bryanjeffrey (ABOUT)

Given the high volume of quality content <wink wink>  on this blog, I’m sure that many were heart broken when the server hosting this had a harddrive hiccup and downed for 10 days.  If you didn’t notice, I don’t blame you. I keep telling myself and everyone else that I will someday maintain this, but it happens to fall a ways down in a very long list of life and professional goals. Not that I don’t see this as important, but our little I/O episode is case in point.

The issue was actually a rather simple one, involving only a corrupted ext3 journal in the /var partition; that unfortunetly becomes much more complicated when the offending host is located some 350 miles away in a dark basement’s much darker closet with no known *nix admins to be had. I tried to do a phone walkthough with my very patient and forgiving brother-in-law, but that ended when I failed to assert the gravitous difference between

tune2fs -O ^has_journal /var

and

tune2fs -O ^has_journal / var.

If you’re not a sysamdin, the short story is that the mis-placement of a single space made the machine completely unbootable. So thanks to FEDEX, we’re back in business little the worse for the wear.

Aside from hosting a few blogs and our primary DNS, that server was not doing much anyway, and I was in the process of backing up the data to decommission it when the error occurred. I never would have guessed it a year ago, but we are now 100% Ubuntu as that was our last Fedora based server. We just upgraded most of our desktops at work to the new Beta release of Hardy Heron, and I’m happy as cake. The NVidia drivers for my GeForce 6150 LE are finally solid in Compiz-Fusion after endless screen locks (the mouse would move, but no one was home) and the intel video cards are doing their own work so that the processor is freed up for snappy performance. The background art is the best yet.

I apologize to the faithful few who keep checking in hoping for personal news and continue to get assualted with tech jargon.. I have plans to split my personal and professional blogs apart–stop laughing, I know that keeping has been more than a task for me so far. Thanks for sticking with me anyway. Blessings!

I’m sure that you’ve all heard me sing the glories of Linux at some point, and probably most of you know that I run Ubuntu (among other OSes). I’m constantly impressed by the relative ease of use and how quickly it is continually improving. I’ve got 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) running on 5 machines at the moment, and I’ve been wanting to upgrade to 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) since it came out a few weeks ago; I just haven’t had the time to add a new hard drive to my apt-mirror machine. BTW, any of you really geeky fellows who run Ubuntu on more than two machines, apt-mirror is well worth the effort and bandwidth (if you have it).

It takes all of about 10 minutes to set up, and about 12-72 hours to download the packages. Once it’s done, your updates and installs will happen in seconds, since the downloads are only limited by your local LAN. With my sources enabled (all of the official and community repos on the ubuntu mirror plus the wineHQ one) it was a 37 gig download. Assuming you have a running web server, all it takes is:

sudo apt-get install apt-mirror

After the install, open up your mirror.list and replace the lines that start with deb with the similar ones in your sources.list. here is mine:

sudo vim /etc/apt/mirror.list

############# config ##################
#
# set base_path /var/spool/apt-mirror
#
# if you change the base path you must create the directories below with write privlages
#
# set mirror_path $base_path/mirror
# set skel_path $base_path/skel
# set var_path $base_path/var
# set cleanscript $var_path/clean.sh
# set defaultarch
set nthreads 20
set tilde 0
#
############# end config ##############

deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty main restricted
deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty main restricted

deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty-updates main restricted
deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty-updates main restricted

deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty universe
deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty universe

deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty multiverse
deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty multiverse

deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty-security main restricted
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty-security main restricted
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty-security universe
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty-security universe
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty-security multiverse
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty-security multiverse

clean http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu

After that you just need to run the mirror updating command…
sudo su - apt-mirror -c apt-mirror
…and wait for several hours. Or days.

Once it has completed the first run, you can go into /etc/cron.d/apt-mirror and uncomment the line in there to make it run on it’s own every day.

I know, I know…. I tease you all with a new blog, and promptly forget about it for several months. For those of you who know me well, this is pretty much right on par. I get a great idea and start after it with the best of intentions, only to drop the ball for some other shinny one–or a bigger and more important one. I really do hope to maintain this someday, but no promises of consistency just yet.

At the moment we are still juggling a monster remodel of our duplex ( not nearly as monster as it might have been with out the wisdom of my wife =), a blossoming young company, growing involvement in a church that is busting at the seams, and family spread all over the northwest. The crazy part is that we still pretend that we have a life most of the time, and we go out with people now and then.

Our business really is going well, and we’re excited to see where it takes us as it grows and takes shape. The time investment is still quite significant, but we hope that it pays off, and not at too high a price. We have a great team and the privilege of serving some exceptional clients. My travel has tapered down a bit as our Spokane office is off and running now and I can focus on developing our services and improving our current offerings.

Aside from work, Alyssa and I were able to sneak away for a weekend in the Great North. Although it was a whirlwind trip, the timing could not have been better. We spent a little over a day and a half wandering around Victoria BC, shopping, talking, and just leaving all of our cares at the airport. If you ever have the chance, tea at the Empress is well worth the time. It is an architectural marvel–not to mention the first-class teas and fare. The Irish Times pub was also a great stop. I may be a bit biased in that, given our great love of most Irish pubs (Kell’s is one of our favorite Portland haunts).

Hopefully I won’t be six months in writing the next post, but only time will tell. Feel free to chide me over not keeping this up; there is no motivator like a good public taunting, and it doesn’t get too much more public. Cheers!