/devices/pseudo/bitbucket@0,0:pseudo (Posts about Status)

A collection of laziness

jmcp — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT

In preparation for my trip to Wellington next week, to present at the Multicore World 2013 conference, I’ve been building up a new vbox instance on my laptop.

To my great annoyance, I have to run Microsoft Windows 7 (x64) on my laptop, for three reasons: $EMPLOYER uses Cisco IP Communicator as a VoIP solution (no Solaris version), when I travel OS I call J and the kids every day using skype video calling, and the Intel HD graphics support in Xorg on Solaris is somewhat flaky.

So I run Solaris inside vbox, in seamless mode, and do all my coding and sysadminning tasks using Proper Editors(tm) and other interfaces.

Here’s the first bit of laziness: installations.

Two weeks ago I took delivery of a new workstation (a Lenovo M82, which promptly received a memory, disk and graphics upgrade) to replace the aging, hot and noisy Ultra40 M2 I’ve had since 2007. I downloaded the latest (at that point) USB live image from the internal site and happily booted + installed what I needed to… before remembering that the installer blats over any existing disk partitioning you’ve got. That was rather annoying, since I like to use raw slices for swap and dump devices (an old habit) rather than zvols. In order to keep my existing configurations, I cheated. Just a little (ok, rather a lot).

Technically, I should have setup an AI server and gone through my list of installed packages and made sure that I had them listed, blah blah blah. However, what I chose to do was zfs snap my current BE, boot the new box using the liveusb image (with livessh mode enabled), create my desired rpool config, then zfs send|zfs recv the snapshot… and mount the snapshot, make appropriate edits, install the bootloader and then reboot.

Simple!

It took about 25 minutes to transfer the snapshot from the Ultra 40 M2 to the Lenovo M82 (I’ve got a 16 port cheap-o gigE switch to connect the home systems), and about another 5 to go through the specific changes I needed in /etc (apart from those for svc:/system/identity:node and svc:/system/identity:domain. Installing the bootloader (grub2) was easy, but I had a weird problem getting the new system’s boot menu figured out. I ended up needing to remove /etc/zfs/zpool.cache and then recreating it (by running zpool status; zpool list would have done just as well). The SMF changes were done while I had the liveusb stick booted. To do this, after importing the new rpool I uttered

# svccfg
svc:>  repository /mnt/etc/svc/repository.db

and then selected the services I needed and edited them.

Prior to getting this Lenovo, I’d been using a non-global zone in the Ultra 40 M2 to serve out my webserver and handle mail. Part of this reconfiguration involved getting a miniSAS-connected jbod (from Other World Computing, shipped via Borderlinx) and physically moving my media and scratch pool disks into it. Then I attached the jbod to my Ultra 20 M2, and I just had to bring that up to date. So I snap’d the zone BE on the Ultra 40 M2, and send|recv’d it to the rpool on the Ultra 20 M2 – same liveusb+livessh sneakiness, same svccfg activities … and all done in under 30 minutes.

The longest part of the physical downtime was swapping the screws on the disk caddies when I removed them from the Ultra 40 M2 and inserted them into the jbod.

The second bit of laziness is not really laziness. I had a filesystem on the old box which I wanted to transfer to the new, and tried using rsync to move it. I’m a big fan of rsync, it does its job pretty well… mostly. However, this time it just wasn’t performing at all. I had about 8Gb to transfer, and after 30 minutes not only had I only seen 1.5Gb go across the wire, but trying to do any interactive work on the console of the other box was impossible. And I do mean, impossible – I got no response to keystrokes unless I paused the rsync. Then, having kicked myself because I really did just want the filesystem which happened to be on its own dataset, I snap’d it and kicked off a zfs send | zfs recv. All data then completely transferred in about 12 minutes. And with interactive performance going very nicely as well.

Now for the final bit of laziness:

Cut to yesterday, when I remembered that I really should get a new Vbox instance cons’d up on the laptop in preparation for my trips (I’ve got WLG next week, and SCA in mid-March). I still had the build 13 liveusb stick image, and I just could not be bothered downloading the equivalent ISO image so that I could boot the vbox with it. Running strings on an older Solaris 11 update 1 ISO showed the mkisofs command line that Release Engineering used to create it. So, I figured I would copy their example.

Firstly, I needed to mount the USB image in the filesystem:

# lofiadm -a /path/to/liveusb.img
/dev/lofi/1
# fstyp /dev/lofi/1
ufs
# mount -F ufs -o rw /dev/lofi/1 /mnt

Great… UFS. Ugh. Now to create a bootable ISO from it:

# mkisofs -v -R -J -o /tmp/bootable.iso -c .catalog -b boot/bios.img -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 \
    -boot-info-table -eltorito-platform efi -eltorito-alt-boot -b boot/uefi.img -no-emul-boot \
    -N -l -R -U -allow-multidot -no-iso-translate -cache-inodes -d -D  /mnt

This commandline gave me exactly what I needed, so I moved the resulting ISO image across to the fileserver, fired up VirtualBox on the laptop and attached the image to my new vbox instance, and started installing.

Easy (and rather quick, too).

Some shuffling of deckchairs

jmcp — Sat, 16 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve moved off the homeunix.com subdomain I’ve been using for the past few years. It seems that not only did I not read the email from DynDNS.org in June 2010, but that requesting an AAAA record for jmcp.homeunix.com was sufficient of a change to take that subdomain out of the grandfathered list and also turn off domain wildcarding.

Boo.

I figured that I might as well go for a proper vanity domain, so here it is: jmcpdotcom.com.

I think I’ve fixed up most of the links in various posts, but if you find one that’s still pointed incorrectly I’d appreciate a comment or email to advise.

Today I brought her home

jmcp — Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

We’ve had a very relaxed day and enjoyed homemade pizza for dinner. It’s scary just how much muscle tone she’s lost after 17 days in hospital; I don’t know how long it’ll take to get that back but hopefully our stairs will help. The kids are very, very glad to have mum home. I’m pretty darned happy to have J home too.

While she’s going to be fatigued for quite a while, I think (and hope) she will improve faster than she was doing in hospital – being able to get fresh air and have home cooking should help.

She’ll go back to see the neurologist in a fortnight, and will get another MRI around then too. Medication-wise she’ll be carefully dropping down her doses over the next month. Reading through the radiologist’s report from the most recent scan, there was significant oedema around the tumour, it appears to have swollen somewhat (5-10% in volume, a bit difficult to determine), and also appears to have started pressing on one of her ventricles. No wonder she wasn’t feeling well

I’m just glad she’s well enough to get out of hospital and come home. The optic nerve inflammation appears to have gone though there’s still some nystagmus going on, and while she’s still a bit dizzy, it’s not close to the level it was at pre-admission. At least now she’s home we can establish some sort of normal-for-us and work on improving things like quality of life. I recall, too, that she finds baking therapeutic.

Incremental improvements

jmcp — Fri, 04 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

It’s been a few days since my last update on J’s state, I’ve been a little slack because she’s back online herself and been updating her blog.

She’s having alternating good days and bad days. Good days seem to occur when she’s had a good night’s sleep (even it that sleep came via a pill), and the bad days are after a rotten night, or too much boisterousness from the kids when we visit. I’m appreciating that the good days are genuinely good, but more importantly, the bad days are getting less bad.

I’m hopeful (with grounds, this time) that she might be home on Sunday. However as with all the other days when we got hopeful, we’re not making assumptions.

Sunday evening update: J won’t be home in a hurry

jmcp — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I was in the middle of composing this last night when C woke up crying after a bad dream. She’d possibly just overheated – new flanny PJs.

Sunday morning revealed a slightly better night – not only did I get to bed earlier, but A was only awake and unsettled for 1h30 (and only screaming for about an hour of that). I eventually brought him into bed and he fell asleep again. C’s been sleeping in our bed for the last few nights – seems to help provide some stability for her, and we all woke up around 8am.

When we eventually got to J’s room in the afternoon, the ENT surgeon was doing his rounds and showed her the test for BPV. It was pretty easy to tell that she doesn’t have it – for which I think I’m grateful, even though that means her doctors still don’t really know what the heck is going on with her. It appears that the MRI done nearly 2 weeks ago wasn’t quite fine-grained enough to show the detail that the specialists want, so she might need another one. There have also been some questions about whether an MRI can show if the tissue around the tumour is necrotic; she might need a PET scan for that. We don’t know just, we’ll have to wait and see. Ugh.

J’s mum arrived while we were looking at the fishes at the ward entrance; both A and C were really happy to see her and we had to shush them since it was still just before the ward’s visiting hours. Walking back to her room was tiring, again, and reinforced that she really isn’t well enough to come home yet. Then while J was recovering on her bed, YT turned up for a visit with her two kids (about C and A’s ages) – it was a very joyful and thus very, very loud. That tired J out even more.

Last night C had nightmares, A was awake for about an hour and a half; it took him close to that time before he calmed down enough to snuggle up into a ball on my chest/neck. Sigh.

This morning J sounded happier, she was able to shower herself without needing the anti-nausea drug first, and when I rang she was typing a blog post on her laptop. [She doesn't have an internet connection yet - too far from the wireless AP in the hospital, and only 1 bar of signal strength on the vodafail 3g dongle]. However, she still needs to be able to cope with moving her head quickly to track the kids’ movements, needs to be able to cope with their energy levels, and I just don’t see that happening until she’s had a few whole good days (ie, morning + afternoon + evening) strung together.

We’ve had better days

jmcp — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

J had a less good day today; dizziness was more evident, needed the anti-nausea drug to get out of bed, and just felt generally flat. It was really really good to see her this arvo, and it reinforced for me that she will have to get significantly better before we can expect the neurologist to release her. I think it might be another week before she’s home.

On the positive side, however, she did feel good enough with her eyesight to ask me to bring in her laptop. Club Wes does have wifi in the rooms, but of course her room is too far from the AP to get an signal, and our vodafail 3g dongle couldn’t get any signal either. She might compose some blog posts for later.

I, on the hand, had a horrendous day. After getting some flow timehacking on a proof of concept with Darktable, I slept until 1am when A decided that he should be awake and screaming. I tried pretty much everything I could think of, including panadol, but he didn’t stop screaming until about 0420 and was asleep enough for me to put him back in his cot 5 minutes later. Then we all woke up at about 0720. After getting the kids some breakfast I rang E+T; T came over shortly thereafter so I could crash. The next thing I knew it was 10am, T had given the kids morning tea, played with them, got them dressed and told me he was taking them back to their place for cousin H’s birthday party so I could have some more recovery time. I crashed out again, waking just before 12 and still feeling like I’d been thumped in the head a few times.

T and E: thankyou so very, very much. I’m not sure I could have lasted through this morning without your help.

After voting in the council elections, I went around to E+T’s place to collect the kids and have some chillout time. T had managed to get A to sleep, but only after driving him around in their car for about 30 minutes first. C had a grand time, playing really well with her cousins and the other kids at the party, then just enjoying herself playing with her cousins and some different toys for a while. A, having woken up, was back to his grizzly self and wasn’t happy until he was able to munch on an arrowroot bikkie and my bowl of 2minute noodles. He reached for my coffee, too, and was a bit disappointed to be told no.

A note about yesterday: C again had a great time at daycare; she’s got the same carer as the last time she was there, and while the center has had serious staff turnover in the last 12 months the staff who she interacted with are the same. A… well, he was bitterly disappointed at the rain and having to stay inside all day. They did manage to get him to sleep a bit longer (45-50 minutes) than Thursday, though when I came to collect them (3ish) they’d popped in an emergency dummy and I could hear him screaming from the door to the toddler room. I know he’s got to get used to going to daycare, but it’d be a darned sight easier if he knew mum was at home at the end of the day.

E mentioned to me that A really hadn’t wanted to play inside at all, but wanted to be outside on their deck. I noticed a week or so ago that if I go to the front or back doors to unlock and go outside (plant watering, or coffee cherry picking mostly), he has this shiver of delight – his face lights up and he races over to the door. I see a pattern forming!

After leaving E+T’s we went to KMart at Mt Ommaney to get some winter clothes since we discovered almost all the winter kit we had from last year (or handmedowns from friends) didn’t fit. Then it was off to Club Wes to see J. When we walked into her room, A squealed with delight (and probably a bit of relief) and immediately started struggling to get out of the stroller. Pretty clear what’s happening in his mind right now.

I’m still knackered from this morning’s screaminess, and I’m hoping that he’ll sleep through. Heck, we both need him to do that. I’ve rugged him up, he’s got a full tummy, had a nice warm bath with C and I’ve got my fingers crossed.

Friday a.m. family update

jmcp — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Janet’s neurologist popped in yesterday evening, he disagrees slightly with her neurosurgeon in that he doesn’t think she’s got BPV (Benign Positional Vertigo). Too many acronyms and “it could be this, it could be that” for my liking. She’s a sufficiently unusual case that she’ll be the topic of a combined neurology/radiology case conference today. We’re hopeful that between them they’ll be able to figure out something which helps us move forward and accelerates her recovery. Speaking of recovery, she’s started dropping down her dose of the dexamethasone (the anti-migraine drug), and she’ll be dropping off the epilem as soon as possible too.

This morning she was able to get out of bed after breakfast and shower unassisted – and didn’t require an anti-nausea tablet first. Her eyesight is getting better focus-wise and the nystagmus is easing off too. All of this is combining to lift her general mood and make her realise just how terrible a state she was in last week. The neurologist is expecting to see her in her room on Monday, but he’s amenable to having “home by Wednesday” as a goal.

Overall, I think we can class this as a morning so good that it might keep going to the afternoon.

On the family front, C really enjoyed being back at daycare yesterday. Not only does she have the same carer as she did for her last stint, but a lot of her friends were there too. She slotted right back in and enjoyed being a big sister too. A, on the other hand, after having a great walk around the playground and jumping in the sandpit, refused to be taken inside without screaming the house down. His carer told me that he didn’t have a nap either (eeeek!) and that she was planning “a more outdoor-focused program for him”.

Of course, with today being rainy, that probably won’t work. This morning both the kids slept until 0630, but that meant I was able to get them to daycare by 0730. C was right into everything, but A screamed. For the whole 10 minutes while I was there dropping them off. After handing him to C’s carer (the staff combine before 8am so that they have sufficient numbers per legislation; they’re on overlapping shifts to cover the opening hours), you just have to walk away. I hope he’ll have a nap today, I really really do.

Family update: rushing, and a probably-good day

jmcp — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

As foreshadowed yesterday, today is indeed a big day for A. He started it by stirring around 5am though quickly went back to sleep after I re-wrapped him. Then wonder of wonders, both C and A slept in until 0730! Eeeek!

So yes, it was a mad rush this morning, but not because I was disorganised.

They seemed fine when I dropped them off, I’ll find out for sure when I pick them up this afternoon.

J had another good night’s sleep – nearly 9 hours this time. She’s a little queasy this morning, but that might actually be due more to not having had enough breakfast than anything else. Only one piece of bacon? Darn those hospital dieticians for limiting caloric intake, it’s Un-A-Strayan! Seriously, I’m ecstatic that she’s not only been able to keep her breakfast down, but that she’s ravenous and wanting more of it.

Another really good data point – she frequently plays a sudoku in the evening before turning out the light and going to sleep. For the last 10 days or so she hasn’t been able to focus or concentrate on them. However, this morning she was able to get through almost all of a game and only stopped because the effort tired her out. She didn’t feel nauseous and her eyesight didn’t play up on her either.

I’m marking today as probably-good. Still not quite at the “I’m having a genuinely good day” point that the neurologist wants her to be at before she’s released, but she is definitely getting closer to it.

An evening update on J

jmcp — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

This afternoon I took the kids in to see J. As you’ll recall from this morning, things are starting to look up. She was a little tired when we arrived because she hadn’t really been able to get any sleep after lunch. [The post-lunch siesta is a most excellent concept, btw]. We had a walk down the corridor, looking at the fishtanks along the way (A points them out, raises his hand to point at them and utters “issshhh!”).

Two days ago she wasn’t able walk that distance without sitting down on the seat halfway along, and when we got back to her room she had to rest for 5-10 minutes. Today…. not only was she faster and more balanced with her walking, but she didn’t need to stop and rest along the way. It wasn’t a big speed increase, perhaps another half-metre/minute but when we’re looking at 7-8 metres in a minute, that’s noticeable. She plans to ask for a physio to come and assess her walking tomorrow.

One other thing she noticed about her walking is that two days ago she was unable to step over a vacuum cleaner hose unless she stopped, turned to face the wall and held on to the wall while she lifted one leg over and then the other. While there wasn’t a vacuum cleaner around today to test herself with, she reckoned she would be able to walk over its hose normally now. She’s going to ask the physio to help her figure out stairs too – we’ve got a few and you can’t really live in our house without having to go up and down them several times a day.

Food-wise, her appetite is coming back so much that tomorrow’s breakfast order includes bacon, and whatever she had for lunch today (which she vomited up a week ago) she wolfed down and was feeling rather hungry by afternoon-tea time. The appetite change really puts in stark perspective for us just how rotten she was getting since just before Easter when the migraine started to kick in.

The neurologist was very pleased at her progress, and told her that he thought she needed two good days before she could come home. While today was a better day than yesterday, it wasn’t up to “good”. I’m hopeful that if she can get another good night’s sleep (7-8 hours) tonight, then we might have got to the point where we can really see her coming home soon. It probably won’t be Sunday, but I’m optimistic (with good reason now, I believe) that we could have her home on Monday. We’ll have to start tapering off the various drugs that she’s on too … that’s going to be tedious.

Things are starting to look positive

jmcp — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I just got off the phone with J, and she’s feeling chirpy. The u-shaped pillow I took her last night helped give her a comfortable night’s sleep, and she hasn’t vomited at all so far today. She’s alert and while the dizziness is still there, she doesn’t feel as if moving her head will definitely result in a big chuck.

It might not sound like much, but this is a definite improvement – I think she’s turned a corner. Even though she still won’t be able to come home for at least a few days, I do think it will only be a few days more, not a whole darned month as previously feared.

When I took the kids and my Mum in to visit her last night we were delighted to see two “Lollypotz” that one of J’s facebook friends (you know who you are :>) had sent for A and C. Thankyou! They loved the dinosaurs and let’s just say that the chocolates are being rationed carefully to maximise enjoyment!

I could hear that she was smiling while I was talking to her, and that’s put a smile on my face too.