Christmas, Bugs & Shortbread So Christmas has come and gone once again. I had lots of time to sit down and write about things going on lately, but I just wasn't in the mood. In the reader's digest version of work : things have been very busy, but not as productive as I would like. I went to some potential client meetings, and I went to do work at some clients, and after arriving and setting up it was decided to push things back until the new year. I am building some new Mail servers for L&Y (Kubuntu + Kolab). We ordered dual opterons, big HDs, lots of RAM ... fun boxes to play with, but they have not arrived yet. Suppliers are always slow around Christmas, but I know they will come through for us.

Christmas was low key. I stayed in Calgary this year. I ate Christmas eve dinner with Mary Ann & Dayle. Mary Ann cooked up a fabulous meal. Old style Saskatchewan for us so we were not homesick. She even got us the Life Saver books (which are total old school Saskatchewan things). Craig came over later. We had some port and conversation. Dayle took off to head over to the house for the kids that night. I went home around 11 and opened my gifts from my mom. Christmas day I slept in. I went for dinner at Dayle's house with the family. Jan cooked another amazing spread. Two nights back to back where I got stuffed. We proceeded to have the gingerbread house contest. Dayle and his daughter Maegan versus Katy and me. It was a long fought battle, but the first set of judges split the decision. I'm thinking we got hoodwinked because the judges were Katy's boyfriend, and Maegan's boyfriend. Funny how they were all downstairs together before the judging. The tie-breakers came back from the airport later, and the best house (mine and Katy's) was triumphant. Dayle and I sat in the hot tub for a couple of hours. It was a great Christmas.

In between the regular Xmas activities, I finally got fed up with SuSE messing with my hardware. I've had sound issues since upgrading, and lately I could not run at 1280x1024 without the monitor "screeching" at me. I have the synch and everything set to the manufacturers specs. I finally decided it was time to move on. I installed Kubuntu 5.10, and updated the repositories with Jonathan Riddell's KDE 3.5 packages. I must say I am quite happier now. I have a great resolution, and the sound has never functioned better that it is now. (Goodbye to FC, and SuSE problems).

I continue to have problems with the custom menu features in KDE. I actually found a bug, and just a few short minutes after I took some screen shots, and explained things to Aaron, he had already changed the code, and sent me an SVN diff. That's why I love Aaron, and the rest of the planet should love him too. He's AWESOME! It's too bad I'm not running KDE from SVN, or I would have the fix. I do have a work around, and I guess I'll just have to live with it until the next release of packages. I also love Aaron because he added dragging windows across the pager ala bbpager style. I've been waiting for that for quite some time now. I thought I had found another bug with the font installer. It completely messed with my xorg.conf. Lots of unprintable characters included around the sections it edited. I can not seem to reproduce this. Guess I don't get to file a bug report.

Everything seems to be running much smoother in 3.5. I'm sure running a much more stable distribution is helping that as well. Everything works exactly as I expect. I even have MIDI support via Timidity now, and I modified the file associations accordingly. I did try out Amarok for playing MP3s. I found the shortcuts to change the track to be much too slow for my liking. It does have some neat eye candy. I reverted to juk though. It's still my fave. My re-installation of Apollon did not work completely. I had to get Aaron's node files in order to search the Gnutella network, the Ares plug in is still not working. I can not seem to find a nodes list to bootstrap the plug in. Oh well. I tried out KMldonkey. It connected (sort of). I couldn't stand using the interface though. I gave up on that quite quickly. I'm settled back into a working system. I still need to load my databases and configure apache for development, we I _need_ to.

I have to get my house in order for work shortly. I need to go back over the last couple of weeks and find out what I still have to do, and make my list. I just let it get away from me right before the holidays (understandably so). I've been so unmotivated to work lately, but I need to get moving again. It's time.

On the brightest note of the past few weeks Hammy's wife Hannah sent me home with a package of shortbread last night. Everyone wants Hannah's tablet (smashed tablet is like a flaky sweet fudge ... sort of). It's too sweet for my liking, but her short bread is to die for. yummmy yummmy!

Happy holidays, and Happy New Year.  ¶ 2:59:00 PM 0 comments

  Parachutes, New Hardware & Parking So it's been a crazy couple of days. I was plugging away on rebuilding the server for Fortress internally, and Gregg phoned me up and asked me about doing a quick Atrium job. He said "It's kind of a parachute mission". The clients had hit disaster, with complete loss of email, web, DNS and who knows what else. Their computer tech is a nice guy, but he is in _way_ over his head. It's clear when several of us worked with him that he just really does not know enough about computer systems. Gregg mentioned when he first got there that they had 2 DHCP servers running on the same network, and that was causing IP conflict problems. They had moved DNS to network solutions, and I found on the old server named files. I was not informed the new systems were to be public name servers. I just left handling the routing, DHCP services, and everything else for the time being. I wanted to get the mail servers running, and ASAP.

Let me backtrack for a bit. Gregg confirmed we were going ahead on Tuesday afternoon. I was delivered the new servers and hardware Wednesday morning, and I began the process. The first problem I encountered was the pain of installing a second hard drive into the cage. The cables (with some re-arranging) were just barely long enough to provide access and power. After I had the boxes assembled I attempted to install Kubuntu 5.10. The first installation was underway and I started on the second server. When the reboot happened it booted directly to console. I was surprised and figured something was incorrect. It happened on the second computer as well. I could login without problems, yet starting X would crash horribly. To cut the story short, after a couple of hours of investigation, the kubuntu installation does not properly detect the on board ATI RADEON EXPRESS 200 IGP cards. It configures the xdriver "ati". The x driver "radeon" does not work either. It turns out I needed to install the xorg-driver-fglrx package and manually configure xorg.conf to load the module, and use that display driver. After the hardware issues were resolved, the Kolab installations were a breeze, and the servers were ready to go. I also imported the users with some scripts I have written.

I installed and setup the mail servers on site. We waited until after hours to turn on the DNS MX records, and switch everything over. Everything was working properly from my side. I know when I left we had switched accounts and tested them. They were having internally network issues though. Ray helped them out the next morning. There was a small issue on the new servers where the system clock was running 2-3 faster than normal. THis meant the email times would be all out of whack. I tried a fix which didn't work, and then I hacked a cron job to restart ntpdate every minute until I figured things out. It turns out to be a bug with some motherboards and the ubunutu 2.6.10 kernel. I hade to add some kernel options (noapic nolapic noapictimer) to the kernel boot line in /boot/grub/menu.lst. I did this remotely, and rebooted a few times. The CPU was no longer double clocked, and top registered 90% and over idle, instead of the 50% auto use as before. That was a tricky bug, and has apparently bitten others.

During all of this mass rush to get things working, I have really come to dislike the parking situation in downtown Calgary. When I went to do the initial on site setup, I went to 5 different lots and they were all full. Signs up, attendants turn me away. I drove past the client building 6 times, and finally parked by the band room, and jumped the C-Train. It's funny how there was a write up in the paper about parking that same day. Everyone seems to agree it's a mess. It won't get any better I don't think. That's why I don't go out in the day much.  ¶ 3:27:00 PM 0 comments

  Open Source, Crossovers & Reunions In my experiences, every so often I'm asked the typical "So what do you do?" question. I usually end up giving an explanation of my activities. Since I have so many varied so called jobs, I usually hit the major points, and it usually comes down to me saying "I'm a computer programmer". I don't like, because I do so much more than that. I'm a system administrator, a Database admin, developer. I'm and analyst, a technician. I provide support. I do do programming. But I'm also a designer, tester, implementor, how about a mentor period. I was on site to do some systems "problem solving", and I was asked to sit on a meeting with a potential client. There was a process of getting me some business cards, and I was asked "So what's your title?". I replied ... "I don't know ... what did the contract you gave me say?". There was something in there ... I just can not remember. I offered to be called "Linux God", but I think they were looking for something a tad more professional. The end result was a small set of business cards that read "Andrew Kopciuch - Open Source Systems Analyst". I like that because it does cover a great deal of things I do with pigeonholing me into something. The most important part is it states "Open Source". Since one of the duties I pride myself on is being an Open Source advocate, I get the warm fuzzies from my new business cards.

I had to setup the backup procedure between two server. We decided not to bog down the public network with such activities. Since there was a plethora of network cards in the servers (alright ... 3 ... but it I like the word plethora), we just plugged in some cables, and an available switch to avoid finding a crossover cable. This way we have a direct Ethernet connection between to cards. I had free reign to assign some private IP addresses to the cards. This was the fun step because I was doing this all remotely and had no idea with cards were plugged in. I just set them all up, added static routes for all of them, nd started pinging on specified interfaces to find out which ones were hooked in. I wrote a couple of little scripts to bring up these private connections and manually add the routes. The rsync of over 22 Gigs of data took around 2 hours. I love cool things like that. :D

Coming up in the new year marks the 10th anniversary of my high school graduation. My best friend John emailed me today and asked if I would be interested in organizing with him. I don't know what my time will be like with all this work coming up, but I threw out some ideas to make it as little work, and organization as possible. He mentioned a day time one day gig, people can come and go as they please, or not come at all. He mentioned a BBQ, and I suggested to have the high schools entrepreneur class run the BBQ, or the charity group do it as a fundraiser. Then he and I won't be flipping burgers all day long. This all just happened a few hours ago, so I'm sure plans will change, but I'm looking forward to it. I even offered to make a web site for it all.  ¶ 2:31:00 AM 0 comments