Thursday, February 07, 2008

So Crazy It Just Might Work

I can’t decide if I should be proud or appalled.

Lucas (13 and in 8th grade) has come up with a rather sure fire money making plan.

He noticed that his junior high school sells 20 oz. bottles of Coke products out of vending machines for $1.25. This is of course, highway robbery and a travesty of epic proportions.

But our man Lucas sees this as an opportunity to muscle in on the market.

He’s taken to smuggling cans of soda in his backpack to school and storing them in his locker and backpack until lunchtime. At which point he hangs out by the vending machines, selling his wares and undercutting the vending machine price rather significantly.

And he doesn’t just sell normal sodas. He’s branched out into those goofy “energy” drinks that the kids love so much. He sells those for a much higher profit margin.

Seriously, he’s worked it all out on a little piece of graph paper. He knows exactly how much he’ll make on each case he can move. Market analysis and stuff.

I’m all for it, of course.

Except.

He has to sneak all this stuff around and hide it in his locker and treat it like it’s contraband. Because certainly the school would frown upon this sort of activity. I’m also pretty sure that the school gets a cut from Coca-Cola in exchange for exclusivity on campus. So he could get into trouble, which would be sad for our normally well-behaved little guy.

And I’m very much of two minds about pointing out to him that he could get even more inventory to school if he squirreled away cans in his sax case. But his cute blue eye lit up when I told him that, so it’s hard to feel too bad about it.

And I say things to him like, “Don’t drink that Mountain Dew! Dude! You don’t get high on your own supply!”

As a nominally responsible father figure, I’m just not sure how comfortable I feel promoting all this. I’m essentially telling him it’s OK to get around the rules, even if the rules are dumb. And I’m sure that at some point he’ll see my rules (such as they are) are “totally dumb” and feel like he can avoid those as well.

Plus, we’ve bankrolled his initial inventory and he’s being evasive about when he’s paying us back.

“Yeah, I’ll get you that money soon. Real Soon Now. I promise. I just have to move some more product tomorrow.”

If I start seeing phone calls to Bogata, Colombia on our phone bill, that’s when I’ll start to get really worried.

Jon scribbled this mess on 02/07/08 at 11:16 AM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Hi, I’m OS X Server, Leopard Edition! Let’s Waste Some Money Together!

Normal (non-nerdly) updates will resume tomorrow. I just kind of had to get this off my chest.

Let’s start with these two screen grabs:

This is a graph of my company’s weekly bandwidth usage. The blue lines represent the data we downloaded from the outside world. The green lines are the data we sent out to the IntarWeb Planet.

And another one:

This is zoomed in view of the “hourly” usage.

What do we see here kidlets? We see TREMENDOUS spikes occurring at regular intervals and then stopping.

What do we think is causing all this data transfer? What pray tell, are we downloading off the Internet? Have we suddenly developed a taste for P2P file sharing? Are we downloading every movie there is from the iTunes Store? Is someone at my work a voracious pr0n hound?

Nope.

That is one of my Xserves, screwing me with my pants on.

Yes, I am quite annoyed.

The problem lies in Leopard Server’s Software Update service. (10.5.1, even) This is a neat little thing where the Server downloads all software updates from Apple and then distributes them locally to all the computers in the studio. It’s lovely for a couple reasons. One, it saves on bandwidth costs, since machines can just go to MY server instead of Apple’s servers to get 10.5.1, updates to iLife 08, etc. Yes, a 150 MB OS X update isn’t that big a deal, but multiply that out by 20 machines and it’s a whole lot of usage. Two, it’s way faster to get updates locally than to have to truck all the way to Apple’s servers.

So I use this little function quite a bit. It’s very handy.

Except that it’s horribly, horribly broken in 10.5.1.

First off, upgrading from 10.4.11 ruined the Software Update setup. When I tried to turn that on, I’d get an error. Unfortunately by the time I started digging around I already knew that I’d be re-installing the whole she-bang (because Open Directory/Kerberos hates me, but that’s a whole ‘nother story I won’t go into now). So I didn’t make a note of the error. But as I recall, it has something to do with a .bundle not being updated properly. So the fancy new Leopard stuff is trying to use a creaky old Tiger .bundle Theoretically, you could extract the new Software Update .bundle off the Leopard Server Install DVD and plop it into the proper location, after making sure all the permissions were correct.

Yeah, a big freaking chore and one you might not get right. If you have upgraded to 10.5 and things aren’t working right, plan on re-installing. Or praying that the 10.5.2 update fixes all this crap.

Second thing with Software Update, which relates to the graphs above:

After the clean re-install, I got it to work fine and I went about setting up all ten of our new Mac Pros. (And upgrading three or four other machines to Leopard). All is right with the world, except that I was sleep deprived.

But then!

Sunday morning at about 1 AM, the Mac I was setting up could no longer reach my update server and the Software Updaters on the other Macs were spewing “can’t find index.sucatalog at server_name” and no updates were going out.

“Hrrrrm,” I said sleepily, “That’s odd. I haven’t changed anything on the server. Why isn’t it working?”

I stopped and started the Software Update service and there was No Joy in Jonville.

Fine.

Reboot the server.

Nope. Still not working. Same error, they can’t find the file they need on the server. Let’s look at log files! Whee! In the Software Update Error Log we find:

[Mon Feb 4 01:55:34 2008] [error] [client 192.168.0.51] File does not exist: /usr/share/swupd/html/index.sucatalog

OK, let’s SSH into the box and see what’s there. Where is the index.sucatalog file? Maybe I can just manually find the little bugger and put it where it’s supposed to go. Or I can just change the config of the Software Update process to the right location.

Turns out that index.sucatalog is merely a symbolic link and the real catalog file is here:

/usr/share/swupd/html/content/catalogs/index.sucatalog

Fine.

Except.

When I dig down in the “content” directory, guess what I do not find? If you guessed “a directory named ‘content’,” you win a cookie. There’s a directory called “downloads” and in there is where all 18GB of Apple Software updates can be found, but no “content” directory. Which is how the Software Update service does its mojo. It keeps track of everything on Apple’s servers and itself and syncs between the two.

See? No “content” directory.

It’s royally hosed.

But the thing that is flummoxing to me is that not only is the service hosed from the outside and my Macs can’t get their updates (even though I did NOTHING), but it’s fried internally as well. Because it just keeps downloading the individual software update packages OVER and OVER and OVER again. It would start in the middle of the night, go for 7 hours and then just stop. And then later in the day it would start up again, completely saturating our 7MBit connection. All told, it download about 70 GBs worth of crap.

Our “normal” bandwidth usage in a MONTH is around 55 GBs. We only pay for 75 and everything over that is $MONEY.

So this clever little custom apache process called “Software Update” that is supposed to save me money on bandwidth? Will end up costing us a grundle.

I hope the irony is not lost on you.

I called Apple Enterprise Support (We have Premium support for servers). This is the gist of the conversation:

Me: YOU ARE KILLING ME.

Apple Enterprise Support Droid: Yes sir, we know about this issue.

Me: For the love Pete on a popsicle stick, when are you fixing it? Can it please be VERY SOON? I’m feeling very fragile over here. I’m not well.

Apple Enterprise Support Droid: We are very sorry about it. A fix is coming very soon.

Me: OK, let me know, please. I’ll be the geek in the corner, weeping quietly into his caffeinated beverage.

Here’s the hack/fix/workaround:

1. Make sure the Software Update service is off in Server Admin.

2. ssh into the server and remove ALL the directories BELOW /usr/share/swupd/html/ (Yes, any updates you have already downloaded will be nuked.) BE CAREFUL while slinging around the rm command, OK?!

3. Restart the server.

4. Start up the Software Update service.

5. The service should auto-magically re-make the index.sucatalog file and all the appropriate linkages. Log back into the box and see if it did.

6. Go away for a while and go outside. Talk to human beings for a bit. When you come back, see if the updates are making their way down to your server again. Note for the 800th time that though the Software Update service is pretty ginchy and useful, it would be EVEN nicer if there were some way to gauge how long the downloads will take. Progress Bars. LET ME SHOW THEM TO YOU.

7. Profit!

Tune in tomorrow, because I’ll be back to “regular programing” with a story about how my oldest son is either a genius or criminal mastermind in embryo! Whee!

Jon scribbled this mess on 02/06/08 at 04:01 PM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post Rants. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Our New Chef

“Ellis! What did you put in your soup?”

“Um. Some chocolate chips. I thought it would be good and delicious, so I put some in my soup.”

pause

“But it wasn’t.”

For the record, it used to be chicken noodle soup.

Jon scribbled this mess on 02/05/08 at 10:18 PM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Monday, February 04, 2008

I May Have Fallen off the Ladder Once or Twice

I’m typing this in short clips, because my brain is having some trouble…
<2 minute pause>
Forming completely thoughts.

See what I mean?

Running on 6.5 hours of sleep in the last 3 days.

This weekend I set up 10 new Mac Pros at work. And I upgraded/installed Leopard Server on one of our Xserves. I moved a couple of TBs worth of data between old machines and new machines so everything would be ready at 9 on Monday. No Migration Assistant was used for this either. Hate that thing. Sucks donkey nuggets, the Migration Assistant does, IMHO; and stop writing like Yoda, I will now.

Do not try to do this in your life. You must have ninja skills and the ability to curse in English, Italian and Binary. You also need a screwdriver.

Quick review!
Leopard Server: Yes. Very Nice. Good mojo mostly. A++++ Would install again! Runs great.

Upgrading Tiger Server (10.4.11) to Leopard Server (10.5): Utterly useless and hopeless if you are running a kerberized ‘net. I had to burn the server down to the metal and start from scratch. And the Software Update Server built into Leopard Server is made out of tissues and wet, drippy snot. Bad alias/link in the config and it has stopped working. Can’t find correct catalog link. Fix this please, Apple. KTHX, BAI!

At around 3 AM, I was essentially done with the whole dance and I made the small fort you see above out of the now empty Mac Pro boxes. If I’d had a couple blankets and some couch cushions, I could have made something really cool.

BONUS! Why I love my job reason #7.7: I got a round of applause (and a bunch of time off in the future) at staff meeting this morning.

ALSO: As of this afternoon, the fort is still up. People are on board with the “stonehenge look.”

Jon scribbled this mess on 02/04/08 at 04:18 PM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Friday, February 01, 2008

Wasn’t One of the Seven Dwarves Named Wheezy?

That was our friend Jonah last night in the E.R. at Primary Children’s.

We can always tell when Jonah is having a really bad asthma attack: He stops talking to himself while playing video games.

Why?

Because he can’t breath.

Which is kind of a bummer. Breathing is fun! And useful! Everyone should try it!

I have the mildest case of asthma you can have and still call it a lung disorder. When I run and it’s cold or the air is soupy and pollution filled, I get a bit wheezy. Lame, when you consider that Jonah has turned pale and gaunt and blue-tinged in his life. And been hospitalized for this condition when he was much younger.

Which is not what happened last night. Last night was just a “normal, Jonah’s not breathing well at all, we better take him to the E.R.” dance that we have to do every now and then.

Last night he was coughing and wheezing and his voice was clipped when he spoke, like my emphysema-ridden, two pack-a-day grandmother’s voice used to be. We gave him Albuterol, which is a bronchial-dilator and usually provides acute relief. Unfortunately, if he is far down the road of “chest tightness,” the stuff we give him won’t work.

So we have to truck over to the E.R. and they give him the same stuff along with steroids, but from an industrial-sized vat and they monitor his heart rate. Because one of the side effects of Albuterol? Makes your heart explode. OK, not really, but it ramps up the heart to hummingbird levels. So they have to watch him while he breaths the Albuterol mist and 100% oxygen.

How did this happen?

Because I’m a bad parent, basically.

On Friday last, he ran out of his normal medicine (Advair) that keeps things under control. We tried to call in a refill, but he was out of refills. So the pharmacy had to call his Doc on Monday and get the ‘scrip refilled. Which meant that the stuff wouldn’t be ready until Tuesday.

I kept forgetting to pick the stuff up until last night, by which time he was well on the way to this mini-drama of wheezing and dashing off to the E.R. That was my job to get the prescription and I’m an idiot.

Oh, and he probably gets the genes for asthma and allergies from me, since I’ve sneezed twice while writing this and I’m essentially allergic to EVERYTHING. Is it furry? Yeah, I’m allergic to that. Does it have leaves? Yep, and I’m sorry I sneezed all over you. So I’ve passed that on to him as well.

But!

The good thing is that Jonah has a pretty healthy sense of what’s going on. Last night, laying in our bed and falling asleep I was talking to him:

“Sorry about all this, bud.”

“It’s OK, Dad. But you know, this is all your fault.”

So in the long run, he’s saving on therapy.

Jon scribbled this mess on 02/01/08 at 11:41 AM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Photos Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link
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