Kutiman-Thru-you – 01 – Mother of All Funk Chords

At work we have a 48RU open rack for our patch rack. To those of you who had that fly over your head, it’s where we make phones and network connections happen.

Neatpatch promises to sort that out. After some pretty poor service from the local distributor, I finally received 6 of these at work, choosing to source the cables locally (where I can get a very good discount by purchasing in bulk). And here are some results, using a pair of 48 port switches in my desk-top rack stand to show a dense cabling setup:

OK, so after going through their website and looking at the alternatives, I made the pitch to my employer to purchase these in order to fix up our patch rack. This work will happen when we do our VoIP rollout and our cabling requirements will go from volatile (i.e. constant phone repatches while manglement play musical chairs with staff) to set-and-forget.

Whenever I get something new, I look for what’s wrong with it, and, well… I have gripes with the Neatpatch kit.

1) They talk about dividing by 24 as an industry standard, yet they only provide 16 slots for the cables, meaning some get three cables, some get four. This kind of denser loading makes it trickier to remove some cables, and is also difficult to unclip the inside row of RJ-45′s.

1b) They announced that this was (albeit slightly) fixed with their new product revision, now isn’t that a gripe! They’ve made the slots wider. I’d have personally preferred 24 slots so that in a dense setup you’d have two cables per slot. But maybe there’s a good reason to leave it at 16.

2) We tend to telco mount our switches so that they sit a bit more balanced in our racks. The Neatpatch kits don’t work well at all with telco mounted equipment, so we have to flush mount them. This is ok once some unused rubber feet are put on the back top edge of the neatpatch, thus using the neatpatch to get the switch sitting level.

Apart from that, I’m very happy with the product, and can’t wait to get it into our patch rack

Dear Apple Computer,
congratulations on the hard work you have put in to producing your greenest mac ever, I bet it was really hard work.

However, I must let you know about a few oversights on your part.
1) Outside of North America, in the rest of the civilised world, people who say “aloominum” are douchebags, regardless of officialities. Don’t be a douchebag. It’s spelled aluminium, you can pronounce it “al-oo-min-ee-um”. Want to impress those of us who loathe Windows constantly defaulting to EN-US as the language? Don’t discard the obvious syllable. Or at the very least, get a localised dubover.

It’s bad enough that we have kids these days calling Jam “jelly”, and Biscuits “cookies”, and the letter Zed “zee”. Insulting us (especially commonwealtheans) further does not make you sales.

2) Make the ability to give such feedback directly possible on your website, plzkthx.

3) I look forward to buying a mac tablet. Hurry up with that, and make sure it’s made of aluminium, not aluminum.

Hugs and kisses.

Me.

tHeDirTyJoHnSon – I just can’t help myself

Uh oh, I think I might have Ukulele Acquisition Syndrome (UAS).

I remembered that back when I was hanging out at the music department at school, messing around with drums, guitar, but more seriously the saxomophone, that there were practice guitars with sticky dots underneath the strings with the notes on them. So I figured I’d do the same with my uke, in order that I could learn the notes, and in turn scales and progressions etc

But my uke cost me damn near 2 hundy. I don’t want no sticky residue on my fretboard, I don’t want to devalue it and have it looking like some school instrument.

So I purchased my second uke, a red dolphin bridge makala soprano, then I stole the label maker machine from work and spent an hour and a half labelling the fretboard. I have guitar playing friends who bitch about the tuning of a uke, so now I’m considering a baritone to shut them up enough to just play. Yeah Ra, just keep justifying things to yourself… *self jedi mind trick handwaves*

Pictures of the soprano are forthcoming…

Today I went for a wander into the city to have a look around. My intention was to go to JB Hifi and pick up an Eee PC for my upcoming trip to NZNOG, but they were all sold out. So I figured I’d go window shopping down Cuba St.

I was about a block away from Real Groovy when I noticed Alistairs Music, and in the window were a lot of Ukuleles. So I went in and had a talk with them and came away with two Ukes – a basic Makala soprano in black for my friend Benny, and a Oscar Schmidt (by Washburn) OU2E. The E stands for electric – yes, my Uke has a pickup

Another friend’s soprano, my concert, and a standard guitar for comparison.

This is going to be fun

This was received from a workmate announcing the birth of his second child, names changed etc:

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Eagle Eye Cherry – Permanent Tears

Subsonic is a brilliant piece of software that you can use to stream your music collection over the web. Imagine being able to login from a friend’s place and share with them realtime the tune that’s come up in conversation, or imagine being able to play your music at work via HTTP, bypassing all but the most nazi of corporate firewalls.

I have recently consolodated my collection of multimedia and various other things onto a second hand Apple Mac Mini with an external 1Tb drive. This is in turn connected to my 42″ plasma and functions as our loungebox, almost perfectly. There are a few niggles such as Quicktime and Frontrow not really having decent aspect ratio handling – watching things either letterboxed or megazoomed is not cool.

I have, however, found it irritating to play music from my collection off this box on my other PC’s, and sitting at work and having that urge to hear a song, and not having that itch scratched by youtube irritates the living bejesus out of me. So these are my notes on getting Subsonic working on my Mac Mini.

Firstly, download the latest standalone version and extract it to /Applications, renaming /Applications/subsonic-3/ to /Applications/subsonic/. The instructions will tell you to install it in /var but that’s just dumb. Then in /Applications/subsonic/ edit subsonic.sh to reflect the changes you want – most basically that the folder that subsonic is in, and that the java directory is /usr/bin/java (getting rid of $JAVA_HOME/some/nonsense/bin) or whatever the standard script has.

Then test it in the terminal: cd to /Applications/subsonic/ and issue ./subsonic.sh and see what happens. It will probably pour out a bunch of text but will otherwise work fine. Jump into http://localhost:8080 and see if you’re away laughing. Login to the admin interface and have a poke around – point it at the directory your music is in and then kick off an indexing for the search functionality to work.

Later on I’ll update this post with information on how to setup lame and various other plugins that are required to get advanced stuff such as on-the-fly restreaming, but otherwise a picture says a thousand words:

I was able to stream some music at a friend’s bbq on the weekend, and have been streaming music to work without any problems. YMMV depending on your internet connection and routes on both sides, and whether or not you have a data cap (I don’t)

1 Giant Leap – Nothing Wrong With Me

I was having a hard time figuring out how to migrate Cacti from one box to another, or more specifically I could do the migration by the book but nothing was working, so after much head scratching and googling I’m going to collate my notes here. This assumes Debian to Debian, and we’ll call the boxes oldcacti and newcacti.

Step 1 is to setup Cacti, RRDTool, SNMP etc on newcacti. This is outside the scope of this post.

Step 2 is to migrate your database, so dump it, scp it to newcacti:

oldcacti:/etc/cacti# mysqldump -u cacti -p > cacti.sql
Enter password:
oldcacti:/etc/cacti# scp cacti.sql root@newcacti:/etc/cacti/
root@newcacti's password:
cacti.sql 100% 463KB 462.5KB/s 00:00
oldcacti:/etc/cacti#

and restore it:

newcacti:/etc/cacti# mysql -u cacti -p < cacti.sql
Enter password:
newcacti:/etc/cacti#

Step 3 All of your settings should now be across, but you'll likely want to keep your RRD history too. Unfortunately you cannot just scp the files across as you'll likely get complaints about the RRD files being created on a different arch:

COMMENT:From 2008/06/18 14:05:32 To 2008/06/19 14:05:32\c
ERROR: Garbage ':05:32 To 2008/06/19 14:05:32\c' after command:
COMMENT:From 2008/06/18 14:05:32 To 2008/06/19 14:05:32\c
ERROR: This RRD was created on other architecture
ERROR: This RRD was created on other architecture
ERROR: This RRD was created on other architecture
ERROR: This RRD was created on other architecture
ERROR: Garbage ':05:41 To 2008/06/19 14:05:41\c' after command:
COMMENT:From 2008/06/18 14:05:41 To 2008/06/19 14:05:41\c
ERROR: Garbage ':05:41 To 2008/06/19 14:05:41\c' after command:

So we need to export the files to xml and then reimport them:

rrdtool dump filename.rrd > filename.xml
rrdtool restore filename.xml > filename.rrd

But if you’ve got dozens, hundreds or even thousands of RRD files, doing them one by one is going to get tired, very quickly. So here we go:

oldcacti:/usr/share/cacti/site/rra/# ls -1 *.rrd | awk '{print "rrdtool dump "$1" > "$1".xml"}' | sh -x
scp *.xml root@newcacti:/usr/share/cacti/site/rra/

followed by:

newcacti:/usr/share/cacti/site/rra/# rm *.rrd
newcacti:/usr/share/cacti/site/rra/# ls -1 *.rrd.xml | sed 's/\.xml//' | awk '{print "rrdtool restore "$1".xml "$1}' | sh -x
newcacti:/usr/share/cacti/site/rra/# rm *.xml
newcacti:/usr/share/cacti/site/rra/# chown www-data:www-data *

That should be it, the final chown ensures that Apache can actually open the files and present them. Assuming Cacti et al is configured right on newcacti, you should be seeing some pretty graphs

Soundgarden – The Day I Tried To Live

This is the first Linksys device I’ve ever returned. Stunning disappointment is how I’d explain it.

I got it without researching because, well, Linksys is generally a good brand and I’ve never had problems with their kit in the past. Plus it looks like it will stack handsomely with the new wireless router I have on the way. In my minds eye it would be a bit of geekery that I’d be proud to have on my desk to display to all who enter my office. I also need a way to consolodate data from multiple 200G drives onto a 1TB drive.

What I got was well presented, with thorough documentation and an insanely simple setup. I dropped in a 1TB drive* and jumped right onto the webui (default login/password: admin/admin) as I don’t have a windows box handy for their CD based setup. I manually configured it, and it was straight away sharing on my network. It couldn’t have been easier.

Then I started consolodating my data onto the drive, and here’s where the problems started. It turns out that it formats using the ancient XFS filesystem, and has grossly underpowered hardware, resulting in 3MBps write speeds across the network. This is not pleasant when you’re consolodating some 600G of data. A newer firmware is available that will allow you to format the drive without journalling using EXT2, but this risks a scandisk on every startup and only offers some 6MBps performance.

Options:
1) Return it, get a Macpower Minipod and stack that with the Mac Mini loungebox
2) Stick with it and wait for some performance improving hacks to come out

I opted for option 1.

* It turns out that there are three models of Seagate SATA HDD:
1) Model number ending with AS. Desktop. Rated for 9-5 hours, lowest performance and price.
2) Model number ending with NS. Server. Rated for 24/7, best performance, top price.
3) Model number ending with SV. Video Surveillance. Rated for 24/7, average performance and price.

The SV is the smartest buy for a SOHO NAS, unless you have money to spare for the NS.

Audioslave – Your Time Has Come

Here’s what I wore for my presentation. Red is an action colour… see, when making a pitch it’s all about the subliminal mindgames. (To any colleagues who were at that conference – *jedi handwave* this isn’t the blogpost you’re looking for. Move along.)

The pitch went well, tough questions were asked, most of them I was able to answer. It looks like this project is a-go

Pink Floyd – Take It Back

As promised, here’s the first picture of my cheap n nasty fibre management spool in play:

I need to complete recabling the power, but I think I could get it down to two spools per rack. It might not be a cable management-gasm, but considering the state of cabling that I inherited, this is eons better.