The Empirical Manifesto

M2 Pro saga so far: The support person who took ownership of my case was unable to get the required approvals for the return and/or upgrade to the M1 Ultra Studio today and will reach out again Thursday. When an M-series box crashes to the firmware loading prompt, it can be quickly and easily "revived" by attaching it to another M-series computer and running Apple Configurator on the working machine. This of course requires a person to own more than one M-series computer. So I bought a base M2 Mini for Dorian ($499 on Amazon) and reclaimed the i7 Mini in the interim (also to run my x86 VMs). If this ever happens again, I'll be able to fix the goddamn thing myself!
Also much love to Tony, who gave me my first Mini, and Carla, who gave me my second Mini ❤

Let's talk ClusterSSH on macOS. Because ugh.

ehowton@minime % brew install csshx
Running `brew update --preinstall`...
==> Auto-updated Homebrew!
Updated 1 tap (homebrew/core).
...
ehowton@minime % csshx
Unimplemented: POSIX::tmpnam(): use File::Temp instead at /System/Library/Perl/5.30/darwin-thread-multi-2level/POSIX.pm line 185.
Unimplemented: POSIX::tmpnam() at /usr/local/bin/csshx line 1130.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/local/bin/csshx line 1130.

According to StackOverflow, something with how the Perl they used to compile csshX was deprecated in the Perl included with Big Sur and Catalina. Easy fix:

# vi /usr/local/Cellar/csshx/0.74/bin/csshX

Replace:

use POSIX qw(tmpnam);

With

use File::Temp qw(tmpnam);

Works immediately.

On each my computers with a desktop (2xWindows, 1xOSX, 2xLinux) resides five (5) browsers (Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, Chrome & Firefox) and on each browser resides 70+ tabs. Given memory requirements, I keep these cultivated tab-farms in browser, but only run one browser at a time. Occasionally I will need to pull up another 70+ tab-farm browser to find some information, but keeping it up longer than a few moments is a dangerous game as I never kill my current browser. When my current browser does eventually crash (they all eventually crash), then and only then do I restart a previous browser as a new current default.

This is the way.

A local copy of my entire iTunes database running in the garage on the Powermac G5; 2x2GHz PPC procs and 3GB RAM running OSX 10.5.8. And of the many circa 2005 Netgear dongles I have laying around the house, I discovered there is an OSX driver for their RealTek chipsets!

Not that I'm going to host any Anna-level events in this garage.

Not shown in the rack are two Dell PowerEdge 2950's (one is running a Win7 remote browserfarm, the other a stupidly overpowered externally-facing openSUSE Minecraft server), an HP DL360 (my kids' internal Win7 Minecraft server), and one of my Itanium boxes - I decided to reinstall HP/UX 11iv3 here at the house as a test box since we don't have any at work.

I also enjoy using the SSH client on my iPhone to send "say" command to the G5 to freak out the kids when they're outside :)

I received three gently-used CPU/MOBO combos from a like-minded friend which I decided to use to stave off a new home-computer purchase for myself, and with them began a household upgrade path which turned out to be far more intensive than I was anticipating.

While it sounds easy enough to 'flowdown' better boxes to replace the older ones, given the disparate heterogeneous environment I run at the house, and why, it was rather hair-raising for a week or so while I took inventory:

MEMORY:
1 x 1GB PC5300 DDR2
1 x 1GB PC3200 DDR
2 x 512MB PC4200 DDR2
1 x 256MB PC3200 DDR
2 x 1GB kit (dual-channel 512MB PC3200 DDR, 4-sticks total)
1 x 128MB PC2700 DDR
2 x 256MB PC2100 DDR
3 x 512MB PC-133
4 x 256MB PC-133
1 x 128MB PC-133
1 x 128MB PC-100
3 x 64MB PC-100
3 x 32MB PC-100

STORAGE:
1 x 36GB 10k SATA Raptor
1 x 80GB IDE
1 x 120GB IDE
1 x 160GB SATA
3 x 160GB IDE
1 x 500GB IDE
1 x 500GB IDE external
2 x 30GB IDE
2 x 40GB IDE

CPU:
1 x 3.60 P4 (HT?)
1 x 3.06 P4 (HT?)
1 x 2.80 P4 HT
1 x 1.60 P4
1 x 1.42 PPC
1 x 1.25 PPC
1 x 866 PIII
2 x 500 PPC (dual)

The first thing I did was was upgrade little girl from a non-functioning 1.1GHz Althalon box to the 866MHz PIII and put in 896MB of RAM. XP runs remarkably well in this configuration considering the only thing she does is play her online flash games. She has to run XP because there are no linux drivers for the WPN111 USB networking client I needed during my 6-month stint in a STL hotel, and everything but the office has to connect wirelessly.

I'll likely upgrade the boy to 512MB of RAM, splitting the PC4200 pair as the mac mini contains only a single slot. Its not as much as the 1GB I run in mine, but it will double what he's currently running.

Those are the easy ones. I really don't know how I'm going to lay out the rest.

I'd like to take darkvoyager, my current ubuntu server and yank out the 500GB drive, leaving its 30GB root drive, but populating it with all the leftover single sticks of mixed speed memory, letting it run fully populated lowest-common denominator, and installing XFCE on it as my wife's new desktop. Its a 1.6GHz P4 and I should be able to put in the remaining 512MB PC4200 stick, the 256MB PC3200, and the two 256MB PC2100's for 1280MB (right now it has one of the dual-channel PC3200 kits in it). She only uses the browser, but demands a snappy response, which the RAM upgrade + XFCE should accommodate. I don't know what I'll do with the PowerMac G4 (dual-500MHz; 1.75GB RAM) it will replace. I've considered putting ubuntu on it for giggles because there's nothing else I can do with that box right now.

My mac mini will go atop the rack, and I'll only use it for VNC, likely moving my iTunes database onto a linux vault of my creation. If I put both sets of dual-channel 1GB kits in my current XP box and pull out its amazing 36GB Raptor. I can use it as-is, and simply add my two 500GB drives to it, and let it boot off a 30/40GB IDE, leaving the 160GB IDE drive in it. Its a massive Antec case, so it has the room to be a great vault (its the one on the far right).

Let's talk about workstations. I think I'll purchase 8GB of dual-channel PC5300 and split them between the 3.60GHz and 3.06GHz boxes, loading the faster of the two boxes down with the SATA drives and putting the 80GB IDE drive in the other. Here's where it gets sticky: What do I put on what, and why?

I've been at this a week so far. Do I run XP on the faster box, or linux? Do I run XP in a linux VM or simply across a KVM? What are the benefits and shortcomings of each? Will the one box that will accept 8GB of RAM be seen by a 32-bit processor and would linux be able to see it? I don't know! So many possibilities. Let me know your thoughts?

Either way, this gift of processing power will probably give me another two years of life before I have to do all this again. Thank you. New hardware always makes me giddy!

Recent updates to both my XP box and my OSX box have crippled my functionality identically, though it affects me much, much more on Windows. When I reboot either of these operating systems, my computer now cannot traverse the KVM and get a read on my widescreen monitor, so it defaults to a lower resolution and a 4:3 setting, which given my 16:10 aspect ratio, renders illegible ass. I set both the computers to fixed 1440:900, but of course this new update assumes I don't know what the fuck I want, and overrides me. I guess that's what frustrates me the most. How about an update where you can uncheck 'idiot' mode? And though this is an issue on both computers, I really only ever have to reboot the XP box with any regularity, which compounds the problem. At each reboot I must detach the monitor from the KVM and plug it into the back of my machine to let the video card get a reading directly from the monitor itself. I downloaded the exact widescreen driver from the monitor manufacture and forced its use at boot. The computer didn't care, and defaulted back. I forced the change by using the video card manufacture's advanced settings to set the resolution - which it did by allowing the display area to exceed the screen area! I changed the registry to force my resolution, but with every change I make, it creates new registry entries for me, because it thinks its smarter than I am.

I hate computers.

I want to travel back in time to hunt dinosaurs and get startled off the pre-fab trail by a charging T-Rex causing me to step on a butterfly and when we get back to our time there will be no Microsoft and the leader dude will put a gun to my head because he'll have to use an operating system that doesn't suck.

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.
  

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.