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Toothache

I took the time to read the personal blogs of Jake and Dave. Oh my goodness, what a fricken whinge-fest. If this is how they want us to write blogs then read on. Its great to know that you are tired as hell for taking on too many responsibilities and maintaining the illusion that you are living life to its fullest because you are too busy to do stuff all the time. Yeah that excuse approach worked well for me throughout my time at Monash Caulfield. Just look at my dismal grades because of it. Everywhere I look, not just at these blogs but in my personal and professional life, everyone is working more hours than they should. Taken a labour day holiday recently? What happened to 8 hours of work, 8 hours of rest, and 8 hours of play. (That adds up to 24 quite nicely.) People are getting pushed by their managers to do all this overtime, and regardless of whether it is remunerated or not, their personal lives, relationships, health (yes it is unhealthy if you don’t get enough sleep) and their own existence takes a dive. I’ve done it for too long, (I even go by the monkier, neversleepz, on many internet message boards because of it), and woke up one day to realise that 4 hours of sleep a night isn’t living, its slavery. I feel as outspoken as a vegetarian saying anything about it though. I wonder how you stop a junkie employee, thinking that their drug work is the most fruitful thing in their lives?

Next whinge, I also couldn’t believe the nerve of Jake to blog that “2 teams with the same client didn’t think of sharing data”. Since I worked with members of the other team last semester, I did approach them a couple of weeks ago with the idea. All I got back was ‘we already asked, the client wants the systems to be separate…. I don’t think we have stuff in common anyway’. Granted some members in my team were of the persuasion that it was additional risk, but after Jake and Dave made the point that data could be shared, and I drew on the board that we shared a common point of collecting customer contact data that we could develop together, we agreed that this is something that should be persisted. If only we could we could get hold of the client and run it past them…

Whinge 3: The manager of the clients organisation, the only paid employee, finally emailed Andy and myself with regards to the current host of their CRM, their only online presence, being the host for our project(s). She began a week and a half of annual leave on Friday, but advised in an email to us Thursday night, that she was super busy (this is true, she wears a few different hats…, again see opening rant), and would contact the host on Friday (her day off, how nice), and let us know. I’m just about to walk into our Monday morning meeting, only to report that our client must be well and truly on her holiday and we are still in the dark about were to put our host. What we do know, is that the client contact for the other team working for the same organisation, has no jurisdiction on this kind of thing, they only deal with their program. The organisation is still young and they don’t have much integration yet. I see Jake and Dave’s point about the marrying of the data, but the organisation itself isn’t very married to each other. Its great that these IT projects can facilitate this, but it’s a shame we haven’t been able to get a warning light out to them to say, ‘hey, your next business problem is that one hand doesn’t talk to the other, you are going to need to pull stuff in and work more closely if you want this organisation to run effectively.’ They probably already do know this, I hope they see the opportunity in these teams to help achieve this.

Whinge 4: I was stood-up on Wednesday and Thursday with regard to going over our database design. I was to meet with another team member over MSN, but haven’t heard from them. Yes, errors a plenty on both our behalves (like no phonecall to ask where the other one was), so this wont be a long whinge. It does mean we will have more collaboration today which will cut in to our time today and my time to find a dentist (see next whinge)

Whinge 5: Saturday afternoon felt like my wisdom tooth was pushing into the tooth next to it. Due to my bad habits of no breakfast, and being best mates with the vending machine at work, I think I exacerbated a long standing problem. A few teeth away from said wisdom tooth was what looks like a couple of cavities. Dentist, Dr Danny Lam, as rude as he was when I saw him a couple of years ago, may get my business after-all because I don’t know if I’ll have the time to travel any other locality and lookup a new dentist (refer to opening rant, again)

How’s that? Do I sound like enough of a baby boomer for ya? Feel a bit low, eh? Now go and read Conversations with God, and find out that this negative ranting does nobody any good.

Or don’t, but heed my advice: Never underestimate the power of positive thinking.

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It’s not cheating if you blog using OneNote 07

Wow. What a stupidly technological week. If doing I.T. was like eating fruit, I’d have a severe case of the runs.

 

Database Modelling

Ok, so the first interesting item this week was our Domain Model. A domain model, for all you B Comp. students, is essentially a Class Diagram, its just what the B. Info Systems students call ’em. We needed to prepare our Domain Model as the first step of our design for the vicICT Membership System.

 

A membership system sounds fine and dandy until said membership system requires you to facilitate group memberships and changing from one membership type to the other. One thing I’ve learnt is that regardless of what walk of life you come from, you will always argue about the database schema.

 

So, Tuesday morning started with the B Comp students in my team all standing at a whiteboard, arguing about the particulars of cardinalities of relationships and basic stuff to do with ER modelling. Then to assist, along came our tutors, who both disagreed with our approach, and then with each other. Apart from being humorous, in a Schindler’s List sort of way, this was a sign, along with all the other signs encountered in previous group work, that system design and modelling is a great

divider amongst men. I guess that’s why the majority of DBA’s I know are women!

 

Anyhow, if the torture of the morning wasn’t enough, we decided to press on. Find a meeting room in the uni containing a whiteboard. Tucked away in N block where no IT student normally ventures and after we had some time to think more about the data and problem space, we proceeded to draw our designs. This was followed by a series of drawing over each others design intertwined with a lot of explaining of our thought processes and explaining the basics of some database concepts to other members.

 

By the afternoon we were all bored and frustrated with each other, but we had learnt an important lesson:

 

The safest thing when coming up with a DB design is to have each person go away and draw their own models. This way everyone has thought about the perils and at least made a few mistakes in their revisions. They have also tested their schema in their head against different scenarios which can then be used to challenge alternate designs other team members have come up with. They can go and find tools and fill in their own knowledge gaps before we all get together and waste each others time. After that, they can regroup and compare ideas, merge models and go forward. I guess in the real world, a safe analogy would be that someone calls a meeting about a design. In preparation for this meeting you:

 

  1. Actually prepare.
  2. Find your database mojo. If you haven’t had much exposure to databases (ie, you are still a uni student), go and look at your textbooks on databases. Make sure that you don’t come to the meeting proposing silly things that can’t be normalised.
  3. Have a go with as much of the design as possible. Make sure you challenge it and find a few things wrong with it, then fix those things. If your design comes out smelling like roses on the first go, please go sniff a dogs bum and ensure your nose is in good functional order.
  4. Break the design and find test scenarios to break other peoples designs. Write these scenarios down, they will make the basis for some clever test cases when you are implementing your system.

     
     

    Office 2007

    My new toy this week was the new Microsoft Office. Surprisingly, my 3 year old laptop runs it faster than Office 2003. The user interface redesign in Word, Excel & PowerPoint (among others) was a risk but it certainly paid off. A lot of thought to what controls are used most often and common toolbar icons pop up over your document when you highlight something and right click, so you are closer to the editing controls. Some of my senior colleagues think the interface is shit and the ribbon is too big, but I’m very impressed with it. You can turn it off if you like later anyhow.
     

    One Note is still my fave app, and the extra features show that M$ are certainly pushing it. Some cool new features are the text recognition of pictures and audio recordings so that they can be searched just like typed and handwritten notes.
     

    The best feature so far is the blogging tool though. It can integrate with my two faves, WordPress and Blogger and it’s a great welcome to the new suite.
     

    Office Ultimate is still available at the ridiculous uni student price of $75 per license. You will need one license for each computer you want to install this on (per my reply from M$ when I emailed them about it), but its still a bargain compared to the Academic pricing in the shops for a not so Ultimate version ($250~). All you have to do is go to http://www.itsnotcheating.com.au and mention referral code MSP9.
     

    That Linux Box that’ll run a version control server and upstairs heater

    Fun and games on the linux front. The Cobalt Raq4 server is now running Fedora 5. All it took was to upgrade the firmware on the cobalt, pull out the old hard drive, install Fedora on a normal PC, then replace the kernal and modules with premade ones as well as code to run the LCD, configure the serial port and terminals to run on startup and then put the Hard Drive back in the unit, configure the unit to use the hard drive rather than network boot and tell Fedora it’s the /boot partition rather than the / one, I want it to start when it boots from disk.
     

    Yes, I am being sarcastic, it took an age and a day (two of them in fact) to get this thing up and running.
     

    My friend who has provided the hardware, has met with much frustration in linux land, particularly with user and group permissions, but has managed to resolve these, and also install SVN and Apache2 and have them run our repositories nicely.
     

    We have a backup strategy and he has also wrote a script to do an incremental backup of the repository onto a series of large rotated USB disks. One thing that still puzzles us is how to do a backup of both the repository configuration and the files in the repository. svnadmin dump does the first bit, but not the second.
     

    “By the power of SSH tunneling, I am HE-MAN” aka “now I can escape my countries Internet Censorship Proxy by finding an SSH server to bounce off”

    We had the box running solo throughout the end of the week while we were at uni/work. Something that was interesting were the amount of connection attempts from overseas. People from China, France and Russia trying a dictionary attack of usernames and passwords. On a bad day we had 600 connection attempts of which only a couple of them legitimate. Thankfully of all the successful logins, they were only done from our own networks in Aus, but its still interesting to see how many people just sniff ports on the web in search of a place they can squat and do all kinds of nasty stuff to. Side note: If we were hacked, the hackers could have gone and edited the logs to make us believe no one ever came in :S
     

    And the winner is Sydney, Australia

    As for hosting the server, it was sitting in my house for most of the week but the spare room is small and along with another computer, router, 2 monitors, a laser printer and god knows what else, the room heats up really quick. It’s also not suitable since my partner runs a home business from the same room!
     

    We were going to secure a place in a Sydney datacenter but our contacts advised that the operators of said datacenter had a habit of unnecessarily unplugging things they decided on a whim didn’t belong. My friend on the other hand is keen to host the server at his place, which I’m glad. Its a win / win since my friend has a dedicated internet connection just for the server (big family, 2 internet accounts), a large bedroom and personal tolerance for loud PSU fans, as well as a bedroom that gets really cold.
     

    The only limitation about hosting it there is the bandwidth involved, 64k upload will mean slow checkout times but once a checkout is done, then doing the updates shouldn’t suck too badly. We can consider an upgrade of speed and since it’s a wireless connection the provisioning lead time to upgrade shouldn’t be long at all.
     

    And after all our hard work, I managed to fubar it all up by doing a yum update. In doing so, it updated the kernal and heaps of other software. Great we have patched many known security holes. However it must have installed packages intended for a 686 instead of 386 architecture, and now every command is returning an illegal instruction message. I’ll use this opportunity to reformat the thing as a Raid device, and also set up our repositories using the FSFS type rather than the Berkely DB filesystem. Berkely DB is tried and true, but much less resilient to unexpected shutdowns. I read on one of the cobalt pages how to configure yum / rpm to only look at 386 packages, so I’ll take this on board next time so we can get back together.
     

    I’m am so haX0r. Give me admin rights so I can install developer tools

    Good news (I hope), the ‘development managers’ have met with the ‘internal services’ people at Monash and met our requests to install TortoiseSVN on the student labs. The dev managers seem quite happy with the idea. I believe Monday morning (a few hours away) I’ll be meeting with one of the internal services people in charge to run through Tortoise and determine if it can run on the Novell setup and talk to our servers, great and small.
     

    There could be a few issues with this. Tortoise can accept a proxy configuration but the problem is that it will store the said configuration in its configuration file. This means that if another student logged in, they could potentially have the password settings from the previous user. We would need a logout script to clear this value or have Tortoise ask for the password each time and not save user credentials. Or it could be that the students documents and settings where all this stuff is stored, is wiped on logout anyhow, so worrying about this may not be too much of a hassle.
     

    The other issue is that TortoiseSVN appears on every context menu in Windows explorer. This can be switched off I believe, just have to find out how.
     

    It all ends with V

    Shit its 1:33AM and I’ve already had my daily recommended intake of V. Time to sign off this stupidly long blog.
     

    Till next time

    -K

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Of server racks and linux distro’s

Ok, so for my industrial experience project, an opportunity to have a server housed in an ISP’s datacenter for our source control system was made available.

What an excellent proposition, no bandwidth charges, fast link for everyone concerned (no more sharing my precious torrent upload bandwidth, ha!). The only catch, you have to install your software on an aging Cobalt 4i Rackmount Server.

Just to give you a rundown, the cobalts use an OS based on Redhat Linux 7. Not too bad, they also have an aging pkg format to install stuff on, however there aren’t many packages available nowadays for this.

So, the unit itself is great, but I do want to get svn running and apache2 to make use of committing over port 80. This meant it was time for a new distro.

Basically getting a recent linux distro to run on it is possible, but there are a couple of hoops you have to jump through.

  1. The ROM

    The box we had come with a 2.3.35 rom installed. The first step was to go to the sourceforge Cobalt-ROM project and update to 2.10.3-ext3-1M rom in order to make available the bulk of the linux distro’s available to us.
    Since the original cobalt site has been down for a long time, so too were the instructions of how to install the flashrom. Although its work-out-able, flashing ROM’s especially when you are going by guesses greatly increases the chances of bricking your router. Thankfully the bottom half of this page explains the steps involved. Especially making a backup of the existing rom first just in case things go awry.

  2. Weapons of Mass Panic

    W00t! Power cycling the router bought some nice new LCD graphics (ok, Kon, get a grip, they are just mono-colour pixel graphics). This allowed me to guess that the flash was successful but after a little waiting all I had on the screen was a clock icon, with Sun Cobalt written at the top and a knight rider esk cursor moving from left to right and back again. Ooops! Maybe its taking longer getting used to its new life in the new rom? Once ten mins had passed and it was still the same, I recall reading that the boot rom defaults to booting from a network. This means that there must be a way to configure it. Here was my saving grace. Hold down the S key on bootup and you’ll get to the boot options menu where you can choose to boot from disk instead of network. The network option i guess will come in handy later.

  3. Re-Conception

    So now we have our Rom upgraded, the next step is to prepare a new distro. There are a couple of options for this. One is to use a slave PC to install the linux distro of your choice on, install some additional packages to allow the boot time stuff to kick in. There is one distro in particular CentOS which has a BlueQuartz system which basically is the open source equivalent of the Cobalts current web UI and server config management (along with the server packages themselves). This may be the most ideal option. To get the a linux distro onto your system you can do one of two things (there may be more but these seemed the most appropriate)

    1. Pay $85 AUD and buy Strongbolt, the CD installer for the CentOS + Bluequartz. Strongbolt is a bootable ISO that will install the updated ROM and CentOS over Ethernet.
    2. Install onto a PC then transfer the hard drive across. Cheap, a bit of a muckaround, but doable. If you want Bluequartz, then Nuonce have the distro as a free (and slow download)
    3. Null Modem serial cable< - Does anyone have these anymore?

      4. I’ve seen Gentoo, Fedora, Debian and other distros have Cobalt installation pages dedictated to them.

I’m going with Nuonce, because of the additional packages they have available and the much less stuffing around. Beware that the installer will assimilate itself to any hard drive you have in the PC that you put the CD into. My friend unfortunately found this out the hard way.