Older blog entries for Bryce (starting at number 99)

Tuesday

Made the mistake of leaving the sound system on last night even though I turned off the video and tv, so come 07:30 I got a rude awakening as the VCR switched on to record one of the morning shows. Lazed a bit until 09:00, showered, dressed and debated on what to do for the day considering it's a holiday.

09:45 Got into the office, (sad isn't it).
Read though the hate^W e-mail. Read through the newsgroups. Umm I'm feeling a certain lack of motivation.

Fortunately(?) I wasn't the only person that came in, msw, Sopwith and Deviant being key culprits. My request for more information on Cypress 82c693 SuperIO chipsets was granted and I now have all three pdf data sheets for the 82c693, 82c693U and 82c693UB. Deviant spent a while doing PCI code to tweek the Cypress a bit and we discussed the hack value of getting a USB connector added to the sx164 motherboard. I'll have to break down the Alpha and extract the motherboard to ensure that the datalines are indeed connected to the Cypress IO chip. Even if it's not (which would be dissapointing), getting the Cypress chip to initialize for USB is still a good thing as the DS10/DS20's use it to drive their motherboard USB.

On a more dissapointing note, it looks like the XFree 4.0.1 server doesn't build the DRI modules under the Alpha. The upshot being that the graphics cards are being driven in software mode with no HW acceleration. Thats a bit disapointing. I haven't given up hope though as I did find this thread on DRI for the voodoo3 which indicates that a patch is available and was submitted to the XFree86 group (who knows if it got incorperated yet).

SteveC finally got around to poping in dwmw2's donated AHA-7881U SCSI controller to replace the aging NCR825. As a result, the scsi disks speed has increased from ~8Mb to 19Mb/s which is quite impressive. SteveC has also installed the wdt4997 watchdog card though I dunno if the reset lines are connected and tripping the card to check would seem like a bad idea 8) The machine is still running linux-2.2.14 though the dreaded boot floppy has been excised from the box. I'll leave a kernel update in _A_'s hands as he wants to play with UML.

Politics
Something is rotten in the UK and it would appear to be the prime minister. When UK petrol prices were hiked as part of a 'green' tax, it was claimed that the money from this tax would go into the transport infrastructure. In actuallity this didn't occur at the level that was expected and the surplus was drained off into the public fund for 'other purposes' Given Tony Blair's remarks in this article It seems quite clear that the Labor goverment views the motorist as a "get out of jail free card" for monetory deficencies in other parts of the goverment's responsibilities. Methinks Labor are close to becoming undone by their own bumbling. If nothing else, Mr Blair should be looking over his shoulder a lot more for the next outraged Lorry driver.

Monday

Actually slept in till 09:00! then again I didn't get back home last night till 04:00 and I watched 'Spawn 2' on DVD. That might have something to do with it.

As expected, work was a bit light on workers as people seem to have used a payed holiday on friday and monday to take 5 days off in a raw.

More fun with the Alpha and USB.
As it turns out SRM (the initilal boot firmware) doesn't bother providing any tools for setting up or configuring the Cypress 82c693 chip to initialize the USB in any sane manner. As it turns out the Cypress 82c693 is an EOL'd (end of life) chipset that Compaq are still using in their motherboards. It would appear that it was expected to have a 5 year life on the production line but instead ended up only having 2. Additionally the Chipset databook is almost impossible to find though Deviant was helpful and found an online pdf copy (not to be confused with the VIA VT82c693..). When I started looking at all of this in more detail I discovered that my own Alpha actually has the solder points on the motherboard for a USB connector and I'm debating on the possibility of buying a connector and somehow getting it soldered/mounted onto the board.

USB will work on the Alpha; of that I'm reasonably sure as the USB code does successfully find the PCI OPTI (FireLink) 82c861 and is able to use it. So now the issue comes down to making the Cypress IO controller do the right thing and latching the usb-ohci code on top.

Suffered the horror of letting a Norweign fiddle with the Alpha to tet some of his updated coded. and descovered that e's broken modutils horribly,.. which is ok,.. except I couldn't do any networking to pull down the original package to recover from! Argh!... floppy diskettes to the rescue! Thank god I didn't build the floppy driver as a module!

ZenII remains untouched. It needs that upgrade damnit.

Although tomorrow is the 4th of July and a national holiday in the US, I'm debating coming in to work. Damned if I know what all the fuss is about. When I looked up the Declaration I was surprised to see that one of the signatories was dead two years before the declaration got to congress in 1776. I guess legal proceedings in the 1770's was as slow as todays courts.

Friday (cont)
After work went down with Keith to CompUSA and bought far too many goodies.

Bought 1 Surge protector with phone socket surge protector, a second USB webcamIII for testing, a es1371 based sound card and as a treat, 2x128Mb SDRAM for my Alpha as I was a bit limited with 128Mb.. whee! cost far too much though 8/
As an aside, I did notice the surge protector cam with a limited warrenty for up to $50,000 if any equipment was damaged by a surge AND more impressively, there was a best efforts warrentty to recover data on a hard disk if it became corrupted, so the surge protector seems like a good buy. Doubtless I'll get email tomorrow telling me why it isn't...

Sat/Sun

Saturday, slept in! well,.. until 09:30...

Went shopping about 10:00 and bought a few more items for the apt. specifically, some spare bedding, some kitchen utils, some other assorted goods and a bathroom scale,... I've decided to stop lying to myself and accept that I just *MAY* be mildly overweight,... (but only just! *cough* *cough*). While I was shopping I noticed a temporary tented area that had been errected to seel fireworks. In the UK you'd be damned lucky to get anything better than a small squib and even then you'd probably need a firearms licence and several arms merchant licences to handle it. So I was rather bemused to see a number of what I would call 'massive' rockets on display for sale roughly 20cm diameter by 3/4 a meter tall. I avoided the urge to buy anything...honest!

Went home and played with the Alpha/USB/webcamIII and watched a couple of movies.

Sunday

Woken up my and old friend of mine (Martyn) who rang. I guess I can be grateful he didn't call at 09:00 BST 8)

More fiddling with the kernel, as a result I have patches for _A_ to add in at some point. The ov511 driver tries to cheat a lot but unfortunately some of it's operations are promoted by the compiler to floating point operations. THOU SHALT NOT USE DOUBLE. On the bonus side, I DO have the PCI Opti USB card I've had for months installed in the Alpha, working with stock 2.4.0-test2. Additionally, now that the _fixdfsi missing symbol mystery has been solved (caused by promoted float operations in the ov511.c code), the webcamIII is up and running! There are certain caveats at this time. The onboard USB (a Contaq Microsystems 82c693) seems to be horribly broken and tries to assign itself arbitary irqs eg 234. As far as my limited testing goes, it looks like the Contaq kernel driver is at fault or the USB HW is not getting initialized at bootup. Who claimed the Alpha was a dead architecture,.. pah!
I suppose my next hobby task is to see about getting the em86 code back up and working. (note fs/binfmt_em86.c is missing a #include <linux/file.h>)

Added the soundcard I bought on Friday to the Alpha from API I have at work. Learned that it's a really bad idea to drop to the SRM console on the Alpha and wonder what the 'sound' directive is by simply trying it. In this case I get a truely horriffic rendition of 'Dixie' though the internal speaker.

Must remember to bring in the stamps I have for Elrond.

The LVS list seems to have gone quiet again so hopefully the beginnings of the holy wars that I saw last week have died. I just hope no one is left with bitter tastes in their mouths over the head of it all.

Thinking a bit more, I see no reason why I can't use a USB-USB connector to do heartbeating and cluster comms humm,...

ZenI seems to have stopped functioning as the BTC's web server, so I'll have to find a new home for it soon. I wonder if Telsa would ever forgive me if I sent it to.... Argh no no! don't arghhh!!!!!!

Friday

I wish I knew why I was waking up at 04:30 in the morning 8/
Played with the 2.216 kernel on my home machine but got sidetracked into playing with the Alpha SRM interface

Got to work (early)... by 11:00 there was only a 1/3rd of the office staff in. There is a belief that people are off Friday and monday to take advantage of the 4th of July and thus have a 5 day holiday break for the 'price' of two workday holidays

Mostly a quiet day. Need to go buy a new sound card later on so I'll have to try to not buy additional items when I'm in the computer store.

Started into this weekly status report thingy that management want,.. looks like it's going to chew up a load of time to do 8/

Decided that the piranha web interface REALLY needs an overhaul. It's plain confusing. So much for following the original GTK interface faithfully.

ZenII is *STILL* not upgraded and continues to act as a timebomb. Needs addressing ASAP

Thursday

The I40 is incapable of supporting oversized loads. Every time someone transports a mobile home down that road, the road system comes almost to a crashing halt. Oddly, with petrol prices rising, people have stopped noticing that the road infrastructure is in serious need of repair/upgrading.

Played with the Alpha this morning. I tried linux-2.2.16SMP on it, however, for this kernel, while the 2nd CPU is detected and all, it is not used. I'll have to do some back tracking and find a kernel that does and see if it's possible to foward port.

Rebuilt two more Alpha Tsunami boxes for lab work. They really are nice boxes. [Fruitless beg to API] I really wish I had one at home to fiddle with...

Email today was icky in that a lot of my time was tied up in responses. Watched the internal email lists turn nasty towards the end of the day., fortunately I'm an observer which also means 'so what? like I can make a differance'

I still have issues with LVS's algorithmic balancer in a multinode enviroment. I'll have to show Wensong what I mean when he finally shows up here next month. Also looks like a long standing bug in the kernel still hasn't been fixed (deals with virtual interfaces). I might have a crack at that tonight at home and see if it's something that can be fixed quickly.

Tuesday

I was tired, didn't get around to doing a diary entry.
Summary: got in early (around 08:40). Recabelled the HA test equipment that michael moved around in the lab. Unfortunately it now turns out michael put the equipment in the wrong place. Then politics entered the arena and I buggered off. The technology works, the social infrastructure doesn't and I'm not here to play esthetical games. Got a mail package from mum containing bills (ick) and a letter from IBM trying to sell me an as400 to run lotus notes servers on.

Wednesday

Fairly impressive rainstorm last night with frequent lightning. With luck the car will look less dirty now 8)

Looks like I'll be at the Linux World in San Jose in Aug 14th-17th. Looks like I'll be demoing piranha to the masses. Oddly this will be one demo where you want a computer to not work 8)

Watching the HA lists, I see more 'own branding' going on. I'm not against it, however, I can see potential fallout and damage comeing from it... evn now I see people becoming preditorial and defensive.. this is NOT how community efforts are supposed to go. If things start swinging around in circles then there is the potential for all out war. oops.

ZenII still hasn't received the scsi controller nor the watchog upgrade. I'm watching the message logs fill with SCSI error messages with growing anticipation of imminent disaster

Seems I need a few more IP's for virtual assignment to ZenII as well. I dunno what SteveC's reaction to a request for more IP's would be.

Tried getting SMP Alpha working today (using linux -.2.16) I can get it to boot and it even sees the other CPU,.. unfortunately it doesn't actually task the 2nd CPU,... bummer. On the positive side, it booted, and hasn't keeled over it's not a complete failure.

Monday

BT Cellnet decided to do a survey and called me up at around 09:30.. *their time*. Brings forward the thought that I really should get my mbl phone service registered with BellSouth rather than constantly being on the BT international roaming.

Watched some of the DVD's I bought from Best Buy yesterday. 'Bicentenial Man' is a good movie to watch. (Ok I quite liked it which doesn't necessarily mean that you will [given _A_'s thoughts on Shogun Assassin])

Played with the external 56K modem I bought yesterday. Unfortunately, getting connected to an ISP if going to be a nightmare as they all climb over themselves to give you win95/98 only CD's. I've as yet to get details to get a home link working. Bah.

Swaggered into work around 13:00 mainly because I'm supposed to be on holiday. Typically I have nothing more exciting to do other than watch TV or eat/sleep, certainly I havn't come across anything of notable intrest in NC as yet.

Again I see petrol prices are on the rise. When I came to NC just before April, petrol was about $1.37 a gallon, as of today, the cheapest I've seen has been $1.53 ie 11.5% in 3 months. I appreciate that other states have costs rocketing past $2.20 a gallon and I believe one state has abolished petrol taxes altogether. If the UK petrol prices shot up 11.5% in three months, I'd expect the current goverment to have been lynched by any number of truck/car drivers. Actually that may yet happen, we can only hope.

On the HA products front, Mission Critical Linux have released their HA product, kimberlite. The main restriction with it is that it only caters for two machines. They have said they will release a multinode version later.
It seems everywhere I look, a 'new' HA product is coming to market. As yet, I havn't seen any that are generic and scaleable. Looking at piranha, there are a number of improvements to be made yet, however, the technology in the kernel doesn't exist. I think I'll totally rework the web interface.. I don't like it.

Spent a couple of hours in the lab with Michael rearranging test equipment. Lots of fun lifting really heavy (and expensive) equipment around the lab. No networking has been plugged back in as yet, I'll probably do that tomorrow.

Curses 8/
he planned upgrade of ZenII didn't happen today as expected. I'm frustrated at this. This is an upgrade thats been badly in need of doing for months. Curses curses curses,..

The swear box is starting to fill up.

Sat/Sun

Satrurday was,.. utterly uneventful beyond my sister phoning me at 09:00. Had a natter with her, she seems to be doing ok,.. horribly pressured for time and moving my junk around the house 8). On the bonus side, she does have my home theatre kit 8/
I just hope she's taking care of it (cringe).

Moaped around all day in the apt, doing miscillaneous tasks (tidying up/washing). Reaffirmed my belief that cable TV sucks.

Fell asleep somewhere around 20:00

Sunday
Woke up around 02:30 (bah, looks like I'm on BST this week). Watched some of last weeks 'Gundam Wing' episodes. The cartoon network seems to be the most sensible TV channel of all the standard Time Warner selections. Well it seems to carry less 'trash' adverts than the others.

Put the trash out, drove into work (yeah I know it's sunday, anyway). Met up with Al Viro who just got back from Usenix (unscathed). Had a discussion about the VFS layer/stackable FS's and the semantics of symbolic linking across physical and logical media. (Al speaks english slowly and with a thick accent, it's kinda hard holding technical descussions, it's almost at the point where I'm contemplating taking pen and paper outside for these talks 8) It's not his fault, it's just the way it is.

Reading though Advogato, I came across a piece of nostalgia 8)
StevenRainwater

Going through the mail, it looks like some of the direct debit's still havn't been setup,.. (mutter).

I shall not go home early again. It's bad for my sleeping habits. I went home early yesterday (18:00) and because nothing was on TV except stupid adverts, I dozed off.

Morning,.. well technically at least. 03:30. Damn. looks like my body clock is back on BST. Didn't get back to sleep so watched 'South Park' on DVD. Bored. Drove into work very early.

As it turns out, Zen II crashed during the night (bah, roll on monday) and worse, a security vunerability in wu.ftpd was posted to the various security lists so _A_ had already poped onto the box and shutdown ftp services. Thus it's now a case of waiting for the wu.ftpd geeks to get their act together and fix the problem before services are resumed. Having looked at the src for the hack all I can say is that someone has way too much time on their hands. Nice code, but freaky.

Revisited the ipvsadm code, spotted a few mistakes that I'll correct before sending back to Horms. Ipvsadm suffers from the same problem as rpm,.. far too many command line options and combinations 8)
Made a new rpm spec file for ipvsadm that may make life a little easier for people playing with the src.

Managed to get the drbd code from yesterday to break on the alpha, though the same problem also exists in x86 architure. Oops 8/ It's not a showstopper, just a minor tweak that needs fixing. Don't get me wrong, it's a nice product/idea, it just needs some additional coding to be useful in a prodution enviroment, though it occurs to me that running it across 10Mbit ethernet may not be a good idea (ie whre your disk activity can easily saturate your network bandwidth).

Yuck. Someone left popcorn burning in the microwave in the kitchen. It reeks in the Gnome Dept now.

Spent a while with Michael going though US/UK customs, spellings, meanings, architcture, places to visit etc... Very knowledgeable guy

19:00,... I think I'll go home now

Got home last night to discover that they were busy cutting down trees opposite my normal car park area, as a consequence, everyone had filled up all the remaining spare car parking slots in the ajoining apartments. The air was fairly heavy with the scent of pine resin. Watched this weeks Voyager episode on UPN with some weird excuse to have an Irish theme to it.. mentions of Sea Haven and Kilkeel. Thats a bit close to home. The accents were wrong. (Just to be picky 8) )

Dunno why, was woken up at about 05:15 this morning. As it turned out this was a luck break for some delivery man who would otherwise have died as he started thumping on the door at 07:30 asking 'Do you know what apartment a miss amanda <something> lives in?'. Not exactly his fault the dear hadn't bothered to put a apt letter on her address. Being a delivery person seems to be one of those jobs akin to having to wear a red uniform on the old Star Trek episodes... (ok so I didn't melt him or subject him to some horrible death but only because I was already awake)

Drove in along the I40 parking zone. Watched some rather bizzare driving around exit 274 involving an peeved articulated lorry driver in reverse and 5 cars all hastly trying to get out of the way. Very strange. No damages. Very lucky.

Got in the office, read all 12 emails that were waiting in the queue. Read some article on the BBC about the average UK office worker having to deal with an average of 190 emails a day. Humm. I remember it being closer to 3000-4000 when I worked at IBM.

Spent the morning playing with drbd trying to work out how useful it might be in it's current form. Certainly it seems to work fine between two Alpha's however, there are limitations that wern't spelled out in the readme. ie you can't have a primary and secondary server both mounting the network block device at the same time,. I was hoping they may have got it to the stage of RW on the master but allowing the secondary servers at least read access. If the drbd team can get that working then their software would rock. [ Gave lclaudio a gold star never the less for his efforts even if riel didn't 8) ]

Started into the next revision of piranha. Massive rework of the web structure is complete (ha! less than a day,.. I rock!) Some rpm spec file annoyances to hammer out for when uninstalling the packages that need addressing. Got upset at one point because netscape wasn't showing the panels in the right colours until I discovered another app I was running had 'stolen' the colour.

Got another piranha fan email. I'm relieved that at least someone actually uses it. Gave him the updated rpms, fixed their lvs.cf file and got them back on their feet. Looking at the lvs/ha maillists I can see that it's time to start giving help to the masses again. I didn't get around to making the diffs of ipvsadm for Horms so that'll have to wait till tomorrow.

Otherwise it's been a quiet day.