmail-under-plesk/
http://rackerhacker.com/2007/11/27/sort-e-mail-in-plesk-with-procmail/

In my case, I am not using Plesk’s built-in spam filtering (instead, I’m fronting it with Maia Mailguard - if you are curious on how to get that working, comment, and I’ll write a post on it someday), so the spam part of this really doesn’t apply for me.. but the posts do describe how to get procmail working. The one big downside is that it isn’t done automatically — any time the account is updated via Plesk, the .qmail file will be overwritten, and you will need to edit it by hand to get things working again. One of the posts suggests making it immutable, but, well, that’s a pain in the rear too. ;)

I wrote a quick script that will run through this setup for you, and then set up Plesk’s event handlers to call this script after an account is created or updated. My system is Plesk 9.0.0 on Debian 64-bit, using Postfix as the MTA — even though it’s Postfix, Plesk calls a virtual mail delivery agent that still uses the .qmail files. If you are interested in how this works, read more!

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Finally! Sonic opened the location right by my house in Savage, MN a week ago. Tiff and I were planning on trying it out on Saturday, but it was way too busy - cars lined up past the Walgreens. Sunday afternoon, we stopped by and got a stall in about 15 minutes - not bad! I also swung by solo on Monday afternoon to try it out; got through the drive through in about 10 minutes.

Oh, yeah, and the #1 reason to go to Sonic: same menu, whenever they are open!! That’s right - in the mood for a burger at 6am? No problem! Hankering for a breakfast burrito at 11pm? They got you covered.

I’d recommend trying it out if you get a chance.

In any case, in the style of the Weier Rating System(tm), here goes..

Must Have
——————–

Mozzarella Sticks (Piping hot, perfectly fried, yum!)
Cranberry Limeaid
Cranberry Fruit Slush

Very Good
——————–

Bacon Cheeseburger TOASTER Sandwich

Good
——————–

SuperSonic Breakfast Burrito
Chili Cheese Fries
Chili Cheese Tots

Take It Or Leave It
——————–

Tots with Pepperjack Cheese (Cheese was rather flavorless)
Cherry Limeaid (Too sweet)

Probably Not
——————–

I recently needed a new UPS, and liked the price/performance of the CyberPower OR2200LCDRM2U. I was just about to go ahead and order it from NewEgg (link), but happened to swing over to Amazon (link) first. NewEgg had the UPS listed for $399.99; at the time I ordered, Amazon was selling it for $356.19. So, Amazon was a bit over 40 bucks cheaper. Plus, I’m a Amazon Prime member, so two-day shipping on the UPS was free (NewEgg would charge $117.08 for that), or overnight for $3.99 extra (NewEgg would charge $123.53.) I elected to go with overnight shipping (needed it quick!), so my total cost was $360.18. The total cost for the same UPS with the same shipping option at NewEgg would have been $523.52. So I saved $163.34. That pays for 2 years of Prime. Nice!

The odd thing - I ordered it about a week ago; now the price is set to $425.86. Seems to seem to vary a bit there. ;) Even at that price, however, it’d still be a savings of nearly $100 if you need quick shipping.

Other things I’ve ordered from Amazon this year that I should have paid a pile of money for overnight shipping on, but paid $3.99 instead:

• Krups KM7000 Grind-and-Brew 10-Cup Coffeemaker
• Antennas Direct Clearstream 4 Antenna (The price on the antenna was about $50 less than retail too!)
• Wii Fit
• Wall mount for a LCD TV
• Polk Audio RM6880 5.1 Speaker System
• Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver

This is a long-ish rant about why I will never use Travelocity to book a ticket again; it’s a wonderful tale of incompetent customer service. If you’re interested.. read more!

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RANCID, the “Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ” (nice backronym, eh?) is a program that periodically goes out and fetches the config files from your routers / switches / many other devices that it supports. If you manage any of these type of devices, and do not currently use RANCID, well, all I can say is.. do it!

Why am I bringing this up now? We had a switch failure at work lately, and somehow while replacing the failed component, the switch managed to wipe it’s configuration (how? no idea.) Without RANCID, we would have been trying to figure out at least 4-5 months of configuration from the last time that the file was copied off the switch. We do have a RANCID server, which was unfortunately behind the switch that failed.. but fortunately, the server was being backed up by our BackupPC server, so we were able to hop on the web interface and grab a day-old config file. Even if we hadn’t had the BackupPC server, however, it would have only been a 15-minute job to recable the RANCID server onto a different switch and grab the config file from there — much better than the multi-hour job to rebuild the config of the failed switch. However, this does tell me that it’s actually not a bad idea to set up a job to regularly sync your switch config files from your RANCID server to an off-site machine.

In short: RANCID rocks! Use it!

uh, ok?

The other day, I ran across oDesk, which is a site where contractors (”Providers”) can offer their services and clients (”Buyers”) can find them. Providers can take free tests to show their skills. The site also facilitates payments, etc.

Quite interesting - I’ll have to try it out at some point. One thing I notice is that many of the providers are from other countries, and their rates are dirt cheap - it’ll be interesting to see what the quality of their work is. It would certainly be tempting to hire someone for $10/hr to do some menial labor..

As many of you know, I’m a big fan of XenEnterprise as a virtulization platform, as it’s based on open source software, and just makes it a lot nicer to manage. For some reason, it just seems to make a lot more sense to me than VMware ESX when I’m trying to debug a problem between the two - I think it’s just because I know the OSS Xen hypervisor very well, and can understand what’s going on behind the scenes a little bit more.

In any case, Citrix just released a new version of XenEnterprise - 4.1. There are lots of new features (like very tight Netapp integration, which is cool), but the biggest one for me has to be support for live migration on fibre channel storage, which is huge. I’ve done extensive testing of it starting with 4.1 beta 1, and am pleased to report that it works quite well in my environment. Highly recommended - if you haven’t tried this yet, go give it a shot!

Last night, Minneapolis was the first stop on Skillet’s Comatose tour, with Thousand Foot Krutch and Decyfer Down. It was at Club 3 Degrees, which is a small Christian club on 1st and 5th downtown. Tiff and I went with a friend, and met up with one of my coworkers and a couple friends at the show.

The doors were set to open at 6:30, we showed up around 6:40 after parking, and the line of people was wrapped around the block. I took a look at the number of people, tried to figure out how in the world they were all going to fit in the club, and then decided not to worry about it. ;) We finally got in around 7:00ish, and found a spot that wasn’t too crowded off to the side. The sound wasn’t the greatest where we were, but the view was much better than the shorter people in our group could have gotten from the floor.. next time I go to the club, I think I will have to pay the $50-$75 for a private table on the first row of the balcony, however.. get a great view and good sound from up there.

Decyfer Down opened up. I’d never heard of them, and I think I will still maintain I’ve never heard of them. Just didn’t interest me.

After about a half-hour set change (eesh), TFK came out. Their show rocked! They were really able to engage the crowd and keep things moving. Unfortunately (for me!), most of the songs they sang were from their new album, which I didn’t even know existed until yesterday afternoon.. but they did pull out a couple of their old songs, which was great.

Then came Skillet. From the moment they got on the stage, they had the crowd moving - it was great. If you’re not familiar with Skillet, they are a bit of a unique band - the lead singer (John Cooper) plays bass, they have another guy on guitar (Ben Kasica), John’s wife Korey is on keyboards and guitar, and they have an unbelievable female drummer named Jen Ledger. They also have an unnamed dude on the cello on many of their songs, which is pretty awesome - how often do you see a rock show with a cello in it? In any case, their entire performance was unbelievably sweet - by far the best concert I’ve been to. I just wish I had gotten there an hour earlier, so we could have gotten a good spot on the floor - but ah well. ;)

If you ever have a chance to see TFK or Skillet in concert, all I can say is do it!

So, SuperTarget had asparagus on sale for $.99/lb. Tiff and I both love the stuff, so even though it wasn’t in the greatest shape, we picked some up. I usually buy asparagus in the frozen, ready-to-steam bags, and it tastes good. However, this time it was fresh asparagus, and I couldn’t find our steamer. I thought about blanching it, and finally went meh, and tossed the asparagus in a hot skillet with some olive oil and kosher salt. The results were AWESOME. I probably cooked it for 2-3 minutes in total; not long at all.. instead of being kind of mushy, it’s nice and crisp, and the flavor just explodes out of it. I love it.

Tiff prefers the mushy stuff, unfortunately.. ah well, I can mush hers up after I cook mine. ;)

A few weeks ago, a coworker pointed out Mosso, which bills itself as “The Hosting Cloud”. Looks like a really interesting service - basically like shared hosting that will scale forever; no need to worry about individual servers, etc.

If you are just hosting a generic php/rails/etc site that gets a lot of traffic, it looks like this would be a pretty sweet (and affordable) solution. Unfortunately, most of the stuff I do (both personally and at work) is too complicated to host on this - ie, it requires third-party software like solr or other java apps.

If anyone has tried it out, let me know how it went for you!

Last week, my HTC Kaiser dropped off my belt in a cold, cold parking lot, and sat there for about four hours before I was able to come back and get it. Gah! It worked OK, except for a big crack on the bottom half of the screen. Gah! After a couple days, the crack had spread, so I can’t see anything on the display. This makes the phone pretty much useless. Sigh.

I put an order in for a new phone yesterday, but because it’s a Saturday, I won’t get a new phone delivered until Tuesday at the earliest. All my spare phones have been sold or eaten, so that means I can’t make calls or see who’s calling me until a new phone comes. I figured I could probably deal with this.. but today I was at Target, and noticed that they have AT&T Gophones, which are pre-paid cell phones. On a whim, I picked up a $20 GoPhone (Motorola c168i), figuring I might be able to pop my SIM card in and make it work. Got home, tried it out, and what’dya know, it works!

It’s a junk phone (it’s only got GPRS - not even EDGE networking, horrible interface, etc), but at least I can send and receive calls, texts, etc. ;)

ok, this site is cool:

http://www.revfad.com/flip.html