The first thing I remember from this morning was stepping onto something as I came through the hole in the wall. I’ll assume the hole was in fact the doorway, but my memory is cloudy at this point. Where I’d been? Don’t know, I have no memory of emotion before I felt the crackling, crushing under my foot, no recollection of intent, no short-term memory, no sensation of hot or cold.
But I distinctly remember the feeling under my foot as the words broke apart into syllables, further shattering into diphthongs and finally breaking apart from letters into strokes and stems.
They never broke like glass, not the sharp cutting pain of shards that penetrate your skin, shattering into unimaginably small pieces. Nor was it the cracking of ice beneath my bare feet. The closest I can associate it to, was a painless form of Lego, falling into pieces, into the lower denomination of letter-forms.
As soon as I realised that I was stepping into something, I moved my foot back up, feeling it writhe beneath me, magnetic, reforming itself towards an approximation of the original shape.
As I looked around, I could suddenly see them, clear as ice, yet blackened serifs against the background of the room, lying everywhere, attached to the surfaces, sentences falling slowly from paragraphs, embedding themselves, pushing away into a mess of syntax I could not comprehend. All of it, centring above the bed, hovering in the air, the closer I looked, the more it took shape, solidity, paragraphs forming chapters hanging around, rotating with an internal tension I just could not explain. The words appeared to be static, some of them clinging together, others pushed away from each other, monopole magnets in the room. Over it all there was a certain kind of order, disturbed and fragile, imperfections in the way the chapters were bound together forcing them apart, causing the stress that pushed them all away from each other.
Further out were the signs of the last shattering, a paragraph with dropped capitals embedding itself in the bookshelf, punctuation falling slowly down, attaching itself to another sentence along the way, causing it to break off, transforming the words as they fell to the floor.
I was trying my hardest not to breathe as I looked around, attempting to understand the order of things, what had happened. I looked to the bed, seeing my own curled up shape, tension in my face, teeth biting into my lip, brows tightened, skin clammy and moist.
The room was steamy, smelling of ozone and brine, sulphate nearly, and there was a chill down my spine as a comma trailed off and slithered downwards, unable to find it’s place in the surroundings.
Misplaced quotation marks were hovering in the air like flies, buzzing around paragraphs, attempting to get a hold; without success.
As I looked around, the novel took shape in my head, I was reading faster than I could understand, trying to get a grip of the pieces, attempting to sort them out before this fleeting moment disappeared, yet I was obviously too late. An em-dash was falling into my face, I could feel it slip in, rubbing against a comma and setting off like a lug nut from a dipole magnet.
The disturbance was the final strand as I opened my eyes, rubbing away at something caught in the corner of my eyes, attempting to shake a serif from my beard. The room was coming into view, multifaceted rainbows in my eyes as the words dissipated and left.
I shook my head, trying to remember the context of the words.
So, Due to Buerocrazy, life is sorta miffly atm.
However, I need to clear my head from that. At work I've recently been reading PCI and credit-card specifications, dealing with osCommerce, Virtual items for sale, generating tickets for a PoS system and so on.
It now appears the pieces are coming together, tickets can be bought, printed, ordered and added, and disappear from the inventory when things are sold out. Yey.
Next up, design and featurism. Then it's off to the other projects in order to see what happens with them.
I'm still looking for suggestions on hardware ( x86 or Arm, 24+ Megs of RAM, 32+ Megs of flash, Ethernet, 2x USB ( and maybe a built-in 3G modem) Theres a few on my list, but I want stuff for smaller batches, (a couple of hundreds) at decent price. There's a few on the market, but maybe you know of one that I don't know. Do tell!
Tomorrow, building more firmware, doing some cabling and design-work. Yey. Still waiting for some more prototype units of various CPU-denominations. I wonder what I can do with 32Megs of RAM, 200 MHz and 4 Megs of flash .. The flash will be a pita for my usecase, I fear. :/
"Zeroeth of all: anyone who writes () in a function prototype in C needs
to get severely napalmed, maimed, hung and then really hurt. It is
(void) in C, () means (...) which is literally NEVER what you want."
-- H. Peter Anvin, on LKML
"Man has killed man from the beginning of time, and each new frontier has brought new ways and new places to die. Why should the future be different?"
-- Col. Corazon Santiago
"Planet: A Survivalist's Guide"
I miss Alpha Centauri sometimes
(Apologies to the international friends/aquiantances reading this, I wrote it originally for the Work blog, but it ended up too personal for there, and I figured I'd post it here instead. )
Dags att ölblogga! I normala fall pysslar jag ju mest med teknik och tre eller fyra bokstäver långa förkortningar, saker som må vara nördigt men ja, det är ju inte ölnördigt. Då kan jag ju jämföra med vår ölguru Magnus Bark, som är såpass ölnördig att han får helsidor i tidningen och både pratar i radio och föreläser på nördcafé.
Nej, där ligger jag i lä.
Men, för att lära mig lite mer om ölen och saker däromkring så räcker det inte att gå på ölprovningar och läsa böcker och bloggar. I samrådan med Amanda bestämde jag mig att det var dags för lite mer praktisk kunskap. Därför hittade jag mig i onsdags på andra sidan baren, tillsammans med lustiga pekskärmar, bongar, glas och tappar.
Det blev till att sätta upp håret, slänga hatten på hyllan och hänga rocken i garderoben, här var det förkläde och prydlig förvirring som gäller. Snart stod jag där som ett frågetecken, vart var det man hittar knappen för Vedett, hur mycket fyller man ett Maredsous-glas, var står glasen till Gonzo, hur får man pumpen att sluta skumma?
Oj. Hoppsan. Hjälp!
Jag blev snabbt påmind om varför jag brukar sitta vid ett tangentbord: japp, jag är en klant! Det där var ju inte helt en nyhet, men ont gör det ändå när man sätter ett glas snett mot kanten och det går sönder i handen. Och kladdigt blir det också.
Men men, nu lär jag ju minnas att jag är en klant ett tag till! Och så illa blev det inte. Ett par plåster och en timeout så var allt fint igen. Då var det dags att balansera brickor, denna gången utan glaskross och kaos. Och så fortsatte kvällen! Fullt blev det, sällskap kom och gick igen, och det verkade alltid finnas någon som ville att
ölen skulle rinna snabbare.
Men visst är det kul att vara där, och trots att jag såg så förvirrad ut vid baren så var kunderna trevliga och hade översikt med min vilsenhet.
Och, nu hittar jag till Hofbrauglasen, men jag får nog leta lite till efter ESB i kassan.
Och på lördag blir det lite mer ölnördande. Då ska jag på provning här i Klompen, sedan får vi se vad som händer. Men kul ska det bli med lite nytt om Amerikansk Humle.
- “Good morning”
* “Morning, at least”
Well, that’s how it usually goes for me.
--
I woke up this morning. I’m quite convinced it was morning because I was awake, but that doesn’t make sense, does it? My face was icy cold, my hands stiff, cramped and locked down beneath me. As I tried to turn around, behind me; to see what that thing behind me was, I realised I could not move a muscle. I was trapped, my body cold as porcelain beneath covers, I could feel my heart beating in my chest, my lungs were contracting for ages, attempting to get the air either way without success. I became more and more aware that there was something behind me, it was there, I just could not turn to see it.
That was the worst. Being unable to move around to see it, being unable to move.
Eventually the feeling let off and I woke up again. Broke down, went up, glass of hot water, trying to shake the chills and quivers from my body. Hitting my toe on the mess in the hallway was a good thing, I felt alive, and the pain was immediate, something to focus on. It made me remember the feeling of fire against skin, and how it can be used to control anxiety-attacks when nothing else is at hand.
Tonight was worse than it usually is for me. Let’s talk some more openly about it. As of the last couple of weeks my sleeping pattern has been shot completely to hell. It’s not that I’m not tired, I’m always tired and unfocused because of sleeplessness. It’s the chronic anxiety keeping my heart rate running too high, the moment I try to lie down, I feel the beating, clutching at the inside of my chest, grabbing hold, my veins contract, feeling of cold liquid pushed down into my arms as I squirm, unknowing, unable to do anything about it. The panic sets in and within seconds I’m coated in cold sweat, calves cramped because my toes curl up and attempt to hide beneath the soles of my feet.
Pills help. If you call “numbing” for help. I squirm less, think slowly and do not have the time to react before I pass out, however, even for that to work I need to be somewhat exhausted.
This isn’t all new for me. It’s more intense as of the last weeks, but that is because certain bureaucrats decided that it was better to make my life uncertain living hell than to have improvement. I admit because of this I haven’t been functioning properly neither at home, nor at work. I’ve had to call in sick because I haven’t slept; because I’m in an emotional state where nothing makes sense and I’m not coherent, where emotions make me unable to think straight for long. It has to change, but right now I’m unable to do anything about it.
A month ago I was functioning better than I had in a long time, I was more stable, somewhat regular, slept decently and most importantly, I functioned. Now, not so much. Because of this situation I feel as if I’m unable to do my real job properly as well. A month or two ago and I was breaking my own expectations, and now I can barely keep even. My home is deteriorating, and nothing seems to work. I feel helpless and caught in the maelstrom. Logic and reality has nothing to do with it.
Some technical notes on migrating from 3-disk raid5 to raid1 without dataloss or reformatting.
My setup: I had a 3-disk raid5 ( 500GBx3, giving 990ish GB of usable space)
*) Empty enough space, you need to go down to the smallest disk in your collection, in my case, cleaned out to some 340GB used space, simply because I could.
*) fsck, need to be done before resize.
fsck -f /dev/md0
*) resize the filesystem so it's smaller than the disk size. Preferably with some margin.
resize2fs -p /dev/md0 400G
( this takes _TIME_ around 1.4Meg/second total )
*) pretend-shrink the array
mdadm --grow /dev/md0 --array-size=471859200
*) fsck-test ( read-only to check you don't lose any data)
fsck -n -f /dev/md0
*) reduce the array to a two-disk raid5 (takes time, needs to do a full recovery, approx 22MB/sec )
mdadm --grow /dev/md0 --backup-file=/root/backup-mdadm --raid-devices=2
*) transform from a 2disk raid5 to a 2disk raid1
mdadm --grow /dev/md0 --level=raid1 --backup-file=/root/backup-raid5
*) resize the filesystem to fill the whole raid
mdadm --grow /dev/md0 --size=max
resize2fs -p /dev/md0
*) remove the spare device from your set.
After that, I just moved one of the drives into the other system, activated it as degraded, copied my files over, and resynced it all.
Spent over 48 hours trying to recover a drive to a machine which lost power during startup, causing the head to hit platters and corrupting sectors vital to bootup. Ouch.
Then we lost power during recovery.
However, all user-data was recovered in the end, backups are now in place, and things appear to be stabilizing. I just wish there was enough cash to throw at the problem to fix it properly. New drives + UPS would be necessary it seems. And we don't like that.
As for my home systems, 1 drive is failing ( sector reassigning failed ) and going back to the store next week. Fortunately it's 1 disk of a raid mirror, so it should be fine to recover.
The other set of raid5 is currently being shrunk (filesystem) in preparation of using mdadm to transform my raid5 to a raid1, in order to remove some drives from the chassi. Takes time, but should be lossless. Only reason for doing this is really to move hardware around, No faults so far.
Good news, USB stick and GNU ddrescue is the winner. dd_rescue is to be avoided. Bad news, ntfs-3g handles _badly_ with disk images, and consumes a _ton_ of cpu. Do not even attempt to use it.
gparted will do some interesting things when resizing partitions, for example, read only moves of data. Will take 12+ hours to operate. Make sure you don't lose power.
Preface:
So, with the new year approaching I’m also joining the future when it comes to fiber to the home networking. Well really, my subscription with the other ISP was coming to an end, and it was time to upgrade to something that was both cheaper and faster.
With the new ISP, I’m finally getting out of the “only one IP per customer”, and into a more realistic setup. This allows me to finally get rid of the NAT box and all the problems it entails .( Instant messenger, UPnP and various protocols still do not act well with NAT. And probably never will )
However, you don’t get any amount of IP-addresses, so there has to be some limit, and for things like the wifi, I do not see a good reason to bridge anyone into the ISP network without some sanity checking.
Now, I wouldn’t be a proper geek if that was the only thing on my requirements. See, I also want to maintain good speed with my NAS storage, ( nfs + samba ) which unfortunately my router cannot manage ( only 100Mbit, while my switch is Gigabit ). However, lets be serious, this is a minor issue.
Add to this that I have, quite a number of various devices speaking ethernet ( Embedded systems galore, 10-15 ‘computers’ around here ), so we can’t really just assume that I’ll get enough public IP’s for all of them.
So, what I’d _REALLY_ want is a server on my home router (OpenWRT 10.03.1-rcX Backfire based) that would set up a private LAN for most machines, but for a few select MAC-addresses would instead of allocating a private IP, do a DHCP proxy call and allocate a public IP-address for those.
Preferrably the DHCP-proxy would then re-write certain fields like “default route” ( the router ) DNS ( Well, doh ) as well as update the DNS-entries for the internal lookup so you could use consistent for your own machines. ( MAC-based to start with )
Well. Right now, there is no such software, and for this weekend I didn’t have the urge to even try and scope it up, much less create it.
So, That leaves me with two “obvious” solutions.
*) DHCP Proxy (dhrelay from ISC and dhcp-forwarder)
*) Transparent Bridging
For these to work I had to do some magic in either way. First and foremost, set up VLAN’s on the internal switch of my WRT160nl. There I’d dedicate 1 port to be “outbound” ( and hook a switch to that) and the remaining 3 to be “local net only”.
Figuring this out took me a bit longer than I’d thought, as I managed to lock myself out by the ways of firewalling whenever I attempted it, causing quite a few reboots into safe mode while I was attempting in blind to figure out what worked and what didn’t. Below will be some documentation on how to get this just right (tm)
Also note that the default documentation on setting up VLAN on the OpenWRT page is broken, as it will create RFC-noncomformant tagged VLAN’s . VLAN 1 is not supposed to be tagged, see 802.1D standard.
So, the relevant parts of /etc/config/network :
config ‘switch’
option ‘name’ ‘eth0‘
option ‘reset’ ‘1‘
option ‘enable_vlan’ ‘1‘
option ‘enable’ ‘1‘
config ‘switch_vlan’ ‘eth0_0‘
option ‘vlan’ ‘0‘
option ‘device’ ‘eth0‘
option ‘ports’ ‘0u 1u 2u 4* 5*’
config ‘switch_vlan’ ‘eth0_10‘
option ‘vlan’ ‘10‘
option ‘device’ ‘eth0‘
option ‘ports’ ‘3u 4t 5t’
config ‘interface’ ‘vlan0‘
option ‘proto’ ‘static’
option ‘ifname’ ‘eth0.0‘
option ‘ipaddr’ ‘172.27.1.1‘
option ‘netmask’ ‘255.255.255.0‘
option ‘defaultroute’ ‘0‘
option ‘peerdns’ ‘0‘
This first turns on VLAN and the switch on eth0.
the part that reads : 0u 1u 2u 4* 5* has a magic meaning. It means that vlan 0 will be _untagged_ as it leaves ports 0 1 and 2, and _tagged_ if an untagged packet LEAVES port 4 and 5. It also makes this the _default_ vlan.
the part that reads “3u 4t 5t” is similarly magic. it means that packets leaving port 3 shall be untagged if they were tagged with vlan 10. 4t 5t also means they get tagged going out of the two internal ports. However, it’s uncertain if this actually does anything.
Next, we assign a local, static IP-address to the vlan0, and serve DHCP off that as normal. That means that physical port 3 on the switch is now magic, and assigned to vlan10 ( eth0.10 ) and free to perform experiments on.
Also note, you _NEED_ to add vlan0 to the /etc/config/firewall zone for your lan. (replace eth0 with “eth0 vlan0“ and do similar in your /etc/config/dhcp
So, My first few hours was spent digging through how to do this without bridging, so I spent many hours getting dnsmasq not to bind the external interface nor the eth0.10 interface, and attempting to get dhcp-forwarder or dhcrelay to work. Unfortunately I got neither to work with my ISP (Telia). However, this may work in the future? I wouldn’t know. I still haven’t compiled up dhcp-helper from the same guy who creates dnsmasq
So. After some time I scrapped this position, and decided that it would be simpler to create a bridged interface between eth1 (external, WAN) and eth0.10 (internal, VLAN 10, port 3 on the switch ) said and done. It was actually quite simple.
from /etc/config/network:
config ‘interface’ ‘wan’
option ‘peerdns’ ‘0'
option ‘type’ ‘bridge’
option ‘ifname’ ‘eth1 eth0.10'
option ‘proto’ ‘dhcp’
option ‘auto’ ‘1'
And that about solves it.
Now, I can hook my swtich to that port, and the machines on this side also get nice external IP addresses.
There’s just one snag. I do not get any firewall anymore. For cited performance reasons, ( I’m unable to find numbers anywhere ) the bridged filtering is disabled in the OpenWRT Backfire kernels. This does put a hinder to my plans, as I’m unable to actually perform what I wanted to do here.
Also, performance stinks right now. Why? My ISP has proxy-arp. This means, that their gateway is responding to _ALL_ arp requests for any IP-address in their range as belonging to them. This in turn is enough to make my gigabit switch scratch it’s head, and forward packets through my bridge and up into the ISP, and then back again. Effectively degrading my gigabit ethernet into 100Mbit or less.
This would ofc. be easy to stop by blocking arp-requests at the firewall. Except that the firewall isn’t enabled on bridged interfaces.
So, for the future:
a) Check out the performance of a custom kernel with bridging. Does it kill the upstream?
b) Investigate in dhcp-helper.
c) Look at creating a patch for dnsmasq that does custom proxying of DHCP based on certain mac-addresses.
d) Kill everyone, NAT and just go with ipv6 whenever it arrives?
Very much not awake.
Last week is a blur, there was Killing Joke, there was awesome, there was camera, there was crowd, there was Guinness and there was Friends and there was Porter House, and there was people.
I had a grand time, doing all from light sight-seeing to heavy clubbing and drinking, Caught three major gigs where I've been a fan for years, Porcupine Tree, Killing Joke and Ozric Tentacles, caught a Mexican day of the Dead burlesque show on film (well, digital such) and went clubbing with friends both new and old.
Overall, it was a blast.
Even though I got a minionic globetrotter cold with me home.
But now I'm still waiting for my RAW's to arrive (there was a screwup with iPhoto and they disappeared, some panic happened but I'm getting them uploaded to me now) meanwhile I tossed up
a few short previews here:
I'll update that album, and make some proper Gig albums later.
Right now I however curse myself for not photographing the taxis at night. Bad me. Very bad me.
I've been hit by Insomnia again. This time in the form of vacation. Waking up early simply from the strange noises outside, or from the life at home calling me because the providers cable has been cut off and nothing works anymore.
But Insomnia is an old friend of mine, we have a history together, you can say. And even when she's with me all day, it's not enough to deter me from fully enjoying the time here.
Monday was Porcupine Tree, with an opening act which while technically proficient, and with a singer who could sing (when he gave force to it, at least) were nothing to remember. The keyboardist was falling asleep over his beat, the singer was mostly missing his autotune, the second guitarrist was brilliant together with the drummer, but it wasn't enough to lift the show into danceability.
And then came Porcupine Tree. Different show this time from before, opening with Even Less, they went through a long history of tracks, Sound of Muzak, Four Chords, Open Car, The Sky Moves Sideways, along with several unexpected old goodies. The audience was in flames, and even though it took a few tries to get some things right, Strings breaking on the opening chord, the new guitar in the wrong key, and some other issues that made them (gasp shock horror) wing it and extend some of the solos into near showoff levels, it was high pace and managed excellently. (the power stayed on too, I think that helped)
So yeah, they were doing some things on stage that you nearly cannot do with a drumset, playing it tightly through more of a history of the band than I have ever heard from them before.
The day after we spent at a friend and writer's place all evening and night, getting home at dawn and sleeping briefly, before heading on towards last nights main attraction, Killing Joke.
Oh my effing god. I was blown away by the show, I had never (bothered?) to look up recordings of their live shows before, and the entrance reminded me a lot of a coverall dressed Alice Cooper, a notion that quickly disappeared as the opening beat ran on.
Forceful, Violent, Aggressive, without a break they went on for hours, blowing the audience away time after time, the moshpits spreading and making me evacuate the floor with the camera. (Pictures will be upcoming) and all this while pushing the audience further and further on.
Today, my spine hurts, my neck aches, my muscles hate me, Insomnia is sitting on my shoulder, taunting me, and I am simply exhausted and at ease. It was a great show.
But, guess what?
Ozric Tentacles on Sunday.
hah!