Ohio Linux Fest

It's time again for the Ohio Linux Fest (September 10-12, 2010 in Columbus, Ohio).  I'm going.  So should you.  :-)

I'm teaching an abbreviated version of my Data Recovery class (for an abbreviated price, I might add) as part of the OLFU program on Friday, September 11.  If you are responsible for any hard drives, I highly recommend the class.

Speaking of classes, we also just announced a tag-team vi and vim class lineup that Bill Odom and I will be doing late next month.  Anyone in the St. Louis area who uses vi and thinks it is a burden (or avoids it like the plague) should take my vi basics class.  Everyone should take Bill's vim class.  (It's amazing stuff.)

I, for one, welcome our Google overlords

After battling (or running away screaming from) various open-source CMS solutions, going through a few iterations of rolling my own, and putting up with a really, really, crappy "temporary" (only 4 years!) site, the store's web site is now hosted by Blogger. Discuss.

PS: Oddly enough, Google Sites sucks a bit. I could be wrong, but Blogger seems a heck of a lot more functional and flexible. One would assume that will eventually change.

PPS: This doesn't mean I've given up on open-source CMS solutions. I'd be more comfortable hosting this myself, but at least in the mean time the new temporary solution is Not My Problem^TM.

I'm not dead (yet)

So the month of September was consumed by work. If I've been less than responsive lately, blame the 12+ hours/day, 7 days/week lately. (Whee!) And to top it all off, since I've been trying to slack off a little this week (working, say, only 10 hours/day), I finally had some time to migrate my desktop to some bigger hard drives, but now that's turned into a nightmare. (It's a long story, involving 2 dead RAID cards, and now either some bad hard drives that passed burn-in testing fine, or a flaky RAID card.)

To make a long story short, if you really need to contact me, email isn't going to work that great. Without procmail to filter all the Fedora lists, linux-kernel, etc., I just get too much mail to find anything sent to me directly unless I get really lucky. Hopefully after my new RAID rebuilds (which is apparently going to take until tomorrow), I can get the rest of my data moved over, and get my system back up Monday or Tuesday.

It would be really nice to have working email again by the time I head over to Columbus for the Ohio LinuxFest on Thursday. (I'll be teaching a one-day LPI certification prep class there on Friday with Don Corbet.) If you email me and don't get a response in a reasonable amount of time, call the shop... They can always get a message to me.

One good bit of news from the day job though... I need to thank everyone who has worked on the livecd-tools package. I've managed to solve some rather large problems with a heavily customized live CD that I can hand to our employees. If there's a Fedora BoF at OLF, I'll share details then. (Some of it might make sense for a generic live CD.)

I'm in love.

My ThinkPad X300 showed up unexpectedly a couple of days ago. (There's a shortage of the things, so even though I ordered it a few weeks ago, I still wasn't expecting it for a couple of weeks. Luckily, since we're a reseller, our Lenovo sales rep expedited the order a little bit.) I need to use it a little more before I do a complete review, but I wanted to share my first impressions while I can still remember them.

First of all, it just seems bigger in real life than it does in pictures. It's definitely much lighter than the average laptop. (I'll be curious to see how much the 6-cell battery and the "Option Bay" battery, which replaces the optical drive, change the feel of the thing. We forgot the Option Bay battery on the actual laptop order, so we ordered it separately later. Neither of the bigger batteries have shown up yet.)

The weird part is that it feels totally normal. Everything is proportioned like a bigger laptop, so unless you set it next to a full-sized laptop, it just feels natural. Plus you get a full-sized keyboard, which anyone used to a ThinkPad should appreciate. (I have to note that this is my first ThinkPad, so I'm hoping the escape key won't bug me too much.)

So far my only complaint is that I don't seem to be getting anywhere near the advertised battery life, but there could be a lot of reasons for that, and I haven't really looked very closely at the problem yet. (For all I know, it could be some side-effect of something on Fedora 9.) (Update: It turns out I'm still waiting for the 6-cell battery to ship, so I've just been using the 3-cell. The 2-2.5 hours I'm seeing are still around half what is advertised though...)

Speaking of Fedora 9, I did my first fresh install of F9 on the X300. I have some first impressions of it to share as well, but I think I'll do that in a separate post...

In the mean time, I think I need to go shopping for a new laptop bag/case/backpack/whatever. I'd love some suggestions from X300 owners...

Recovering data from a HP Media Vault

I had a customer bring in a drive from a HP Media Vault that had failed (or flaked out or something, we're really not sure yet). It was kind of interesting trying to find data on the drive, so I thought I'd share...

First, the drive obviously didn't have a standard PC partition table.

# fdisk -l /dev/hdi

Disk /dev/hdi: 300.0 GB, 300069052416 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 36481 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Disk /dev/hdi doesn't contain a valid partition table

I should note that I tried testdisk at this point too, but it didn't find anything. Next, I checked for anything recognizable at the beginning of the disk.

# dd if=/dev/hdi count=8 | strings
Broadcom NAS Version 1.1 MBR Tag
SYSTEM
8+0 records in
8+0 records out
4096 bytes (4.1 kB) copied, 0.00013262 s, 30.9 MB/s

After a little Googling for "broadcom nas", "hp media vault", and a few other things, I figured out there was a reiserfs filesystem on the thing somewhere. (Note: As pointed out in the first comment to this post, there is some great technical documentation on this thing online. Rather than follow it, I chose to cheat and do this the (relatively) easy way.) Google found me this nice document describing the on-disk structure of reiserfs. That's how I figured out that I was looking for a magic string "ReIsEr2Fs" (or "ReIsErFs" for version 1, or "ReIsEr3Fs" for version 3, according to some other search results). I used hexedit to find the offset of the magic string by doing hexedit /dev/hdi, hitting tab, hitting /, then typing in ReIsEr.

2685A020   84 03 00 00  1E 00 00 00  00 00 00 00  00 10 CC 03  06 00 01 00  52 65 49 73  ....................ReIs
2685A038   45 72 32 46  73 00 00 00  03 00 00 00  05 00 B7 08  02 00 00 00  CC A3 00 00  Er2Fs...................

In this case, the magic string was at hex location 2685A034, which means the beginning of the superblock was at 2685A000, or (decimal) 646291456 bytes. The beginning of the superblock is 64k bytes before that, so I set up a loop device there:

# losetup -o $[ 646291456 - 65536 ] /dev/loop0 /dev/hdi
# mkdir /mnt/tmp
# mount -r -t reiserfs /dev/loop0 /mnt/tmp

The files my customer needed were in /mnt/tmp/FileShare/.

Why I suck at business

So anyone who knows me probably knows about the store, but I try not to make a big deal out of it here or in my normal away-from-the-store interaction with people. The fact is, I just don't like mentioning it, for fear that people will think I'm advertising, and I'm only in it for the money. This post is already making me incredibly uncomfortable...

That said, I need some help figuring out some way to advertise some classes I'll be teaching starting in February. Kara and I have invested a lot in the training room in our new store (which makes the local Linux users group meetings much more comfortable), so we have to start making some money on it soon. As it happens, I'm a darn good sysadmin (IMHO), and I like to talk, so teaching is a natural thing for me. ;-)

The classes I'll be teaching are all Linux system administration-related. Half of them are LPI Linux certification classes (on account of the O'Reilly book on the subject I helped write). There's a Google Calendar with dates, but no class descriptions yet. (Details available on request, but I obviously need to get them posted somewhere...)

So I need to figure out a way to get the word out, preferably to the St. Louis area (and the midwest in general, I suppose) that a) doesn't cost a ton of money (because that's all tied up in the new shop), b) doesn't make me feel like a total weasel, and c) doesn't make the intended audience think I'm a total weasel. Suggestions (like, what advertising do you actually pay any attention to and maybe trust a little) would be most appreciated.

Oh, since I'm talking about work, and in case my lovely and talented wife reads this, I have to point out for the record that she owns and runs the business. (In addition to being extremely averse to "sales", I also happen to be horrible with money. On the other hand, she happens to be good at that and more. :-)

Overdue update

I'm leaving for the Ohio LinuxFest in a few hours, so I thought this would be a good time to give a quick update.

• The store is coming together, slowly. My KVM head units finally showed up, and now that I've seen them, I've reconsidered how I want to cable everything a bit. (One of these years, I'll have to write up what we're doing, maybe with some pictures...) My switches in the front of the store are too loud, so I have to find a way to quiet them down before I can use them. The lighting in the front of the store still isn't right. Our training room furniture still needs to be assembled. We still have a lot of stuff that needs to be unpacked. There's probably more that I'm forgetting, but at least we are making progress...
• We've had some drama with our employees. We had one person quit after Kara and I went over some complaints. (At least we won't have to worry about those issues any more.) One employee is moving away to go back to school. Another gave us notice so he could take another job, but I think we convinced him to stay. And then we have a new guy starting next week, which means we get to train him for a while...
  
• I'm very slowly easing back into doing Fedora work, mostly just to take a break from all of the above. Hopefully I'll get a chance to try out 7.91 over the weekend. (I'm burning a copy to take with me now.)

With all this stuff going on, I'm not thrilled about leaving for a few days, but I probably need the break.

Moving sucks

Construction on our new store is done (finally), so we're moving in now, just a little later than originally intended. We're going to shut down this weekend so we can get everything in the new store set up. Hopefully we'll be mostly functional on Tuesday (2007-09-04, after the Labor Day holiday), but I have a feeling it will be a week or two before things settle down to something like normal...

Store update

It's been hard to find time to get much work done lately, much less post updates here. The new store is coming along nicely. We should be able to start moving in next weekend, and we should be completely moved and operating from the new store on September 1. I've been spending most of my time working on all the little details related to the move (keeping an eye on the construction, turning on utilities, designing a counter, etc., etc., etc.).

I set up a Google calendar to at least start to schedule classes in the new training room the other day.

If all goes well (and I don't lose my mind first), I'll get back to somewhat normal work in a couple of weeks after we're done moving.

Week in review

Yikes. I seem to have spaced off making any updates this week. Oops.

Earlier this week I updated my pugs package to a svn checkout. It builds fine now, but I still have a ton of rpmlint warnings to address.

In Fedora news, all but one of the packages I submitted last week has been reviewed and approved. I also spent some time working on building my packages for EPEL. That's going to get a lot easier once the Module::Build package's dependencies get worked out.

There's been a lot more progress on the new store. We have permits now, and all the electrical and plumbing in the floor is done. We should have a floor on Tuesday, so either Wednesday or Thursday they should be building walls.

This past Thursday was Emma's 6th birthday. I took her to see the Cardinals/Cubs game. That turned out to be a lot of fun... The Cardinals won 11 to 1, with home runs from Rolen and Pujols and a grand slam from Chris Duncan. Emma seemed to especially enjoy all the fireworks. :-)

Movin' on up...

We've officially signed off on all the construction plans for the new store location. At this rate, there is still some (slim) chance we'll be moved in before our current lease runs out at the end of August.