swivel

I think the almost silent death of swivel, the flickr for data, if you see what I mean, has upset me almost more than any other cataclysm in the history of the web.

 

Here was a site which was full of fundamentally useful stuff, really well presented.

But, apparently, no business model. No-one was prepared to pay for the data. Course, I was also a no-one. I pay for flickr. Why not data? I guess I felt a lot of it was in the public domain already: why pay twice. But of course, you’re not paying for the data, you’re paying for the really really slick way swivel processed it for you.

Only got myself to blame.

SkyDrive?

For a variety of reasons (professional, largely) I run a Microsoft OS. I have been running Ubuntu at home for a few years as my main system, with XP sitting on a creaky old box. That box has all but died, so I replaced it, and set about exploring Windows 7

I’ve been using DropBox on all my PCs for ages. It’s delightful. It has a very small surface area, and it just works. I login, and it copies files from the cloud back into my dropbox folder. Anything I put into the dropbox folder gets copied up into the cloud. Because the files are local, I can work on them directly. The DropBox folder, on Linux, Mac or windows, works in exactly the same way.

 

I was quite excited when I saw skydrive. 25GB of space is a tasty amount (Blush- I am on the free dropbox, still). And there’s a 5GB “sync” folder, which sounds like DropBox, sitting in the wings. Or is that 5GB part of the 25. Anyway. I played.

The only way into this seems to be up and download. Once uploaded, I can’t find a way of moving the files around. Nor can I map it, reliably. I can map it using DAV, but the URL is horrible, and who’s to say it won’t change? And can I legally do it?

So I slowly shifted interest to the 5GB of “synced” storage. Only MS have discontinued Live Mesh, or whatever it’s called, for XP and, of course, there was never a product for Linux or anything else.

So, I have 25GB of “free” space which has such limited connectivity it’s useless, and 5GB of synced storage which will only sync with Windows 7 (and, presumably Vista). And, at the moment, I have a file in my synced folder which hasn’t appeared in the cloud. Who knows why?

Sorry Guys. DropBox wins hands down. It’s a simple idea, well executed which works on all platforms.

It’s been interesting coming back to look an Microsoft’s desktop products after a year or two in Linux land. The stuff that works for me is simple, orthogonal (works the same way on different platforms) and rock solid reliable. Products which are driven by sales and marketing just evolve in a different way. They have to be feature driven, and the features have to change. Most users I come across are in what I call the “One Micron club”. If their desktops change icons by more than one micron, they ring support.

 

Oh, and Windows 7 reports itself as Windows 6.1 internally. I guess the dreaded vista was 6.0

Clever SD cards

I'd been eyeing up those clever orange SD cards which advertise not only storage, but geotagging images in camera (very tasty) and wireless upload to the home network and to public sites like Flickr. It would have been nice.

So, I ordered a 2GB card and unwrapped it eagerly.

First, erm, moment was setting the card up. the management software appears to be online, somewhere in the cloud. So the home router has to be unwound to allow the package to act as a server. There is, no doubt, a perfectly reasonable reason for this - it allows the camera to upload when the computer with the management on it is turned off. The upload then occurs to the cloud. Turn your PC on and back come the images. But security issues aren't made clear, or even addressed in any transparent way. Of course, it has to connect to your WPA secured network, and it needs the WPA key. That isn't stored locally - it's stored "in the manager" - i.e., in the cloud, on the internet. So hang on a minute - I've just given my WPA key to someone I don't know on the internet?

Then I tried to use the card. I've tried it in two cameras - a G9, and a Panasonic G1. In neither case can I get the card to download. You're instructed to change the battery / power settings to prevent the camera turning off, but it still won't play. It's much quicker and less troublesome to take the card out and drop it in the SD slot on my laptop. Wirelessly, it gets about 1/4 the way through then drops out. I can't find a way of kicking it manually.

Then there's geotagging. I might have misunderstood this. I'd (fairly naturally) assumed GPS. But it isn't. It uses the Skyhook system - it locates using a combination of known MAC addresses of wireless networks, and telephone masts. Well, that might be as accurate as GPS, but I have no way of knowing. The Skyhook system, certainly in the UK is pretty patch, and since most of my images are taken in fairly remote locations - certainly well away from wireless networks and often out of cellphone coverage, I have yet to get an image geotagged. If you visit skyhook's coverage map it looks quite good to start with - but zoom in, and reach your own conclusions. I take photographs south west of Shrewsbury, largely....

And finally, flickr. Well, you can get them uploaded to flickr, but it's a subscription service. You have to pay the SD card people annually...

No thanks.

Ubuntu 'more secure' than Windows, says Dell • The Register

Ubuntu 'more secure' than Windows, says Dell • The Register

There's an interesting line in this article - about MS offering free AV software.

You've still got to run it, and you still have to offer it processor cycles.

Of course, that's not the complete story. You have to run AV software on Linux servers, to keep your Windows clients happy, so the argument isn't as clear cut as it might be.

But with Google Docs offering an equation editor and Google gears, it really doesn'tmatter what operating system you run. Increasingly, I can flit from Windows to Ubuntu to Mint to OSX, and my browers syncs. More inmportantly, I get the same documents on all the PCs I use without even trying, using a combination of DropBox and Google Docs. All my email is IMAP, so that moves around as well.

BBC News - In graphics: Supercomputing superpowers

BBC News - In graphics: Supercomputing superpowers

Not much choice of OS then?!

Bigot

Nasty word, isn't it.

Hmmm.

Mono

Yay! Got the debugger to work (this is 2.0).

This is a very nice development environment.

One of the guys in my department sent me an xlsx file today - 36MB, of staff with heavy disk space usage.

The shares are all on a Linux box.

du * -sh | sort -an


Produced a file under 5K in size with pretty much the same information in the same order.

So what was in the 36MB file (which, incidentally, crashed my version of Excel)?

The upgrade mess-up

WinZip did the right thing. I emailed them. Within a couple of hours I had my original WinZip9 key and a URL to download it.

Now that's neat. I might have been tempted to download winzip14, but

• There isn't much difference
• 14 is a LOT bigger than 9
• jZip and PeaZip and a lot of others work. And work well.
• 9 does it for me.

So there we are. Decent firm, did the biz.

But how many other utilities and software bits on my PC can't I upgrade? And how many can I? Textpad, a very fine utility, is still allowing me to upgrade and I'm several major versions down the line.

Never upgrade when you're not sure...

I have (had) a registered version of Winzip 11. No problems with it, but thought upgrading was worth it. Not sure whether I was "allowed" to upgrade, so downloaded a copy of the latest version and dropped  it into a different folder.

Then, of course, the new version asks me to register. Not being sure what was what, I tried my old registration code (gleaned from the help screen on the other version of winzip). Didn't work of course.  Do I want to carry on with a trial? Click yes.

Only now my registered version of WinZip is no longer registered.


And, of course, I haven't got a note of the registration key. And neither has WinZip.....

That's the way to do it. Writing a small utility app in C# for work. On Windows, of course, under .NET 3.5. Get the app running nicely and, just for interest, realise it ought to run on Mono (that's the binary, not recompiling the source).

So, copy the app to a Linux box, and, whoa, it runs perfectly under mono. No recompile, no downloads. It just runs. Perfectly.


By the way, I use SharpDevelop. It's neat, small, fast and free.

A wireless bridge using Dlink DWL-2100APs

This doesn't seem to be well documented - I had to do this at home to connect two parts of my home network together.

A bridge connects two parts of the same network together. The ends of the bridge are symmetric, and configured similarly.

You need two Dlink DWL-2100 APs. Put them both into WDS mode (in the wireless config). Put the mac address of the other one in each (obviously, this scales to multiple APs). Set up the same encryption key on each. Plug each one into the cabled ethernet in that part of the network, and restart. You then have one large network made up of the two previous fragments.


That's it!

drbd

drbd sounds like an interesting technology. Essentially, it's RAID 1 over a network. Using it, you can construct two disks which are kept in sync with drbd. Doesn't matter whether the disks are, themselves, RAID.

drbd operates by providing a virtual disk, upon which your filing system mounts. So, instead of mounting at /dev/sda1, for example, you'd enable drbd on /dev/sda1 and then mount your real filing system on /dev/drbd0

Once up and running, it maintains a status in /proc/drbd. Querying this just tells you whether you are on the primary, and whether the two drives are in sync.

When I built a pair (4TB) the biggest issue was formatting. You only format the primary, of course, and the secondary formats by syncing. Syncing 4TB of data takes a long, long time....

BUT - you can't mount the secondary. So you can't use drbd to maintain an identical pair of servers with one of the read only. The second server, the secondary, is missing a mount

Of course, this is used with heartbeat to provide a ha pair with automatic failover.

This all worked really well for me, until d-day. for some unexplained reason, drbd refused to start when the servers were rebooted to go live. I had to strip it off, and that's the end of this particular experiment.

The delights of Karmic Koala

I've just had a nightmare. A large server, built using the server edition of Ubuntu 9.10, out of the box. Actually, I built two, using drbd and heartbeat. They worked nicely on the bench - did an apt-get update/upgrade, shut them down, mounted them in the rack --- and drbd refused to start. Probably something in the upgrade.


Anyway, to cut a long story short, removed drbd, down to one server. Well, ok...except that samba didn't work. The server could be connected to by IP address, but it never managed to get it's name in the WINS server we use.

After a lot of fiddling, I upgraded from 3.4.0 (the 9.10 version) to 3.4.3, building it from scratch, following Jeremy's excellent notes on

http://www.jeremycole.com/blog/2009/12/01/upgrade-samba-3-0-28a-to-3-4-3-on-ubuntu-8-04-lts/

My first stab at this worked perfectly, and is now in heavy use.

I then repeated the procedure on the identical twin machine. This builds without error, and installs without error. It even starts without error. But no-one can connect to it.

The samba log file just shows

smbd_open_once_socket: open_socket_in: Address already in use

There are a number of blog posts mentioning this problem in conjunction with upgrades on 9.10

I purged the install, removing all the config and .TDB files. Exactly the same, Built it with and without LDAP.

If anyone has any inklings on this I would be very interested. My faith in the quality control here is lower than it was...

Jodrell Bank

What a mess. And isn't this just classic The-Way-Britain-Is-Run-Today. Bureaucrats who can't even add up land real science with an £80M shortfall, then decode to close one of the premier facilities in the UK. They've clearly made a mistake, and no-one will actually put their hand up and say "it was me", and no-one will step in and sort out the mess.

Third-rate administration.

So why hasn't the UK appealed ISO/IEC DIS 29500 - the attempt to get OOXML, Microsoft's 6000 page "open" document format through ISO?

The Norwegian story, in summary at


here
or

Steve's own blog account


Is, quite frankly, shockingly disgusting.

I wonder how many sysadmins spend some time looking at the logs on their internet-connected machines. I have several such machines and I can guarantee someone is knocking at the door whenever I choose to look at the log.

The other night, a nice Chinese machine was running through a script of silly login names, getting rejected. The day before, a Japanese machine was doing the same thing. They're all wasting their time, because the machines are well locked down, and run only what they need to.

Do you know what ports are open on your net facing kit?

Seven builds on Vista's "solid foundation?"

Well, shucks. Windows, it seems to me, has at least two problems. The first is that it won't scale - either up or down. It runs on chunky AMDtel hardware, and that's it. My HP iPAC (WindowsCE) never ran windows (and, incidentally, is confined to the WPB now - it won't run WPA encryption)

Boys, it has to scale. And to get that to work, you probably have to rewrite things in a modular way from the bottom.

http://wubi-installer.org/

The easiest way to experience Ubuntu Linux.

Dropped it on my laptop. Installed, added itself as a boot, and even my WPA wireless worked.

It was a flashy looking Fujitsu-Siemens Server, with LSI Megaraid and other tasty bits of hardware. I couldn't be bothered to rootle through the manuals.

Within 20 minutes I'd configured the 4 mini-160GB drives into a RAID array with one hot spare, installed Ubuntu Server 8.04 in an LVM Virtual Volume, installed MySQL server and rebooted.

The whole thing just worked. Another 10 mins and it was populated with data.

Fabulous.