Fractured = broken, ruptured; Noesis = cognition, knowledge
Watch out EMC, CoRAID is getting ready to grow.
CoRAID just got an infusion of Capital and a crack management team. Whithin 5 years they will be a common data center name or owned by a company that is already a big data center name.
Unless you have been living under a rock, or perhaps in the electrical power-less tundra of the Midwest, you probably knew Apple was making an announcement on 1/27/2010. I have been predicting and prognosticating about what Apple might be up to on other entries here tomorrow we may find some things out. Here are the questions I would like to see answered:
And Finally, one more thing….
That’s a lot of questions, but there have been a lot of secrets, rumors and questions about how Apple could change another media category like books and magazines, and how they could subsidize an expensive new device to make it more affordable to the masses.
Once the announcements are made and the dust settles we can start guessing at how long it will be until the next revision of a potential new product and when it will cost $100 less than it did at the announcement. Apple fanboys, warm up your wallets.
Recent glitches required me to update a server I had running Php and MySQL. Before upgrading mySQL I dumped all of my databases using the dump command. When I went to recreate a couple databases in the new installation using PhpMyAdmin a few databases were a little too large and timed out as they were imported. I found a hint to a nice way to import saved tables here (http://www.modwest.com/help/kb.phtml?qid=241&cat=6) but my favorite tip was in the comments: ”
"you can also get to the mysql shell and then type "source file.sql",where file.sql is your dump file"
This turned out to be very handy. Good stuff.
Many people are suspicious of the reported trick of freezing a hard drive in a last ditch effort to recover it. Freezing a hard drive to recover data really can work. I don’t know why it works, but I have used it successfully on a disk that would not boot and I can tell you that heat is absolutely an enemy of hard drives. In a nutshell this is how it is done:
You remove the dead or clicking hard drive from the machine. You obtain a second hard drive of equal size or larger. Once frozen you restart the hard drive and quickly copy off all your important data or use dd, ghost, or some other tool to copy all the data over to the second hard drive. You might also hear about using tools like SpinRite to try to repair the damaged drive to get it to a state where it will work under normal or non-frozen circumstances. I prefer to consider the drive damaged goods and get all the information off it and then retire the drive.
There are some important things to know in order to freeze a drive for recovery:
On new hard drives larger than 350 GB I try to make sure the drives have additional cooling installed. Extra fans or heat sinks to cool them down. I also like to do an initial format of the hard drive and let it warm up, copying some data to and from it to warm it up to “burn in the drive”, before finally formatting it. I do this under the theory that once warmed up the platter sizes are probably different from their cold size and that there is probably a point where the warmed up drive will not get any hotter unless it is under stress. Testing the hard drive before putting it into use also gives it a chance to fail or throw SMART errors before you put anything important on it.
You can freeze a hard drive to make a final try at recovering it but you need to work fast to keep the drive cold and dry. Sometimes a dead drive is truly dead and if it contains critical data or programs it must be sent to professionals to try advanced recovery steps.
You may wonder why this card does not work once you have it installed and the drivers are loading. Check your logs, you are probably missing the firmware that the drivers need to operate.
Here is a good site to reference for getting these devices working in Debian:
I was using DHCP, TFTP and PXE to install debian on a Soekris 4801. The tftp daemon I was using was ATFTPD. It wouldn’t allow the Soekris to PXE boot until I changed a startup parameter in /etc/default/ataftpd. I added ‘–no-blksize ‘ to the list of startup parameters based on some blog entries I found.
The other thing that I had to do was create a symbolic link to pxelinux.cfg -> /tftpboot/debian-installer/i386/pxelinux.cfg.serial-9600/ instead of pxelinux.cfg. This works much better with the installer over a serial terminal.
Here are some useful blog links for installing linux on a Soekris single board computer.
http://wiki.soekris.info/Installing_Debian_Linux_5.0
http://strugglers.net/wiki/Debian_on_Soekris
http://roland.entierement.nu/pages/debian-on-soekris-howto.html
http://www.linuxvillage.ca/support/soekris4801.html#inst
http://hugi.to/blog/archive/2006/12/23/ubuntu-pxe-install-via-windows
And a link to Soekris engineering: http://www.soekris.com/index.htm
It may be we are starting to see the real reason that Google and Apple are parting ways in the board room.
The following is speculation.
Apple is rumored to have a tablet-type device coming to market. The parts have been purchased, the agreements are in effect, but there has not been an official product announcement yet. And it is starting to get late for holiday timing. One of the issues with producing an Apple tablet like an iPhone or an iPod is the cost. In order to make the price lucrative to consumers Apple needs to find a hook that can create repeat sales. For the iPod this is music, for the iPhone it is phone service and music (and other media). A pad or tablet is not necessarily the device of choice for listening to music. It should be good for watching movies, but would be better are books or magazines in brilliant Apple-display color.
Google has been feverishly scanning books for a while. They are getting in the news and getting themselves into some controversy for it.
Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google was recently removed from the board at Apple. Now Google has announced that it will begin selling electronic books . It would appear that Apple is trying to find a source for electronic books, or a way to sell electronic books and magazines and Google was simultaneously getting ready to do the same thing leading to a conflict which resulted in the change. (we are still speculating here) Perhaps they could not agree on how to achieve this.
So who is Apple talking to about selling electronic books and magazines? Are they going directly to the publishers or are they working with Amazon.com? It would seem an Apple product would probably trump the Kindle so that seems unlikely. Maybe they will still partner with Google?
Could an Apple tablet or pad be released simply as a Macintosh computer? I think that seems unlikely giving the profit opportunity for repeat sales from something like books or magazines.
It will be interesting to see what happens and what future income streams Apple will try to dominate.
There are a lot of terms that leave people scratching their heads but ‘cloud computing’ is one of the worst in a while. Everyone you talk to in and out of I.T. is thinking something different when the term comes up. The term ‘cloud computing’ is nebulous. (That is a good pun and I am not ashamed of it)
So let’s rectify this a bit. When we think of things like Google docs, Google mail and salesforce.com, we should call this the web application cloud. There are some one-trick poinies like Carbonite that work in the cloud too and may or may not use the web as their transport. These could be called Cloud products.
Then there are services we should think of as cloud computing services. Services like Amazon.com’s S3 storage are not a complete a product in themselves but are building blocks. These services are cloud computing services or web cloud computing services if they have only a web API (application programming interface).
Now it gets a bit tricky with vendors like VMware talking about building your own cloud. You can use products like VMware and others and build an on-premise cloud. This is multiple VMware servers or the Vsphere product letting you move inbstances of servers between physical machines. You might even be able to move them over a WAN or VPN to a remote hosting site or anyther company location. This might be the on-off-premise cloud.
It is possible to outsurce all your computers to someone else and run everything in their cloud of physical or virtual machines. This might be called outsourced infrastructure cloud or oursourced virtual infrastructure cloud.
Some people seem to imply that moving their operations or computer room contents to another company’s datacenter constitutes cloud computing. So let’s be inclusive and call this co-hosted cloud computing. When you do this it is usually done to get away from the issues of building and maintaining a computer room with special fire, cooling, and electrical services.
I’m not a big fan of many of the cloud computing types above. Even if you master the subleties of the financial arrangement, have goot toos to migrate and extract data, and even if you have a great exit strategy, the speed of light and fiber-seeking backhoes are still some of your worst enemies. When you boil it down, nearly any form of cloud computing is really outsourcing and the key is having a contract or agreement that is air-tight, and has rewards and penalties.
The Adtran 712 was a little puzzling when I went to register it with Asterisk. Once you set up the “ProxyServer.Address.1 (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx)” and “RegServer.Address.1 (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx)” on the SIP settings page and the “Reg.AuthUserID () ” and “Reg.AuthPassword()” you would be done on most phones. But the Adtran would not register and was not even indicating it was trying on Asterisk using SIP debug. Popping over to the phone summary page it did not indicate any line was configured.
So the trick turns out to be heading over to the buttons configuration page and set a button up with “Button.Type (Line)” and “Button.Realm (PBX)”. There may be other variants of these but these options worked for me. Once you have done this and reset the phone, the phone should register itself to Asterisk.
I haven’t done a whole lot of testing with the phone yet but it seems like a good phone, maybe on par with a Sipura or a Polycom. The phone itself does not have any power inputs other than the PoE so an injector is needed if you don’t have a PoE switch. It has an RJ-style jack for a headset. There is also a button for the headset pickup next to the speakerphone button. Unfortunately the flat black finish of the phone shows finger and face oils. The backlit display is nice and reminiscent of a Polycom set.
Remember the early days of Google? The Google page itself was plain and white execpt for the search form and the primary colors of the Google logo in the midde of the page? Remember when searching Google brought back results instead of advertisements? All the results were truly results, there was not a thinly veiled listing of commercialized results at the top?
Google once had a motto, “Don’t be evil”. Do you think a motto like that would loose its emphasis once the happy times are over and they discover they need to make some money to support all the amazing projects, long term initiatives, and employee benefits. How long can it be before they replace product quality with marketing as other large companies have done?
Has it already happened?