Well this is new, and I’m utterly baffled. Here’s a file that’s not in use by anything.


$ md5sum xppro.vdi
589cbb5501dcddda047344a3550aaa95 xppro.vdi
$ md5sum xppro.vdi
a69806ec60d39e06473edbb0abd71637 xppro.vdi


Every time I run md5sum on it, I get a different answer. Same story with sha256sum. If I grab just the first 100MB, it gives the same answer each time. dmesg doesn’t show any sort of errors whatsoever during the time I’m running the tools. The file is 13GB, and was copied from one laptop to another (the new one being a Thinkpad T420s). The old laptop gives the same answer every time. The new one doesn’t.

I’ve put the file on different ext4 filesystems on the same machine (one using LUKS encryption, the other not, both under LVM) – same result. This will have also guaranteed different placement on the underlying hard disk.

I verified that nothing is modifying the file by using lsof and inotify. The system is a freshly-installed Debian wheezy running kernel 3.2.0-1-amd64. Any ideas how I go about troubleshooting/fixing this? So far I don’t know if it’s hardware or software, though my gut says software; SMART isn’t showing issues here, and the kernel didn’t log hardware issues, either.

Our society is one that is pretty well defined by timeliness. TV programs start at a precise time, down to the second. Schools have elaborate timekeeping systems. Even church services are carefully timed. We know how fast we’re going, and our GPS or phones tell us when we’ll get there. And we’re pretty confident that we will, in fact, get there.

Somehow this doesn’t apply to our pickup.

This pickup, in case you’re wondering, is a thing of… stories, shall we say. After a particularly frustrating experience with it one week (oh yes, the battle extended several days), I likened it to the Greek gods. And Terah had a good laughing fit when I began a sentence with “The reason there’s a towel connecting the brake pedal to the steering wheel…”

But I guess the thrifty side of me won out, and somewhere along the line, I relented. My brother fixed up the carburetor. I got it a new battery. The flat tire is repaired. The starter broke, and I got it replaced. And I even got an oil change. Fancy, I know.

So today, when I needed to take some backbreaking junk off the yard, I was hoping the pickup would work. I hadn’t driven it in months, and any manner of catastrophe could have struck it in that time. So I was mildly relieved when it started on the 6th try. That is, quite seriously, quite the improvement, and shows how skilled a mechanic my brother is.

The speedometer, of course, isn’t working. The odometer stupidly reads “21531” or something like that (it was only a 5-digit odometer, broke long ago, so who knows how many miles it really has.) And I like to keep things like grease and heavy ancient air conditioners (one of the things I was hauling) away from my watch, so I wasn’t wearing it.

The result: I have no idea what time it is, how fast I’m going, when I’ll get there, IF I’ll get there, or all those things.

I set out, and made it a good half mile before it died as I was rounding a corner at the bottom of the hill. Always a great place for a finicky old stick-shift vehicle to die, right? Anyhow, a few random adjustments to the choke later, and the thing sputtered then roared (and I do mean roared) back to life. A little lurching up the hill and I was back on my way. Now, I was stuck there in the middle of the road, but it was a country road, so I’d have probably had a good hour to get it fixed before worrying about blocking anybody’s way.

My first stop: my great uncle’s place. He has a “scrap metal for charity” project going on. He is looking for old motors, air conditioners, dehumidifiers, etc. He takes them apart, separates out the metals, sells them, and donates the result to MCC, a world relief agency. I knew I had an old dehumidifier in the basement, and thought I remembered seeing an old window air conditioner in the elevator. That thing is probably the single heaviest object I have ever moved without help. I have a bandaid to prove it. It was way too heavy to carry, so I kind of rolled it, side to side, from the side of the elevator on to the pickup. If you were watching, you’d have heard me making struggling noises, followed by “BANG rattle rattle rattle… pause… struggling noises…. BANG rattle rattle rattle” as I “rolled” it along the ground, and waited for the internal bits to settle after each quarter turn. So anyway, eventually I got it to the pickup, and then had the sickening realization: I have no way to get this thing up there. Oops.

I eventually placed it on top of an old tire rim, balanced it there as I knelt down, and somehow — still not quite sure how — managed to lift the entire thing a few feet until I could get some leverage to shove it onto the pickup. I later commented to my dad that it was a Chrysler brand air conditioner, somewhat to my surprise, and he said that it was probably my great-grandpa’s. That was a surprise.

Anyhow, back to the pickup. I drove down the few miles to my great grandpa’s place, not really knowing how fast I was going. I smelled the familiar smells of the old pickup: exhaust fumes, oil on hot surfaces it shouldn’t be on, a touch of hot antifreeze. You never have any doubt about whether the engine is running.

It was sort of nice to not know, or particularly care, how fast I was going, or what time it was. Sometimes I’d idly wonder, but you know, it didn’t really matter and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it anyhow.

I got to uncle’s place, unloaded the junk — sorta dropped the air conditioner off the back of the pickup with a terrific BANG, then rolled it all the way to his trailer — and got back in. On to town. I hadn’t put gas in the pickup in a few years, and I suspected it was getting low. (The gas gauge, you guessed it, doesn’t work right either.) Plus we had some large recyclables built up and it was time to get rid of them. And for that, I had to drive on the highway a ways. The speed limit there is 65MPH. I have no idea how fast I was going, but it wasn’t 65. Maybe it was 45. I got passed a lot, but nobody looked particularly surprised that a pickup that looks like mine wasn’t going 65.

Partway there, I smelled a different smoke smell. Not an oil smoke, but more of a grassy or wood smoke. Hmm, I thought. That’s odd. Hope it’s not coming from the pickup. I didn’t really see smoke anywhere else, so I just drove on until I couldn’t smell it anymore.

I unloaded the recyclables, then went to the gas station. As the pump readout neared $50, I decided: 1) the gas tank really was pretty empty, and 2) I just can’t put more gas in it anymore. That would be more than the truck’s worth. So I drove home.

The drive home was into the wind. My face got pretty cold – I always drive with the windows open to prevent carbon monoxide poisoning (remember the fumes?) I got home and prepared to pack up the pickup – close the windows, replace the bungee cord holding the brake pedal up, etc. I then thought I’d have a look under the hood to see if there was anything, well, on fire. Nope, but there was a packrat nest that fell down as soon as the wind hit it. Source of grassy-smelling smoke identified.

It’s amazing what difference simple lack of knowledge makes sometimes. Not knowing what time it is or how fast I’m going means I don’t have to worry about those things. I wonder how society has changed simply because accurate and cheap watches are available. I kind of like driving the old truck. It’s a bit of an adventure, a bit of a challenge, a bit of randomness, and a bit of an escape from the normal and predictable. Not a bad deal for a $75 vehicle.

apt-get dist-upgrade is getting a little less fun these days.

It’s not because of a problem with Debian or with apt-get. It’s because of things upstream authors are doing.

It seems that upstreams, for some reason, like to remove features from new versions of software.

The two recent examples to bite me are the removal of the Gnome Terminal features to play the bell through sound card rather than the console speaker, and the recent upgrade to gtkpod — the best iPod music manager out there — which removed the ability to actually, well, play music. Wha…?

Earlier examples where when Gnome removed the ability to type a filename in the Open dialog box (remember that? thankfully reverted eventually.) KDE 4 was infamous for this too, with maybe thousands of instances (and they broke Amarok so badly that it didn’t actually play music from my devices either.)

I don’t understand this. The Gnome people somehow thought that they knew better than I what options I might want, I guess. But I am totally baffled about gtkpod. All it ever did was call xmms (or something like it such as qmmp) with appropriate arguments to play a file. Simple, configurable, and supremely useful. Probably just a few lines of code. And even that is gone.

There is a post by Ingo Molnar complaining that perhaps Gnome and KDE are trying to mimic the Apple and Google result without internalizing the process. Perhaps. It all seems so baffling to me though.

Updated: rewrote introduction.

It’s time to change locations for my server. I’ve been with CoreNetworks for almost 5 years. They provide a good value, with fully dedicated servers a lot cheaper than most places, and good support to boot — targeting people that can handle root on their own box. I’m switching, though, to Hetzner Online (of Germany), primarily because I am needing more than 1GB RAM, and they can provide a 2GB box for less than I pay now for 1GB. I asked for feedback on Google+, and got positive feedback. Today, I migrated from one machine to another, copying a dozen or two GB of data, and only had about 15 minutes downtime.

I was able to do this without console access to the source machine, though console access wasn’t really required for either. This will work with any basic Linux install on the destination, or it could be prepared directly from a rescue environment.

Before I explain how I did it, I thought it was interesting to think of the different places that the machine that was known as complete.org has lived over the years. Here’s a map (click for detail):

Here’s the general process.

First, well in advance of the move, crank the TTL on the domains way down. This way, old IPs won’t be cached for very long once the system moves.

Next, start rsyncing data from the old machine to the new. Do not yet shut down daemons on the old. Shut down as much as you can on the new. You’ll want to focus on static data, such as /home. /usr is a good candidate as well. /var if you are selective — databases may be a good candidate, or may not. The idea is to seed the destination with data so that when we do the “real” rsync, most of the data will be there; it will have to tidy things up after daemons are stopped, and update some things, but the bulk of the work should be done.

Next, start preparing some exclude lists for the final rsync, which will copy an entire machine to the other. You will likely want to exclude files such as /etc/fstab, /etc/network/interfaces, /etc/resolv.conf, /etc/hosts, /etc/default/grub, /sys/*, /proc/*, /dev/*, and the like. I used rsync -v -P -a -H -A -X -S –numeric-ids –delete-after.

Now, start editing config files for the new IP, but do it on the old server (these will be synced over to the new one). Start with the bind config files, and touch anything else that needs it — maybe Apache configs, whatever.

Next, get ready to do the final sync. In an ideal environment, we’d just shut both machines down to single-user mode, but that’s not going to quite cut it here. Use ps and shut down all daemons except sshd and udev on the destination. Yes, including even syslog. This is to prevent anything actively accessing the disk during the rsync, and also to prevent any issues with clients accessing server daemons that aren’t ready yet.

Now, on the source machine, reload bind. This will start answering DNS queries with the new machine’s IP, and should also propagate the changes to your secondary DNS. Next, kill off all the daemons on the source machine, except for ssh and bind. You might want to set /etc/nologin to prevent regular users from logging in on ssh, if you have them. Now rsync things over to the new machine. Do any final tweaking over there (merging in /etc/hosts maybe, dealing with the udev rules.d persistent net thing, etc.). Reboot the new server and you should be up and running.

I would have probably dismissed as not realistic enough for even The Daily Show this kind of story, had someone suggested it a few months ago:

Rupert Murdoch’s corporation (owner of FOX News, Wall Street Journal, News of the World, etc) would have been found to have illegally accessed other people’s voicemails.

These included voicemails from a cellphone belonging to a recently-murdered girl, which interfered with the police.

And they had also bribed Scotland Yard officers for information, and actively covered it up.

The story would close one of Britain’s biggest newspapers, and force the resignation of various government and Scotland Yard officials.

That it would lead to the first high-profile investigation under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of an American corporation bribing British officials.

That one of the central figures in the scandal would suddenly die at a young age.

That there was a question of how the former editor of Murdoch’s newspaper — whom he steadfastly defended until one day he didn’t — would be taken from jail to testify before Parliament.

That CNN would live stream a hearing of a British Parliamentary subcommittee instead of the news conference given by the President of the United States.

And that during this committee hearing, some guy would attack Rupert Murdoch — who, until then, looked like he had a few drinks too many the night before — with a shaving cream pie.

And that Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers and TV channels would portray News Corp. as a victim of the liberal press in all this, and that they should just be left alone.

So maybe the last one was believable, but my goodness. Just when it couldn’t get any stranger, a SHAVING CREAM PIE?!

For those of you that aren’t familiar, please read about the Eternal September, which refers to the lasting damage to a community when vast numbers of newbies suddenly enter and dramatically harm the quality and usefulness if discussions.

• Email: 24 years
• Usenet: 13 years
• Facebook: 2 years
• Google Plus: ?

Seems like everybody’s writing Google+ reviews these days, but most of the ones I’ve found seem to be fluff pieces. I haven’t used it long, but have some initial impressions to share.

First, an analogy. Facebook reminds me of the sleazy guy selling stuff from his car down the street. They do things like change privacy defaults when they think it’s good for Facebook, rather than good for you.

Google+ reminds me of an Apple product. It’s beautiful, easy to learn, but locks everything down and is lacking some critical features. So here goes with the details.

The good

I think that this can be best summed up by: it’s not Facebook. Facebook has, perhaps, set an incredibly low bar but still, this holds. Facebook is the only website I can ever remember using that changes things so much, so often, and so completely that I keep having this feeling of not knowing how to do things. Try maintaining a Facebook page or two and you’ll especially feel my pain then. But even the basics: how many times have I accidentally posted a partial comment because I pressed Enter to start a new paragraph (that has only been the button used for that for, hmm, let’s see now, decades), and instead it posted the comment. Principle of least surprise, anyone?

Google+ has a simple and, on the surface anyway, intuitive interface. However, it does get muddy; more on that below.

I’m going to spend a lot more space on “the bad” below, but don’t let that diminish my excitement about having a viable alternative to Facebook. I am keen to get rid of that monster.

The Bad

I’ll start of this section with the fact that Google+ is a tightly-controlled walled garden. There is no way to take a copy of your status updates, comments, etc. and back them up with your own devices. If your Google account goes away, so do all your updates about your kids’ first words. Facebook does have this feature these days. It has broken half the time, but it exists, works, and I use it. Twitter doesn’t have the feature built in, but its API makes it pretty easy; you could easily use my twidge program to do this, for instance.

But whatever you put in G+ stays in G+. There is no autoposting it to twitter or Facebook, no backups, nothing. I’m disappointed in that, given Google’s prior attitude about openness to individual data ownership. (Update 7/12/2011: There is a way to get a backup, which I hadn’t noticed; see comments below.)

Almost as bad, there’s also no way to get data in. So I now have identi.ca, twitter, Facebook, and now also G+ accounts. When I post an item in identi.ca, it autoposts to twitter, and then it autoposts from twitter to Facebook. Handy – one place to notify people of my public activities. My uploads to Flickr and blog posts also auto-post to Facebook, so people I’m friends with there get a picture of what I’m doing outside of Facebook without me manually having to link it in.

Not so with G+. There is no way to even add an RSS feed for my blog to auto-post to G+ as there is with Facebook. If you use G+, the only way to get stuff into it is with a keyboard.

Poor integration with other Google apps is also an issue. G+ is nowhere near Google’s first social app. They also have Blogger, Google Reader, Buzz, Gmail, etc. So here’s the rub. These aren’t integrated well, and when they have tried to integrate them, they’ve done an exceedingly poor job of it.

As an example: Buzz is a twitter-like service for posting updates. Very similar to what G+ does, right? Well, the best you can do is link your Buzz account to a separate tab on your profile. You can’t even have your Buzz updates flow straight into G+, from what I can see. You have a separate list of followers in Buzz from G+. Reader is even worse; it has a sharing feature, but it’s not G+ aware, so it goes to a reader inbox.

But what takes the cake is the integration with Gmail Contacts. Sounds easy? Not entirely. When you add someone to G+, apparently it sometimes links the record with their entry in Contacts. And the help gives you the handy warning that when you remove them from G+, you have the option of removing them from Contacts, which could impact what you see on a mobile device. It is unclear what happens when it doesn’t link the record, or how it decides which record to link (some people have more than one person in a family sharing phone numbers and email addresses, for instance.)

One very nice feature of G+ is you can add email addresses, even if they aren’t G+ members. Then when you post updates to the circle you’ve added them to, G+ offers to send them an email with an update. Very handy.

Except the undocumented part is that if you select “Your circles” (meaning all your circles), rather than individually ticking the box by each circle, they don’t get the email. And they also don’t get it if you set it Public. You have to select their specific circle, which is a significant difference from how people with G+ accounts are treated.

And that’s just an example. There are a ton of things that work one way 95% of the time, but have non-obvious exceptions. Some of these exceptions are documented in the help, and some aren’t.

I’m still confused about the integration with Picasa. G+ help says that you can upload unlimited numbers of photos for free (though they will be downscaled at a certain point). Picasa has definite storage limits. But G+ uploads are showing up in Picasa. Do I really get free storage by uploading to the same place via a different tool? Very odd.

And finally, a gripe about web standards. I’ve been using Firefox/Iceweasel 3.5, which came out in Debian squeeze and is still supported there. It is also pretty darn new by corporate IT standards. And Google Plus refuses to let me log in with it, saying it’s “incompatible.” Perhaps it can’t do some fancy animation, but then again I don’t really care. Seems Google has forgotten the old RFC adage: be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you generate. If you can detect that my browser won’t animate something right, then you could give me a stripped-down version of the page rather than an error message.

I’m just back from spending a few days volunteering with the tornado recovery effort in Joplin, MO.

The biggest image that remains in my mind is of the first time I saw a person picking through a large pile of rubble. The person was standing on top of what used to be a house. Now it was a pile of wood, glass, carpet, siding, and roofing material. I’m sure there was hope for finding some treasure or other — maybe a photo album or videos of children. In any case, it made me feel so lucky, even unfairly lucky, to have not had to go through that.

This scene was repeated several times, but mostly the houses that devastated appeared abandoned by the time we were there, now two weeks after the event.

But I heard stories, and lots of them. The victims of the storm, who were perhaps trying to rebuild that part of their house that got smashed by a tree or a pickup, or trying to get their intact belongings out before abandoning the house, or whatever, were mostly surprisingly upbeat. They were working out in 95-degree heat, many without electricity, running water, or sewer service. Almost every person I met that suffered a loss from the tornado wanted to tell their story. Many also told of their plans for the future, which were full of hope and even upbeat. These were people doing a hard job in terrible conditions and still showing hope.

Another testament to the disaster was the most unusual set of vehicles you’ve ever seen parked at any hotel you can care to think of, for at least an hour-and-a-half radius in the direction I came from. Besides the usual cars and minivans, there might be FEMA vehicles, electric company trucks, Red Cross vans, construction trucks of every kind, police and law enforcement from all over, etc. There was quite obviously an influx of people helping out in Joplin.

My primary task there was to provide communications support for the effort as an amateur radio operator. Amateurs (or “hams”) are something of a volunteer first responder of sorts during times of crisis; most of us own and are very familiar with operating equipment that can communicate over very long distances without the need for any on-site infrastructure. Amateur radio was the only method of communication for some Joplin hospitals in the immediate aftermath.

The communications emergency is over, but the response isn’t. I was assigned to work with the Salvation Army. They were doing a lot of things in Joplin, and had hundreds of volunteers working with them. I don’t think I even know what many of them were doing – I do know they had set up several warehouses across the city working with donating clothing, food, etc.

The part I was involved with was primarily the canteen operation. The SA sent in food service trucks from several parts of the country. These trucks would roam up and down the streets in the damaged area, trying to get past every single street several times a day. Anybody that we could see would be offered food and water. No strings attached, no questions asked. This included homeowners, electric line workers, construction crews, sanitation workers, and quite a few nonprofit groups that sent well-meaning and useful volunteers into the area but didn’t think to provide them with a large supply of water due to sending them into an area without any. Oops. In any case, with extreme heat and no running water, conditions were dangerous. The canteens also knew of certain at-risk families that were living in homes that were mostly intact in the disaster areas, and made a special point to check in on them. They also generally looked to make sure that people looked like they were healthy. Each canteen also had a counselor on board that would visit with people while we quickly prepared their meal — they all seemed to welcome that.

Amateur Radio’s Role

The operation of this size had quite a logistics challenge. I’d hear of things like an unexpected need of 70 lunches, or a semi showing up with donations before there was space, or an unexpected but very welcome donation of a large quantity of ice cream without a place to store it (so the canteen trucks, which have freezers, needed to pick it up quickly). That’s where us hams came in. Each canteen had an amateur radio operator on board. Each major location also had a ham stationed there, and the head of operations also often had a “shadow” — a ham that would follow him around wherever he went to relay messages back and forth. We also had hams with pickups (with radios in them, of course) that could transport things around the city to places that needed them, hams at headquarters managing all the communication and generally investigating questions that didn’t have immediately obvious answers, etc.

Radios were used instead of cellphones for a few reasons. One big one is that everybody on the operation can hear what everyone else’s needs are, since it’s a group communications situation rather than one-to-one. It’s easy to give a general alert to everyone (“come get your ice cream now please!”) and people that have suggestions can chime in. This came in extremely handy more than once. Also, it frees the people doing other jobs from having to spend time chasing someone’s voicemail, finding phone numbers, etc; that gets delegated to us in some cases. I heard from the head of canteen operations, for whom this was the first disaster he’d worked that had amateur radio support, how wonderful it was to have this going on. I also heard a secondhand report that some police officers that were also amateurs had listened to our operation and reported that “we sound more professional than 911 dispatch and do a better job.”

On Sunday I was assigned to a canteen. This meant I didn’t have a lot of radio traffic to pass, so although I had it in my ear all day, I wasn’t actively talking on the radio very much. So I rode in back, helping hand out water, carry meals to people, and so forth.

On Saturday, I was the shadow for the head of operations. That was a difficult task, because he barely ever moved at a pace slower than a run, sometimes would abruptly zip out somewhere, etc. But it was also enlightening and vital. He was a real “get it done” sort of guy, and was the key to quite a few things. Having someone available to relay questions to and from him was a good thing.

And today I worked as a transport person and at headquarters. Due to not having a pickup there, I didn’t actually get called on much to transport things, but in general between jobs the whole time I’d act as a runner if needed, or simply try to figure out the details of how things were run for next time. I wound up taking “net control” (being the control operator at headquarters, and generally managing communications so that people don’t talk over each other and such) for about an hour. So I got to do a little of just about every amateur radio task.

Thoughts

I am thankful for the opportunity to go, and the good feeling of helping people in need — the first I’ve ever had the chance to do that in a disaster. It’s a good feeling to have a skill that is useful and appreciated. Sometimes it felt like handing out food and water is something pretty small in the scheme of things. But on the other hand, it gives people a chance to have contact with someone that cares, an opportunity to have people that can notice problems drive by a few times a day, and an opportunity to help meet people’s basic needs. And sometimes in a fluid situation, there might be more volunteers than are needed, so I did spend some time sitting waiting for the next task.

But overall, I’m convinced that the work I helped facilitate was a good thing and provided a good and needed service in Joplin. This has been quite the experience and I’m sure it’s changed me too, though I don’t yet know how.

”I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

–anonymous (often attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr.)

Seen many times today.