Living in SD has more perks than just beaches and tons of sunshine. It's also host to Comic-Con International, which is fastly becoming not on only the comic event of the year but also the entertainment event of the year. With major movie studios and TV networks premiering new and old shows it's a must for any fan of the genres. Even though they're spreading out a lot of the bigger events over the four days instead of loading up Saturday as they have in the past, I will only be attending Friday and Saturday. Luckily these two days encompass what I'm most interested in seeing:
Friday:
10:30am-Noon - Warner Bros
I'm pumped to see the first looks at the comic based Whiteout and Watchmen films
2:00pm-3:00pm - Spotlight on Neil Gaiman
One of my favourite writers, famous for Sandman and Neverwhere. Also wrote Mirrormask which is a weird but awesome Alice in Wonderland type film
4:00-5:30 - Vertigo: Looking over the Edge
DC's more "adult" line of comics, featuring Sandman, Fables, 100 Bullets, V for Vendetta, and Y the Last Man
Saturday:
10:45am-12:00pm - The Simpsons
Featuring Matt Groening and other production members on a panel
12:45pm-2:00pm - Heroes
Featuring a clip from the next season and many cast members (Including Hiro)
2:15pm-3:15pm - BattleStar Galactica
Panel on the final season with multiple cast members and producers
3:30pm-4:30pm - Penny-Arcade
One hour Q&A with Tycho and Gabe
4:15pm-5:00m - Marvel Studios
Debuts of the upcoming Hulk and Iron Man films, featuring Edward Norton, Robert Downy Jr, and Liv Tyler
5:30pm-7:00pm - Columbia Screen Gems
Featuring looks and discussion of Superbad, Resident Evil 3, and the awesome looking 30 Days of Night
Whew! These days are going to be packed! Unfortunately I probably won't make it to all of these, due to the lines that form before some of the bigger events, but there should be enough space in there to queue up before the ones I really want to make it to. Now I just need to make sure I pick up enough stuff on the floor to keep me busy while waiting.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Friday, July 20, 2007
Debian Software RAID Setup
The Problem
Over the past few years space on my server would increase based on the deals found on sites like Slickdeals. After some time this lead to a mishmash of two PATAs and one SATA at 120Gb, 160Gb, and 200Gb respectively on my personal media server. Glad as I was to have all this space it started to become disk management issue since I wanted the bulk of the space consolidated for media. Filling up one drive would require me to move data to another with more space, causing organization and software issues (NFS would not single export multiple mounts).
Remedy
Last week this all became moot when Fry's advertised a 500Gb SATAII Maxtor drive for 90$. My EPoX motherboard was capable for RAID-0 and RAID-1 so I figured it was time to upgrade to a terabyte and bought two.
The initial plan was to create a RAID-0 array (striping for performance), re-install Debian, copy all data, and remove the older drives for noise and heat reasons. With two of them PATA drives, they could stay in the system easily copy straight to the new array. The older SATA drive had the OS and I wanted to keep it around for config reference when I was re-setting up the server. Both of the SATA ports would be used for the new array, not allowing this SATA to remain in the system, this was solved by purchasing a Masscool PATA/SATA external USB enclosure and copying the data from there.
Issues
Once everything was hooked up I ran the RAID BIOS config, set the new SATAs for RAID-0, and booted up the Debian Netinst CD. Surprisingly the installer showed both 500Gb drives as /dev/sda and /dev/sdb, completely ignoring the BIOS set RAID array. After doing a bit of research online for the RAID chipset (VIA VT6420) I found that it wasn't capable for true hardware RAID and instead relied on drivers in the OS to function properly, aka "fakeraid". These drivers only really existed for Windows and not Linux. Eventually I did find ones for Linux, but they were binary only and didn't look too friendly.
I thought about using them, but then remembered that Linux can do software RAID. Having briefly heard about software RAID before I was suspicious until I read a few articles explaining it's virtues. After tracking down a how-to Software RAID for Debian before I knew it I had a software RAID-0 array running on /dev/md0. For screen shots check out this Ubuntu Server Install guide.
Debian Config
The biggest choice while running the install was which file system to us. I gave ext3 a try first, with formatted space coming up to around 870Gb. XFS came out to 932Gb which was better, but after reading XFS's disadvantages (no journaling for data blocks) I decided it wasn't the best choice. JFS was last, which I was running on one of the drives I was replacing. It had worked flawlessly for the past couple of years, proving itself in the type of setup I would use. Overall JFS was the best option, giving a total of 932Gb of formatted space, For comparisons sake, a friend with the same setup ended up with 840Gb using NTFS on Windows.
I started the OS install, designating the entire drive as /, but hit a bump when it came to installing GRUB, which said it couldn't install to the MBR. I tried a few partition schemes to no avail, getting "unable to create partition" messages for everything, including swap. After a bit of frustration I split the OS and data onto separate drives; a spare 80Gb PATA for the OS and the RAID for data. I created a basic partition scheme (600Mb for /boot, 70Gb for /, and 5Gb for swap) on the OS drive and then mounted the RAID on /home, since this is where the bulk of the data would go anyway.
Results
Debian finished the install without a hitch and soon I was booting into my new clean system. A few cp -pfr and hours later I had successfully moved my server to the new drive and array. Below are some technical details:
Conclusion
Overall Linux's software RAID capabilities are impressive, not only can it do 0 and 1, but when re-compiling the kernel it has just as may options, if not more, than a traditional hardware card. Performance is outstanding, without being limited by the RAID hardware it mostly depends on bus and CPU speed, which are easier to upgrade than a RAID card. After this experience with software RAID I would not only recommenced it for personal use but enterprise also, proving itself in configuration, ease of use, and performance.
Over the past few years space on my server would increase based on the deals found on sites like Slickdeals. After some time this lead to a mishmash of two PATAs and one SATA at 120Gb, 160Gb, and 200Gb respectively on my personal media server. Glad as I was to have all this space it started to become disk management issue since I wanted the bulk of the space consolidated for media. Filling up one drive would require me to move data to another with more space, causing organization and software issues (NFS would not single export multiple mounts).
Remedy
Last week this all became moot when Fry's advertised a 500Gb SATAII Maxtor drive for 90$. My EPoX motherboard was capable for RAID-0 and RAID-1 so I figured it was time to upgrade to a terabyte and bought two.
The initial plan was to create a RAID-0 array (striping for performance), re-install Debian, copy all data, and remove the older drives for noise and heat reasons. With two of them PATA drives, they could stay in the system easily copy straight to the new array. The older SATA drive had the OS and I wanted to keep it around for config reference when I was re-setting up the server. Both of the SATA ports would be used for the new array, not allowing this SATA to remain in the system, this was solved by purchasing a Masscool PATA/SATA external USB enclosure and copying the data from there.
Issues
Once everything was hooked up I ran the RAID BIOS config, set the new SATAs for RAID-0, and booted up the Debian Netinst CD. Surprisingly the installer showed both 500Gb drives as /dev/sda and /dev/sdb, completely ignoring the BIOS set RAID array. After doing a bit of research online for the RAID chipset (VIA VT6420) I found that it wasn't capable for true hardware RAID and instead relied on drivers in the OS to function properly, aka "fakeraid". These drivers only really existed for Windows and not Linux. Eventually I did find ones for Linux, but they were binary only and didn't look too friendly.
I thought about using them, but then remembered that Linux can do software RAID. Having briefly heard about software RAID before I was suspicious until I read a few articles explaining it's virtues. After tracking down a how-to Software RAID for Debian before I knew it I had a software RAID-0 array running on /dev/md0. For screen shots check out this Ubuntu Server Install guide.
Debian Config
The biggest choice while running the install was which file system to us. I gave ext3 a try first, with formatted space coming up to around 870Gb. XFS came out to 932Gb which was better, but after reading XFS's disadvantages (no journaling for data blocks) I decided it wasn't the best choice. JFS was last, which I was running on one of the drives I was replacing. It had worked flawlessly for the past couple of years, proving itself in the type of setup I would use. Overall JFS was the best option, giving a total of 932Gb of formatted space, For comparisons sake, a friend with the same setup ended up with 840Gb using NTFS on Windows.
I started the OS install, designating the entire drive as /, but hit a bump when it came to installing GRUB, which said it couldn't install to the MBR. I tried a few partition schemes to no avail, getting "unable to create partition" messages for everything, including swap. After a bit of frustration I split the OS and data onto separate drives; a spare 80Gb PATA for the OS and the RAID for data. I created a basic partition scheme (600Mb for /boot, 70Gb for /, and 5Gb for swap) on the OS drive and then mounted the RAID on /home, since this is where the bulk of the data would go anyway.
Results
Debian finished the install without a hitch and soon I was booting into my new clean system. A few cp -pfr and hours later I had successfully moved my server to the new drive and array. Below are some technical details:
micheal@jezebel:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3 70G 4.5G 62G 7% /
tmpfs 502M 0 502M 0% /lib/init/rw
udev 10M 60K 10M 1% /dev
tmpfs 502M 0 502M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda1 564M 37M 499M 7% /boot
/dev/md0 932G 385G 547G 42% /home
micheal@jezebel:~$ cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid0]
md0 : active raid0 sda1[0] sdb1[1]
976767872 blocks 64k chunks
unused devices: none
micheal@jezebel:~$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/md0Particularly impressive are results of 147 MB/sec on hdparm, which is leagues beyond the 60MB/sec seen on the original SATA drive. A few config changes over the next few days and the server was up and running normally.
/dev/md0:
Timing cached reads: 1210 MB in 2.00 seconds = 604.80 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 442 MB in 3.01 seconds = 147.07 MB/sec
Conclusion
Overall Linux's software RAID capabilities are impressive, not only can it do 0 and 1, but when re-compiling the kernel it has just as may options, if not more, than a traditional hardware card. Performance is outstanding, without being limited by the RAID hardware it mostly depends on bus and CPU speed, which are easier to upgrade than a RAID card. After this experience with software RAID I would not only recommenced it for personal use but enterprise also, proving itself in configuration, ease of use, and performance.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Quick GMail Note Trick
Been a while since my last post, but I'm planning to start writing some more. To start off with I wanted to share a little trick I've been using with Gmail for the past week.
Whenever I want to note an interesting page I usually use del.icio.us to tag it and keep it around. However, I'm always writing little notes to myself with what I did to get this or that working, and del.icio.us isn't really designed for that task. Instead I write myself emails, and make sure they're seeded with keywords so when I need to search for them they come up. I could use Google Notebook for this, but I find it easier to shoot off an email instead. The trick I started using is the google +addresssing feature. Normally it's used for creating a spam address, but I found adding a +notes and then creating a filter to label it as a note and remove it from the inbox is a fast and easy way to keep them all organized.
Whenever I want to note an interesting page I usually use del.icio.us to tag it and keep it around. However, I'm always writing little notes to myself with what I did to get this or that working, and del.icio.us isn't really designed for that task. Instead I write myself emails, and make sure they're seeded with keywords so when I need to search for them they come up. I could use Google Notebook for this, but I find it easier to shoot off an email instead. The trick I started using is the google +addresssing feature. Normally it's used for creating a spam address, but I found adding a +notes and then creating a filter to label it as a note and remove it from the inbox is a fast and easy way to keep them all organized.
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