done

OK, I’m finished my experiment. It’s over now and I can “break character”. First, I have to offer special thanks to “tshirtman” for being the first to unambiguously exemplify one of my main points. well done! In case it’s not blindingly obvious (as it should be), the reason for my post was that I was outraged by the spectacle of one fairly high-profile member of the linux community trying to rally support to shun and exclude another fairly high-profile member …

I had a dream…

I had a dream that many prominent members of the Linux community were dressed in Nazi SS uniforms on the Arctic ice, clubbing baby seals to death. I can’t bear the thought that so many Linux people may secretly be Nazi seal murderers, so I demand that they be excluded from any future Linux-related events or conferences that I might wish to attend. My nightmare and the strength of my personal reaction to it are conclusive proof that they are …

openstack, bridging, netfilter and dnat

I just posted the following question to ServerFault….and then realised there might be people out there in magical internetland who know the answer but never visit any of the SO sites, so i’ve posted it here too.  Feel free to respond here on on serverfault. In a recent upgrade (from Openstack Diablo on Ubuntu Lucid to Openstack Essex on Ubuntu Precise), we found that DNS packets were frequently (almost always) dropped on the bridge interface (br100). For our compute-node hosts, …

why is bzr so slow?

from the whinge of the day dept: I started a bzr branch of calibre about 2.5 hours ago because I wanted to see how difficult it would be to understand the code and make a few changes. The calibre Get Involved page warns that it can take about an hour….which is excessive to begin with and, worse, a huge understatement. $ date ; ps u -Cbzr Sat Apr 14 15:10:00 EST 2012 USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT …

comments working again

how embarassing, i make a point of asking for comments and critique on my previous post but comments didn't actually work unless you're logged in.  I only noticed because someone emailed me. It was the admin-ssl plugin.  de-activated now, so comments are working again. A few people tried to add comments according to the log – if you feel like making them again, go right ahead. thanks Craig  

getting the terminal size in python

I’m finally getting around to making myself learn python as more than just a read-only language. Working with Openstack kind of requires it. So far, I like it. Much more than I thought I would as an unrepentant sh and perl using systems geek. And getting over my distaste for the white-space issue is also proving to be much easier than I thought it would (although I still think that block-delimiters like {} make the code easier to read…PyHeresy, I …

rsync and .zfs snapshot directories

zfsonlinux recently added support for visible .zfs snapshot directories, so you no longer have to mount a snapshot to browse/view/recover files from it. This is good, but has caused my rsync backup to zfs script to complain about being unable to delete files in the .zfs directory (which is in the backup but not in the source). e.g. sending incremental file list rsync: delete_file: unlink(.zfs/snapshot/2012-03-31/vmlinuz.old) failed: Read-only file system (30) rsync: delete_file: unlink(.zfs/snapshot/2012-03-31/vmlinuz) failed: Read-only file system (30) […] cannot …