Shawn Hogan Fan Club
What the hell??!? (blah, blah of a wannabe alien)
What the hell??!? (blah, blah of a wannabe alien)
Nov 9th
So this has been driving me mad since I installed Mac OS X 10.7… Any time Cacti tried to output a graph, it would output, but it was painfully slow (like 30 seconds)… prior to installing 10.7, it was a fraction of a second.
Anyway… long story short is apparently RRDtool pulls the list of fonts from the system, and since it was running as the _www user, it was unable to write a the font cache to disk to make future font access fast.
Logging in as root and running the “fc-list” command to get a list of installed fonts fixed the problem. The first time it ran it took 30 seconds (imagine that! heh), and subsequent times it was instant. And Cacti graphs are back to being instant. Hopefully this helps someone…
Aug 7th
Seagate is still not producing the hard drives I want for new servers in sufficient quantity, but they do seem to be actually producing them now. I’ve seen places where I can get 30 of them lately… but I need 72.
I’m assuming I’ll be able to get them relatively soon and have started to think about how I want to lay the servers out architecturally.
As far as hardware goes, gigabit ethernet just really isn’t that fast these days… Real world use has being able to pass about 80MB/sec (theoretical maximum is about 110MB/sec). When you have a cluster of servers passing massive amounts of data amongst themselves, 80MB/sec just doesn’t cut it. Which is why the servers have Infinband QDR (40Gbit interconnects), so they should be able to pass 3.5GB/sec (ish) between themselves.
For software/services, I’m thinking maybe 12 identical servers that are more or less service agnostic… with each server being a web server, MySQL Cluster data node and a MySQL Cluster SQL node. Then each server could probably be setup to handle 10,000 concurrent HTTP connections as well as 10,000 DB connections (1 per HTTP connection). With 12 servers, you could have the capacity of 120k concurrent web connections, 120k DB connections capable of doing millions of SQL queries/sec. If you need more capacity with anything, you could just bring online additional agnostic servers.
This of course is just in theory… who knows how it will test out in actual use, but it does seem like something worth testing at least.
Jul 23rd
I was going to buy a Nimitz class aircraft carrier today, but instead I bought lunch at Rubio’s.
And to be totally honest, I would rather have a burrito from Rubio’s even if an aircraft carrier was the same price.
I’m a saving machine… I just saved $4,500,000,000 and I didn’t even have to switch to GEICO!
Jul 21st
Is there some sort of Congressional entrance exam where you need to NOT be able to pass 1st grade math?
Watching the whole deficit stuff unravel is like watching kindergardeners argue about something they don’t understand.
So let’s forget for a second that the US has around $115 TRILLION in unfunded liabilities, and just focus on a much “smaller” amount… the US debt is currently around $14.5 TRILLION.
Now the latest plan for debt reduction goes something like this… “We will only borrow and extra $800,000,000,000 per year instead of $1,200,000,000,000.” And it’s being billed as “saving $3 trillion over the next 10 years”. Last time I saved money, it was money I DIDN’T spend at all.
Let’s say I have $10,000 to my name, and I wanted to buy a new phone for $176,400 (the price of a Princess Plus iPhone)…

It’s $166,400 more than I can afford, so I decide to take out a loan for it. I decide that I’m going to instead get the less expensive version for $66,150 (less quality diamonds), so I only need a loan for $56,150.
I don’t know much about math, but I DO know that I’m amazing… I only had $10,000 to my name, yet I was able to save $110,250! If I do this every year for 10 years, I can save $1,102,500.
I’m a FUCKING GENIUS… I just solved my lifelong debt problem! The amount of money I can save is limitless.
Jun 5th
I had a switch that “lost” it’s operating system and was stuck in a reboot loop. Long story short is I needed to upload the OS via a direct serial connection to fix it. I didn’t have a Windows machine available, so I used my Mac and a Keyspan USA-19 (USB -> DB9) thingie (heh). This is mostly a note for myself in case I need to ever do it again, and I forget.
Things that did not work…
What DID work (thank God because I was running out of options)…
It was infinitely faster than ZTerm (about 15 minutes vs. 3.5 hours), but more importantly it actually WORKED.
May 28th
Amazing that it’s been half a decade now since we got the new blade servers that we are running on (got them in June of 2006).
Sadly, 12GB in a server just isn’t what it used to be and the database servers are really starting to feel strained as they beg for more memory. Handling ~25GB of databases on servers with 12GB is just no bueno. I thought of upgrading the RAM in the blades, but the maximum RAM the BIOS supports is 16GB, and all the DIMM slots are in-use… so it more or less would mean tossing all the existing RAM and buying 160GB of new RAM. In the end spending that much money to gain 4GB per server isn’t really worth it (especially since 16GB wouldn’t really be enough either).
I started to do a little research on what would be some good options for upgrades… I think I want to stay away from blades simply because we did have the daughter card in the chassis fail once which took down all 10 blades (the daughter card controls the power buttons). Buying 2 complete sets of blades/chassis is overkill just so you have stuff still up if one complete chassis goes down. The “must haves” on my list are hot swappable drives with hardware RAID, hot swappable redundant power supply, some sort of 10Gbit/sec (or higher) connectivity for communicating between servers. On top of it all, the servers need to be generally “dense” (I don’t want to take an entire rack of space).
The Dell C6100 actually looked really nice at first glace…
The age factor really becomes an issue when it comes to the disk drives… you can get 15k rpm drives in a 2.5″ form factor, but Dell only offers 146GB models (there are 300GB models now). The CPU isn’t really too bad… Dell’s fastest offering is the Xeon X5670… 2.93Ghz, 6 core @95 watts (wattage is important because of so much stuff crammed in there). There is a slightly faster 95 watt, 6 core processor these days… the Xeon X5675… the same thing basically, just 3.06Ghz. 0.13Ghz speed difference isn’t a huge deal… but the hard drive difference is a big deal.
I started to think… well maybe I could just order it stripped down and then I could just replace the CPU/hard drives with better stuff. Doing that, you still end up spending about $60,000 because you end up with 8 Xeon processors (valued at about $1,500 each that you just are going to throw away).
Then I started to think harder… Wait a minute… Dell doesn’t even make their own motherboards (at least I don’t think so)… so maybe I could find the source of these super dense motherboards and build my own systems (or just find the source of something similar… which ended up being the case).

What do we have here??? The Supermicro SuperServer 2026TT-H6IBQRF is more or less the same thing… 4 servers per 2U, hot swap hard drives, same BIOS/chip/controllers… supports the same Xeon processor family (up to 95 watts)… And as a bonus, Infiniband QDR is built in (it’s a $2,596 add-on for the Dell server) as well as an LSI MegaRAID hardware RAID card (a $2,156 add-on for the Dell server).
So let’s add up the cost to build one of these things with the CPU/hard drives I actually would WANT…
$30,761.88 would be the total cost (a savings of $24,138.82) and in the end you get slightly faster CPUs and *way* better hard drives. So in a single 2U package, you end up with 48 Xeon cores at 3.06Ghz, 384GB of 1333Mhz memory, 14.4TB of drive space (9.6TB usable after it’s configured as double redundant parity striping with RAID-6… which should be able to do more than 750MB/sec read/write). 8 gigabit ethernet ports and 4 Infiniband QDR (40Gbit) I/O.
Get 2 or 3 of those rigs, and you have some nasty (in a good way) servers that would be gloriously fun to run MySQL Cluster, web servers and whatever else you want.
May 2nd
So I was in a situation where I want to upgrade the operating system on 10 blade servers that are in a data center. The problem is I really didn’t want to sit there and install the new operating systems on each one by one. The other issue is the servers don’t have CD/DVD drives in them since are blades.
I have a couple older Xserve G5s in the facility, so I figured why not use them as network boot servers for the Linux machines? By default OS X Server has a service for NetBoot (which is not the same thing and can really only be used to boot other Mac machines). But Mac OS X Server also has all the underlying services already installed to make it able to be a server for PXE booting from normal Intel BIOS.
So what network services do we need exactly (at least for how I did it)? DHCP, NFS, TFTP and optionally Web if you do an auto-install like I did.
This was written up in about 5 minutes mostly so I wouldn’t forget what I did in case I needed to do it again. Some assumptions are made like you aren’t completely new to Linux/Mac OS X administration. You can also have pxelinux boot to a operating system selection menu and some other things, but for what *I* wanted to do, I didn’t care about being able to boot into multiple operating systems/modes.
Mac OS X Server makes it really simple to get DHCP, NFS and Web servers online since the normal Server Admin has a GUI for each.

Mac OS X has a TFTP server installed by default, but there it’s not running by default and has no GUI. You can of course enable/configure it from the shell, but just to make things simple, there is a free app you can download that will make configuring and starting the TFTP service simple (the app is just a configuration utility, so it does not need to run once you are finished, so adds no overhead). You can grab the app over here.

I was installing openSUSE 11.4, so that is what my example revolves around… most Linux installations should be similar, if not identical. First, make sure you have syslinux, which you probably already have since most Linux distributions install it by default.
Copy /usr/share/syslinux/pxelinux.0 to your Mac OS X TFTP Server: /private/tftpboot/pxelinux.0
Create a directory on your Mac OS X Server: /private/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg, and then create a file named default within that folder with the following:
Obviously change the IP address to your Mac OS X Server IP address. The autoyast part is optional and only needed if you have an auto-configuration file for YaST.
Now we want to grab two files from the installation DVD/.iso so we have the “real” kernel.
Copy /boot/x86_64/loader/linux from the installation DVD to your Mac OS X TFTP Server: /private/tftpboot/osuse11-4.krnl (notice the file rename)
Copy /boot/x86_64/loader/initrd from the installation DVD to your Mac OS X TFTP Server: /private/tftpboot/osuse11-4.ird (notice the file rename here too)
There is not a GUI for adding special options to the DHCP server, but it’s easy enough to add them manually. Just edit the /etc/bootpd.plist file, and add two keys/values to it (option 150 is the IP address of your TFTP server, option 67 is the kernel file name the TFTP server is serving):

Edit your /etc/exports file, and add the following line to it:
/images/opensuse10-4 -ro
Then just copy the contents of the entire installation DVD to /images/opensuse10-4. You can of course just do a symlink or something if you want.
Hopefully if all goes well, you should see something along the lines of this when you choose to network boot a machine (for purposes of this video, I did it in a virtualized environment of Parallels so I didn’t need to boot any running servers):
Mar 15th
So I heard that AT&T is going to start putting monthly usage caps on it’s Internet users (which is me), so it got me thinking about how much I actually pay for AT&T services…
I have AT&T fiber to my house (actual fiber to the premise), so I use U-verse for TV and Internet in my house, so it’s break this down (I’m not including any on-time costs or fees/taxes)…
Television
I pay $138/month for TV (includes set top box rentals). I only watch MAYBE 8 hours of TV per month, but it’s nice to have it when you actually want to watch it. So I pay AT&T $17.25/hour to watch TV.
Cell Phone
I pay $159.99/month for 2 cell phones. Last month I used 17 minutes (which is actually more than normal). So I pay AT&T $9.41/minute for cell phone service. Oh yeah, I also paid them $125 for a MicroCell because their service is so crappy.
Internet
I pay $55/month for Internet because I can only get 18Mbit to my house (remember… I have AT&T fiber straight into my house). I’d like to pay for the $65/month plan to give me 24Mbit, but you know… it’s hard to get more bandwidth out of fiber I guess. I really wish Verizon would buy AT&T’s fiber to my house so I could get FiOS (they offer 150Mbit down/35Mbit up already and I heard they are testing 1Gbit up/down). Meanwhile I’ll be stuck at DSL speeds with my fiber. Sweet.
Mobile Internet
Now if I want a 3G connected iPad, that would be another $25/month (and I would rarely use it… so probably would be about $25/hour).
If I want tethering enabled on one of my phones, that’s another $20… even though I already pay for an unlimited data plan on that phone. lol
It would be nice if I could just pay $10/hour to use whatever I want… TV, cell phone, cell phone tethering, iPad connectivity, etc.
Mar 6th
Here’s an interesting exercise… Let’s take the first two paragraphs from Wikipedia about a Ponzi scheme…
Now let’s swap a couple words here…
Mar 3rd
I was building a website for Digital Point Ads, and for what I wanted it to do, I figured Flash would be the way to go. So it was built, and worked fine in Flash.
The problem is that I’m an anal perfectionist and the Flash object was eating 80-90% of a computer’s CPU when being viewed… and me being me, I couldn’t just be okay with that.
…so I rebuilt it with CSS3/HTML5/jQuery. It turned out much nicer in my opinion, only uses about 1% of the resources that Flash needed and as an unintentional bonus, it works on things like iPad and phones/computers without Flash support.
I’m not anti-Flash (as I said, I *wanted* to do the site with Flash), but I AM anti-inefficient. There are still some things you can’t do with HTML5 that you can do with Flash, but those things are becoming fewer and fewer it seems.
Nov 16th
So I figured it was about time to update WordPress. Went from WordPress 1.5 (haha!) to the latest (WordPress 3.0.1). I gotta say it’s quite a bit nicer now.
Nov 9th
This kid might not be the brightest human to ever walk the face of the planet, but his unintentional comic relief if priceless.
Oct 31st
So I think I decided what I want for Christmas… A Scubacraft (I saw it in Wired magazine).
It’s basically a boat that you can hit a button, and it will go underwater (up to 100 feet). It would be pretty awesome to go scuba diving and instead of leaving your boat at the surface, just take it under water with you when you get to the dive site.
It’s not pressurized, so it’s not a submarine (you would still need scuba gear of course).
It also has an onboard computer that controls your ascent and descent so you don’t go to quickly and give yourself the bends.
I love you, Santa!


Oct 14th
It seems Google has quietly raised it’s limitations on how deep you can look into search results for the AJAX Search API. It’s always been 4 pages (8 results per page), so you could only see the first 32 results.
All of a sudden it was changes to 8 pages (still 8 results per page), so now you can look at the first 64 results. This is quite handy.
Thanks Google, you’re swell!
Oct 6th
Someone I know uses iPhoto, but the Faces part of it wasn’t working. New pictures wouldn’t get scanned for faces and the spinning icon next to the Faces label on the navigation bar would just spin forever (and apparently it’s always been stuck like that).
I Googled the issue, and came up with hundreds of people having the same problem, but no one seemed to figure out a solution.
After a lot of digging and poking around, I think I found the solution. She imported large folders into iPhoto from her old photo management application, and she had some movies in her photo folders. So this is how I fixed it…
Warning… this will delete all your face tags you had previously (so don’t do it if you tagged a bunch of people manually and don’t want to lose that).
Oct 6th
I haven’t posted a random email in awhile, so here’s a new one…
I am Mr Mark Jo—-, I will like to make reservation for 6 people that will be coming for vacation in your area on the 20th November to 30th November 2009.
If you have vacancy for the specified period, give me the total cost for the whole period of 10 nights, with either 6 single rooms or 3 double rooms for 6 guests.
Number of Persons: 6
Mr & Mrs Alb—-{37 and 33yrs}
Mr & Mrs Ben—-{40 and 36yrs}
Mr & Mrs Ari—-{44 and 38yrs}
Arrival date: 20th November 2009
Departure date : 30th November 2009.
Number of days: 10 days
Number of Guest: 6,
Confirm availability and get back to me with your rates and total cost and if you will accept major credit card for your payment and convert the total price to British Pounds or Euro.
Thank you and looking forward to hear from you soon.
Regards,
Mark
I’m open to suggestions on how much I should charge these guys to stay at my home… let me know.
Oct 5th
So I’d like to put together a newscast… I want this guy to be my weatherman, and the guy from the previous blog entry needs to be my field reporter.
Sep 26th
The more you watch this, the funnier it gets… watch it ten times. hahaha
Sep 14th
So I found a draft post for this blog from about 3 years ago that I forgot to post (oops). Better late than never, right?
Sep 12th
The first Monday Night Football of the season, and it’s the Chargers vs. the Raiders. lol
The Chargers play the Raiders twice a year (being in the same division and all), and the Raiders haven’t won since 2002. So uh… yeah… If you are a Raiders fan, good luck on Monday.
Aug 30th
So the fruitloop that kidnapped an 11 year old girl, held her captive in his backyard shed for 18 years while she bore 2 of his children has a blog.
http://voicesrevealed.blogspot.com/
So here’s the deal… Google is really good at determining relevancy of a webpage and what a webpage is about. Maybe they should modify their algorithms a bit to detect crazy people automatically.
Aug 24th
Proof that you should have to take some sort of IQ test before having a Facebook account.


Aug 14th
I know Alexa data isn’t terribly accurate, but for sites under an Alexa rating of 500 *and* within the same market, it’s pretty accurate as far as relative traffic to sites you are comparing. That being said, how long do you think before they sell it or shut it down?
Their traffic is almost cut in half from a year ago (and still dropping)…

Jul 31st
Here’s some wise words for you based on an experience I had last night. If it’s 2am and you are getting ready to go to bed, maybe don’t drink two Red Bull cola drinks.
Someone was telling me about them the other day and I was like, “gee, okay… I guess I’ll try it to see what it’s like.”
Also, for the record, it’s not very good. Tastes like they just mixed Red Bull and Coke 50/50.
Jul 29th
Well actually, I’m not exactly sure how because I have Twitter followers since I don’t have a Twitter account, but apparently I have have a couple Twitter accounts…
http://twitter.com/digitalpoint/ – 1,127 followers
http://twitter.com/shawnhogan/ – 63 followers
Stupid, but funny. lol
Jul 24th
Okay, gonna go ahead and upgrade the Digital Point Forums to vBulletin 3.8.3… Since so many of you are freaks and are on it 24/7, I made this post to keep you up to date on what’s going on (I’ll update it periodically throughout the process). You can also use this blog post as the new temporary forum for all your discussion needs while I do the upgrade. hah

Jul 23rd
So I’ve been waiting for this thing for awhile now, and it looks like Sony is finally going to be releasing it (even $400 cheaper than previously rumored). Yum, yum…
400 discs, serial control, Ethernet port for pulling meta data via Internet, etc… looks nice to me.

Jul 22nd
I gotta say, iMovie HD is really nice for hacking together quick videos with pretty decent quality. I threw together this video for a friend real quick for her company. Oh darn, I get to look at girls in bikinis while editing video. Sad day for me.
The original video I output was full 1920×1080 high def, but here’s the YouTube version…
Jul 21st
So I found myself wanting to override a few items in a sitewide CSS file, but only for a single page… Rather than make entire new CSS elements, I figured there had to be a way to override the CSS file with a <style> clause within the page itself…
Sure enough, I finally figured it out… !important…
[code=css]
[/code]
!important can go at the end of any style attribute and it will override anything that isn’t “important”.
Jul 19th
…well at least I assume so. I can’t imagine he would turn me down.
Dave, you have a Shawn Hogan category on your blog… marry me? <3 We can frolic in a sea of code and whatnot.
http://www.dellanave.com/blog/
If I have a pool party in San Diego, will you come?
Jul 18th
Okay, so I decided not to blog for 2+ years to see if the spam blocker thing I made would work, and sure enough it did… After 2+ years, not a single spam comment got through… I’d say that was pretty good, eh?
On a better note, I have 2 years of life to write about now… stay tuned…
Jul 18th
…so as I’m going through the {cough, cough} 2+ years of comments I never got around to moderating on this blog, I came across one that is freaking me out.
http://www.shawnhogan.com/2006/11/vampire-bite.html#comment-33317
Dr. Finch seems to think I have some gnarley spider bite that needs immediate doctor attention and my life is in danger.
I think he missed this part about this post… lol
Thank God is all I have to say… if it were otherwise, I might be the first person to die from not moderating their blog comments fast enough.
May 7th
I just now turned 1,000,000,000 seconds old. Happy birthday to me!!!!