I decided I’d rebuild my Linksys NSLU2-based PBX tonight, since SlugOS/BE 4.x had been released back in December and I wasn’t getting new versions of Asterisk pushed through the ipkg channel. Since I’ve done it before, I figured it would only take about an hour, and I was right (okay, it took ten minutes longer than I predicted, but close enough.) Continue reading…
Monthly Archives: April 2008
A few years ago, when I was still in charge of the Toronto Community Co-Location Project (a project that I’m pretty sure is defunct by now), I was approached by a fellow named Da Shi, who was just starting a company called 3z Canada. He provided some competitive rates for co-location, but we ultimately sublet space from Chris Kirby. Continue reading…
Recently at work, we tried to implement Xen on Intel Xeon, running a 64-bit dom0/domU. I have to say that this failed horribly, so I’m writing this post to warn others off it. My colleague Gabriel worked hard to migrate everything back to a 32-bit environment, so kudos to him.
The specific symptoms we experienced while running 64-bit Xen is that the domU’s would crash and reboot randomly under (or after) high load. One of our domU’s is a development server, which also runs a CruiseControl, a continuous integration system. This means that every minute, CruiseControl wakes up, does a cvs update to see if there are any changes, and then recompiles the project(s) if needed. Periodically we started to see error messages like
Bad pte = 32971e067, process = cvs, vm_flags = 100077, vaddr = b7f34000
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After a few of these, domU would reboot. It seems like others are having the same problem on 64-bit Xen. This user was running CentOS 5.1, which is basically what we’re running (we have the real deal Red Hat Enterprise LInux 5.1).
As I said, migrating the domU back to a 32-bit dom0 seemed to fix this, so let this be a fair warning to others thinking of running a 64-bit dom0.
It’s that time of year again when I start to think about what computer upgrades I might want to do. I’ve had some annoying things happen with my desktop PC recently and have considered either replacing it entirely, or implementing some much-needed upgrades. Continue reading…
Some of you are aware that I’m into vintage computers. Sadly, my basement cannot hold all the computers I wish I could actually have – and some of them are forever going to be too big to fit in any man’s house (not to mention “make it past a man’s significant other“).
But why would one actually need a VAX when, these days, one can emulate one on a Linux PC using SIMH? Not only can one emulate a VAX (take your pick: MicroVAX or VAX 11/780) but also a PDP-11, Data General Nova, some ancient Honeywell mainframes I’ve never heard of, or a bunch of other old mainframes or minicomputers.
I have a special nostalgia for the VAX, since I accessed my first real e-mail account at the National Capital Free-Net via a VAX in my dad’s office. On the anniversary of my Dad’s retirement, I’ve decided I’m going to try to get a VAX running in emulation under SIMH – running OpenVMS, no less. Do I know anything about running OpenVMS? Nope, I do not – but I’m going to find out. Yes, I know it’s a nearly obsolete operating system, and DCL is not the most intuitive. But hopefully it should prove to be a little bit amusing at least – wish me luck!
(On a completely unrelated note: People are still writing in to comment on the blog post where I got yelled at by Drew of Toothpaste For Dinner for offering an RSS feed. Haha! I’ve moved onto reading xkcd these days … that fellow seems far less uptight, and his comics are more reliably funny. And yes, xkcd has an RSS feed, if you had to ask.)
April Fool’s Day is upon us again, and along with this are some truly stupid April Fool’s jokes. Chief among them was YouTube’s replacement of its featured videos with ones that actually link to Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up, a common Internet meme known as "rickrolling". Now characterize me as an old codger, but I have to say that rickrolling is one of the stupidest Internet memes I have ever come across. I really don’t see what’s so funny about this. Maybe I’m missing something? It’s been done many times over, even in xkcd cartoons, but really folks, it’s not funny, and it should just be put to rest.
I’ll tell you what I found really funny: the folks over at Atlassian who announced the JIRA Solver. Some of you may recall that Cenqua (now a wholly owned subsidiary of Atlassian) presented both the PairOn extreme-programming chair and the Commentator automated code-commenter (commentator?) on 1 April 2005, both of which were a riot. Now that’s creative… perpetuating a lame Internet meme is not.
