Sean's Blog

It was about a year ago that I bought a used ThinkPad off eBay, and with that, I started to think my Mac days were nearing an end. The hardware is still top-notch, but I had serious questions about their commitment to OS X, as well as whether or not the changes to the OS were positive ones (or just attempts to turn it into an iOS clone, which is not a compliment).

With my MacBook Pro nearing 4 years old, it had started feeling a little slow (mostly owing to its hard disk, honestly), and I had never really used it as a laptop anyway, so I started considering my options. In the end, I was between a brand-new ThinkPad T420S and a 13” MacBook Air (in both cases with a SSD—having one in my computer at work has spoiled me). As tempted as I was to go with the ThinkPad, I’m trying out a MacBook Air instead.

And so far, so good. The ThinkPad I have is great for a lot of things, but it’s a tad too small to be a primary computer. My MBP is just a bit too big. The 13” MBA (with the same resolution as my 15” MBP) is just about perfect. I didn’t opt for the i7 option, but the i5 is plenty fast enough, particularly in conjunction with the SSD.

Lion is a bit of a change, and I’ve gone through and reverted just about everything I can do the Leopard/Tiger way (scrolling direction/bars, Dashboard, Exposé, 2D dock, etc.). The under-the-hood improvements since Tiger have generally been great, but the UI changes have been mostly shit, in my book. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again here—on the OS front, Apple’s lead over Microsoft is marginal at best, and their attitude towards perfection in consistency is rapidly disappearing.

But all in all, it’s still phenomenal hardware, and the OS—once its default flaws are fixed—is still just a little nicer than Windows Vista/7. Plus, I’m a UNIX geek at heart, and I love having a bash shell just a Terminal click away (yeah, yeah, yeah… I know all about Cygwin. It’s not the same.).

RSA hasn’t gotten a whole lot of great publicity in the past year, and rightfully so. However, the old SecurID appliances (the ones with LCDs on the front panel) are pretty nice and recyclable systems. I’m specifically referring to the ones where RSA sourced the boxes from Celestix. They’re pretty much standard x86-based servers that don’t consume a whole lot of power, and can run any OS you want without much trouble.

We replaced our RSA boxes at work earlier this year, and we were getting ready to throw two of the old ones away. So naturally, I adopted them and brought them home. One of them has already replaced an ancient Gateway (366 MHz Celeron) box, and the other (with 4 NICs on-board) is poised to replace my little ALIX firewall (hardware-wise, it’s very much like the step between an ASA 5505 and a 5520).

If only the driver/controller software for the front-panel LCD were available (source code or otherwise), I’d have them saying “PC LOAD LETTER” in no time.

If he had been Father Sandusky, I’m guessing he would’ve had at least another 20 or 30 years before anything was done about it.

(Source: amplexushoc)

1. Could you please stop using triple square screws/fasteners all over the place? They’re a pain in the ass to work with, and difficult to find bits for. Tell your German friends too, please.

2. If you are going to continue to use triple square screws/fasteners, could you please not use friggin’ gorillas to tighten them up? When a caliper carrier is held in place by two 14mm triple square screws that are supposed to be torqued to 90 N-m, I should be able to easily break them free with a 18” breaker bar. And even if the breaker bar weren’t enough, PB Blaster and a rubber mallet should have been. But no, you just had to tighten the shit out of these things. Stop that shit!

3. If you are going to tighten the shit out of these screws, could you at least not put them in spots where it’s nearly impossible to get a bit and breaker bar on them? You know, the little things, like not putting the shocks, the springs, and the brake lines in just about every position you could get a breaker bar, or even a socket wrench in there?

4. Lastly, if you’re going to put nifty electronic sensors on the car to tell you when the pads are nearly worn completely, would you consider putting them on the axle that wears the fastest? It used to be the front, but these days, it seems to be the rear. Move the sensor there then.

It took me 15 minutes to jack up the car, pull the wheel, remove the caliper, and put new pads in. I spent hours (before loading up with new pads) trying to get the two 14mm triple square bolts off, so that I could pull the rotors. Ridiculous.

I love my GTI, but it really can be a pain in the ass to work on (which is probably true of most modern cars, to be perfectly fair, but still).

We’re building out a few new datacenters at work now, and before I can get a start on the Linux infrastructure, we’ve been working on the core infrastructure (network and SAN). We’re fortunate in that we’re able to use some of the latest-and-greatest technologies, including some nice new 10GigE switches that support FCoE, along with necessary CNAs (converged network adapters).

What makes these really cool is your NICs and HBAs are now one in the same. For a given level of redundancy and bandwidth, your port count is cut in half. And with these fancy Twinax cables/transceivers you can get, you don’t need to use fiber to leverage these benefits.

Of course, nothing’s perfect. I haven’t been working on the networking side of things too much, but it looks like it’s been quite a pain to architect the design of what will be a truly converged network, with a pair of switches providing redundant network and fabric connectivity to the SAN (requiring things like VPCs, etc.).

Among the things I’ve noticed is the difficulty of getting the NIC side of the CNA bonded on Linux. Let’s say you configure a switch from a certain vendor whose name rhymes with Crisco such that you have “channel-group XXX mode on” for each port. Great. You can boot from SAN just fine, and all the stuff on the FC side works just fine. But no networking. OK, you figure. Let’s try “channel-group XXX mode active” on each switch port, and then configure LACP on each host. Yeah, don’t do that. It’ll get networking going, but it’ll break FCoE connectivity, which especially sucks when your OS volume(s) are stored on the SAN.

As best as I can figure it, no CNA on the market today (and perhaps the FCoE standard itself) allows for LACP to be configured at the adapter level. Naturally, my first thought was to try active/passive bonding at the Linux level instead, but that didn’t work. Inexplicably, a vendor suggested we try XOR load balancing (mode=3 when you load the bonding module), and that managed to get things working.

As nice as it is to cut your necessary port count in half, it’s kind of scary when you’re putting everything (network and storage) in one bucket. Especially when the documentation hasn’t quite caught up to the technology.