A number of people who work in IT incorrectly assume that ‘anecdote’ is the singular form of ‘data’. That is, if they or someone they know has had a bad experience with something, that thing is to be feared and avoided, or if it doesn’t align with their current idea of the way things should work, the best thing to do is undermine the project. If I hear the sentiment “nobody in the industry does it that way” again, I’m likely to scream.

After some testing, and some reports on the zfs-discuss list, it appears that my backup fileserver simply doesn’t have the horsepower, the memory, or the I/O bandwidth to handle dedup. The first problem: it’s a single core Sempron 3300+. The CPU utilization goes through the roof when doing any serious dedup work. Second: there is only a single GB of RAM installed, which has to be shared by the OS, running applications, the ZFS ARC, and handle all the dedup operations. The 3rd and final issue is I/O bandwidth: the pool in the backup server is a pair of 750 GB IDE drives, sharing a single controller in a master/slave relationship. To make matters worse, all of this over 100bT ethernet (not that I’ve ever seen the link saturated).

When I turn on dedup and compression, my average speed drops from 6-7 mbps to 2-3 mbps. In contrast, vault, my “full size” file server regularly pushes 25-30 mbps through the same switches. Some commenters suggest adding a SSD-based L2ARC device to increase the speed of dedup. If I’m going to spend money on the systems at this point, though, the money is going into upgrading the larger file server, and moving hand-me-downs to the test server.

All of this reinforces my comments from a few weeks ago that I really need to move vault off of Solaris Nevada, and onto OpenSolaris. I’d also like to spend a small chunk of cash on upgrades, but that is on hold for now.

The site suffered from a long outage this morning due to a database problem with the hosting provider. The MySQL 4.0.x database that was powering most of the site has disappeared from the hosting machines, and I get a “Can’t read dir of ‘./ databasename / (Errno 12)’ when trying to log into the database. To make matters worse, as of yet I haven’t received any assurances that makes me think they know what they are doing.

When I contacted their support email address, I got a very cheerful and totally useless set of responses. I had included the full error codes from the MySQL client, and the website address for the photoblog of this site. After a few emails that were of little help, I went ahead and reloaded all the tables from my nightly backup scripts into the MySQL 5 database needed for the WordPress 2.9 upgrade, and made all the configuration changes to have the installs point at the correct database. I had to then go in and fix all my backup scripts to make sure they were pulling the right data to the right places.

As I finished this, the tech emailed me and told me that the site was working fine for him, and if I would be nice enough to flush my DNS cache, it would probably work for me. As if this was the problem all along. I guess the following wasn’t clear enough:

How do I get past the error: “#12 – Can’t read dir of ‘./databasename/’ (Errcode: 12)”. I don’t think I have access to the filesystem where

the database lives.

The response to my repeated questions about what went wrong:

With regards to what happen, we do not have access with your logs as a part of your security. What is more important to us is to see your website running smoothly now. In case this issue will occur again, we will be forwarding it to our administrators for further investigation.

Yeah, no thanks to your keen support skills. The problem wasn’t solved in any way. The problem was avoided by restoring the data from a backup to a different database. To add further insult to injury, I can’t find any other contact information on the 1and1 site, other than an 800 number for customer support. I’ll be calling them tonight and trying to work my way up to some form of administrator. Without some kind of response on what happened to the filesystem holding my database, I’m going to have to start looking for another hosting provider.

Any suggestions?

Charlotte’s grandfather passed away shortly after Christmas, 2009, and left behind a treasure trove of family photographs. Most aren’t organized and need long term preservation. This prompted us to finally purchase a scanner, which we had been thinking about for some time.

My wife made the purchase – an EPSON Artisan 710 printer/scanner. It’s getting harder and harder to find a solo scanner, and this one had Ethernet and WiFi built in. Once we got it setup, I found out the real joy: you can scan over the network. No need to be plugged in anymore. Just bring your laptop over to the scanner (so you can get your grubby mitts on the flatbed), and start saving old pictures from decay.

It does an excellent job as a scanner, BTW. We haven’t tested the printing aspects of it yet, but it does take 6 ink cartridges, and a full set of high capacity ink is less than ¹⁄₂ the price of the scanner, which is rare these days.

I always have a bias against people with my name, but spelled wrong. In this case, it’s Brandon Sanderson, the author selected to finish the Wheel of Time series after the death of Robert Jordan. A few months ago, the announcement was made that Robert Jordan’s wife selected Brandon to finish the series, and it was going to be three more books, instead of the promised one. Considering the final book was to be the 12th 700+ page installment, this wasn’t exactly pleasing news. However, during the announcements, I heard very positive things about the Mistborn trilogy that Brandon wrote. Over the break, I purchased the first novel, Mistborn, and gave it a read.

I was shocked at how good it is. It’s the right mix of high fantasy, a magic of sorts and a carefully constructed world, with it’s own mythos and history. Most of the plot lines are interesting and engaging – and I found myself recommending it to people as soon as I’d finished. I also went back to the bookstore today to get the next two volumes, and found them on backorder. I’ll have to look around, or check the local library.

Once more I wax poetic on the extended range of image editing that shooting in RAW gives you. As a picture is worth a thousand words, I’ll demonstrate my exposition in images:

Straight from camera (rendered with Aperture’s RAW 2.1 plugin):

Levels adjusted, shadows boosted, exposure corrected, and some sharpening:

Part of the problem with moving to a smaller space is putting all the things you have accumulated into order once the move is finished. I’ve come to the realization that I need more shelf space for my computer and camera gear, and there’s none to be had without knocking out a few walls and building an addition on to the house. Even buying new bookcases is out, as there’s no available wall space to put them. It looks like I’m going to have to build up, not out.

I’d already been thinking about building myself a proper computer desk for a number of months. At the moment, I’m using a folding card table as a work surface. It’s sturdy, it works, but it’s a pain. It’s the wrong height for me to work at and it’s not wide or deep enough for my needs. What I’m looking at building will be nearly 7 feet long and 4 feet deep, with under-mounted wire management. If I keep it really simple, I’m looking at at least $70 in wood costs. If I build it out a little more, to handle the stereo and the printer, and possibly the speakers, the cost doesn’t go up too much, but the need for a solid plan does.

The desk is Phase 1. Phase 2 is to build a lofted bookcase above the desk. Two or three shelves high, running from wall to wall (leaving a space for the door, of course). That will have to come later, but I need to do enough design work on the desk to make the bookshelf a possibility later. It wouldn’t be a good thing to have to take the desk apart and rebuild it a few months after I assemble it, just to make the bookcase fit. So, it’s off to the bookstore to look at how to design and build desks and shelves, and time to learn how to properly operate woodworking tools.