This is sheer genious. While doing my usual browsing of photography resources, I stumbled across this. I always knew you could do some cool stuff with Lego, but these are just impressive.
Quite impressive… shame I don’t have quite the lego set I used to have.
I’m having one of those days. So much to do, but:
cat /dev/random > /dev/brain
I cannot seem to get my brain into gear… eugh
Having a little free time on my hand, well not really but I didn’t want to work, I decided to do an upgrade of WP to version 2. So far… so good…
Some of us really don’t have the money to buy high quality lighting equipment for photography, and if it is more of a hobby than a profession, then money is probably more of a limit. eBay is a good resource, you can find a handful on there for quite cheap, as long as you get the bids in right. Being ok with my hands, I thought I’d see how difficult it would be to build one.
Or maybe not. Yesterday we set a record high for winter at a freezing 82 (roughly 26 celcius). This beat the previous record set in 1997 of 78 (roughly 24 celcius). Along with this freezing weather we’re having, we’re under a grass firewatch, because I don’t think I’ve seen a drop of rain in about 2 weeks, and with the nice warm weather it’s dried everything out. Hooray for Texas.
Today is not that much better. It’s currently about 67 (about 18 celcius), nice weather to just take the day easy. Shame about all the work I have to do.
Just as a reminder of the severe winter weather we had a few weeks ago… Try this posting
I guess I’ve been using Gentoo now for just a little over a year. It’s quite nice in my opinion, and have multiple servers running it. I’ve not really had any issues with it until recently.
Gentoo uses a packaging system called Portage, it’s basically a bundle of files with details for the emerge programs to use for installing packages. Recently it’s become incredibly slow when updating the package listing. I generally ignored it, as I usually kick it off inside a screen session, and logoff.
Today I decided to quit ignoring it, and start investigating. I started with the Gentoo forums, and really didn’t have to go too far. It appears I’m not the only person having this issue. I stumbled across this thread which goes over various different possibilities in the delays, but they all seemed to agree that the cause was in the updating of the portage cache. After reading a few pages, I found this page which has an interesting suggestion on the second posting. The instructions basically go into telling rsync to ignore the KDE ebuild files. I tried, and sure enough, emerge --sync now takes a lot less time, and no longer hangs for me.
Only in Texas could an inch of snow be considered catastrophic, and inspire whole towns to buy the whole supply of bottled water… Okay, a little exaggeration, but we’re supposed to get a little cold weather over the next two days. Little cold being in the high 20s (roughly 28-32), with a 50% chance of rain/snow.
This news has brought Dallas into Chaos. Reports from my favourite radio station KDGE say that people have been out buying all the water from the local stores. Now Dallas weather history shows that in 2 days, it’ll be back to 80, and this will all be forgotten. So why is it people think it’s the end of the world? Other states have feet of snow before they start to have issues, this isn’t even likely to be an inch…
argh brain hurts!
After thinking something might be up with my camera, I was told by Nikon to send it in, with a few pictures, and the negatives for those pictures for review. So I decided to run a film through my camera quickly as I didn’t want to send off any of the pictures I had already taken. In the end, it looked like it might actually be the printers but we’ll have to see on the next roll of film.
As I am sitting here reviewing a project I have to do, I am trying to figure out why I have to write a project that is fairly complex because the tools available are limited due to the operating system.
The project goal is to synchronize two servers, or more specifically two directories containing over 100GB worth of images. The issue is, if they were next to each other, it’d probably be pretty easy with RoboCopy which is part of the Windows 2000 Support Toolkit. The problem is, one server is in Atlanta, GA, the other is in Mesa, AZ. Slightly far apart, in fact roughly 1,800 miles. The only option available is FTP.
So for the last few days I’ve been battling with our internal monitoring server. It’s running Zabbix on a Gentoo server and does quite well. As far as I could tell, it was checking fine. In fact I could see it updating results, however when I went to check graphs and what not, they all returned no data. This had me baffled.
I checked the server for space issues, certainly not a problem in this case:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/hda3 965M 56M 910M 6% / udev 490M 128K 490M 1% /dev /dev/hda8 45G 89M 45G 1% /home /dev/hda7 19G 1.6G 18G 9% /usr /dev/hda6 9.4G 112M 9.3G 2% /var /dev/hda5 495M 33M 462M 7% /tmp /dev/md/0 150G 232M 149G 1% /data shm 490M 0 490M 0% /dev/shm
I had setup MySQL to store the data on /data/mysql which was 3 80GB drives setup in a RAID5 configuration. Looking at the “Latest Data” tabs in Zabbix, it showed it was polling data just fine, but looking at the history graphs, nothing. I checked the MySQL logs, nothing in there to suggest a problem, and it seemed to be updating other tables just fine. So I decide to check the Zabbix server log files. To my surprise this error was there:
Query failed:The table 'history' is full [1114]
Table full? What? There is plenty of space, in fact nearly the whole drive, how could it be full? Good old google pointed me in a rough direction. There is a couple of bugs with temporary tables, and a couple when updating two tables at once, but this wasn’t the case for me, so I started searching about. I decided to look at the mysql configuration file /etc/mysql/my.cnf. I noticed an odd line:
innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:10M:autoextend:max:128M
Hang on…
pasiphae mysql # ls -lh ibdata1 -rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 128M Nov 9 12:13 ibdata1
Hey, the InnoDB has hit the maximum size. With a little more googling, I found this. Then all became clear. It appears the default installation from Gentoo puts the InnoDB tables at 128MB with an initial size of 10M which autoexpands until it hits the max. After some tinkering, I came up with the following to fix it:
innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:128M;ibdata2:50M:autoextend
Restarted mysql and zabbix, and watched my lovely graphs return. I’ve not set a cap on the expansion, though I should consider it, maybe 10G, so it doesn’t get too happy about space stealing.
My lesson for the day. Table Full is not the same as Disk Full :)