The Empirical Manifesto

I'm no scholar

• I was supposed to have recited the poem, "Paul Revere's Ride" to my class, but since I hadn't *actually* memorized it, I instead orated a very colorful retelling. The instructor was so enamored, I received an A.
  


• I always had a book with me in school. When not working on a project, I was reading a novel. All my book reports were on novels I happened to be reading at the time. The only failing paper I turned in was my report on John Irving's The Water-Method Man. That evening, my father explained to me how to write a book report on a book such as that in a way to remain completely free of the subject matter.
  


• For my December "Holiday-themed" report in Public Speaking I spent fifteen minutes discounting every myth of a traditional Christmas, revealing its origins, its symbolism, and its meanings. Most of this I was able to pull from and cite various Christian Encyclopedias. When I concluded, there was a stillness over the room I'd never experienced. I was the only student who wasn't applauded at the end of their speech.
  


• I have read a lot of the classics. I love them. I did not, however, enjoy James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohican's. For my book report, I instead turned in what can only be called a graphic novel. It was a highly-detailed, full-color illustrated report, bound & covered with those report protectors. I received an A.
  


• Once, we were discussing a new server. It was an ODS server. "Output Data System." Our manager was giving us the pitch on how our team was going to help test it. One of the new airmen asked what ODS meant. The manger thought for a moment and said, "I don't know." I dramatically reached for a dictionary, opened it, and read aloud, interrupting the meeting, "Odious - repugnant, detestable. Loathsome." Half the team had worked with me a long time, and laughed out loud at my show. The other half, believed I seriously thought our manager was talking about an odious server. I was amused at both outcomes.
  

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Apple Support Forums

Concerning the OSX NFS issue, I made progress, then hit a wall, succumbing to submitting a request on the Apple Support Forum two days ago. I have not yet received a single reply:

I am trying to NFS export a FAT32 formatted external USB device, which fails with the error:

/sbin/nfsd: Can't export /Volumes/: Operation not supported (45)

I am able to export internal/HFS drives, which have the "Owners Enabled: Yes" attribute, and therefore assume I need to set the flag accordingly on my external drive.

Despite the fact that the device has been assigned a uuid (it appears to be in place in .fseventsd and running 'repair disk' echos it in syslog), I get this error when running vsdbutil:

vsdbutil: Couldn't update volume information for '/Volumes//': Invalid argument
vsdbutil: no valid volume UUID found on '/Volumes//': Invalid argument

And diskutil returns this:

Permissions are not enabled on the disk (-9973)

I attempted to add the uuid to /var/db/volinfo.database in order to set the permissions there, to no effect.

I don't believe that I am the only person who has attempted this, but I can find no evidence to the contrary. Thank you.

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Ineffective Solutions

I can't get any linux software to burn dual-layer. This has negatively affected my inventory of blank dual-layer media. Thankfully, the price has easily dropped half of what my first spindle cost me. I can, however, burn dual-layer through my wmware XP installation. I decided to make a backup of my backup of my iTunes database in order to burn it off on dual-layer media (the only DL burner I have is on my ubuntu laptop). However, since I boot from my external 500GB drive, and that's also where I dumped my library (apparently, I don't have enough external drives capable of containing my entire repository of music) which means vmware gave me the finger when I asked it to also mount up my iTunes directory.

Fine. I relocated my XP .vmx image locally, then attached the directory. I decided to use iTunes built-in "Backup" solution, which failed after burning six DL DVD's.

Back to the drawing board.

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Politics

The Greater Anna Chamber of Commerce is hosting "Meet the Candidate" tonight. I'm linking my candidate's site on this page (http://www.beckyglover.net) because this blog gets indexed by Google rather quickly. drax0r was testing various CMS's for all the projects we find ourselves in, and while were were dabbling in Drupal, we now jump for joy with Joomla. Both are cumbersome, but Joomla is far less difficult to work with. I'll be installing it soon at darkvoyager.homeunix.com to help familiarize myself with it, as there are several 'gotchas' that drax0r was able to overcome, and my familiarization with it will greatly increase my efficiency.

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Pathetic

I have checked http://lalalandrecords.com twice a day, everyday, for a month now, in hopes they will soon be releasing Bear McCreary's Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles score. I'm on their mailing list, but I always get the email a day after the announcement and I'm unsure I could handle that amount of delay. I often find myself on my Theme Clips post, listening to the two online offerings over and over in mournful anticipation.

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This entry has gone on far too long.

Brought up Toast on teh max0r and selected files from my nfs mounted Solaris volume to make a hard-copy DVD backup of my server, and to consider the possibility of using iTunes new built-in backup application. Toast couldn't read a good majority of my nfs mounted files, yet on the server side I ensured everything was world readable. I may try to mount the volume as root (in place of read-only) to see if that helps. In the meantime I'm making multi-gig tarballs to drag over (thankfully bypassing any scp) and burn locally. The learning-curve of mounting Solaris volumes on darwin aside, the GUI representation of such is pretty nifty.

Simultaneously, I decided to upgrade phpmyadmin to minimize mucking around with mysql. I had one hell of a time, however getting that all straightened out. I'm not a big fan of cleartext passwd's in my config files and for a time ran apache2 just so I could have an egress into https (not that cleartext password are mutually exclusive, in fact I'm now running 'cookies' for secondary logins) I don't recall the reason I turned that off, but I'd really like to either get back to running them both, or perhaps, running only apache2. There were reasons I didn't pursue that 18 months ago, but I've been away from it so long, I don't remember what they were. Since getting my server up and running again, I've really been hitting the unix hard - trying to keep my mad Solaris skillz sharp, but its such an uphill battle sometimes - and I had to completely relearn my systems particular quirks.

All this work has led up to me wanting to completely revamp my box. I have an identical Rave AXi in storage I'd like to build-up better, stronger, and more secure. Running both systems in parallel, I'm sure I'll be able to manifest a most awesome system. This begs the question of when I might actually have time to do this. I have a few ideas, and look forward to discussing them with drax0r who I know would be all over that. He's really a brilliant unix admin who tempers my rashness when it comes to these types of activities. I've missed working beside him these last 18 months - especially on side projects such as this. Unfortunately for me, he gets easily distracted and doesn't like to focus too long on any single thing. Couple this with the fact that he's now married (and expecting) I feel our time would be quite limited in this endeavor. I keep an online copy of each and every Solaris package on the install discs for hand-crafting as small a system as possible after a core install. Its a time-consuming process, but one I feel necessary for the discrete control I prefer to have over my boxes. Who knows, maybe I'm just a gluten for punishment. Hey, my 440MHz UltraSparc-II is a lot faster than some of the bloated newer boxes I've worked on in the past - I feel my attention to this detail is the reason why.

Oh, I did finally get myphpadmin upgraded and secured - but its been a fight. I do well by locking myself in my dungeon office for hours on end without a break in train of thought, which has been nigh impossible this weekend, the weekend of my son's three-day-long birthday party sleepover (special arrangements had to be made concerning split-custody children who ended up here since Friday evening). If only I had the means to concentrate more. Anyway, I made my first sql backup of my database using the webtool, which turned out to be much larger than when I do them by hand (indicating to me I've probably been missing something) as well as a backup of the entire directory, and my webspace on wilddamntexan - something else which should probably be reorganized as well.

iTunes built-in backup/restore utility. Wow. How very convenient, how very idiot-proof, how very BAD. Almost no configurable options. I managed to cull my database down to 41GB after deleting 7GB of CD's I own the physical media to and was prepared to auto-span volumes. This was going to be my first test of the dual-layer portion of the drive. Would it auto-detect the 8.5GB capacity? Would I waste a very pricey disc of optical media? Unfortunately one of the first files it tried to write was a file it could not 'find' on the spinning disc, which all-but hung iTunes (despite the application identifying only six tracks ahead of time I was willing to sacrifice. I will now attempt to hand-verify the remainder of the files. Next on my plate? Lookup the darwin command for Soalris' tip to facilitate serial connectivity from teh max0r to my server. I don't even know if that's capable on a mini. I've seen some serial-to-usb connectors, but doubt off the top of my head if they'll work without windows-only drivers. I lost my wyse terminal when I moved to STL. Still, to be able to ditch the physical console and serial in from my desktop environment? How cool would that be?

Upgraded my Gallery (which is sometimes the only way I can find out where the things I broke in the process of upgrading others) and for the first time in several hours, things are working again. I have quite literally spent all day down here, and I have other issues now which require me actually touching a *shiver* XP box. I'm going to attach my physical iTunes volume to it, and the dual-layer DVD burner (which is running awfully slow on the mini) and see if I can't better accomplish my backup with the processing power that box has. We'll see. As a quick reminder, I've had the processor overclocked, installed the max capacity of 1GB RAM (thanks to drax0r), and running from a 7200rpm 8MB/cache drive. But as loaded down as this box is, I sometimes turn to my XP box for crunching. It has a 10k SATA drive (albeit the 16MB/cache drives weren't at the time available, so again, 8MB) and a quickly-becoming-dating 2.8GHz hyper-threaded chip.