Tag: technology

FreeBSD, Compact Flash, ZFS, and minimum root partition size

The day I booted a FreeBSD system off Compact Flash I was hooked. CF is an extremely robust storage medium with no moving parts. CF cards have emerged completely intact from washing machines, clothes dryers, and impacts that would destroy any spinning disk. After setting up a system to boot from CF, I am confident that henceforth and forevermore, that system will have a functional boot disk.

I’ve stuck CF cards and USB thumb drives into servers in our data centers, our server room at the office, and my server closet. The practice has served me quite well but that is not to say that CF is perfect. Write speed is slow. There is a finite number of write cycles each block can endure. Some CF cards claim DMA support but don’t support it well enough to be useful. Some server boards do not include internal IDE or USB ports. But everywhere else, we use CF.

Because of CF write limits, I always mount the root partition read-only. Files on the / partition are not frequently altered so this rarely causes any inconvenience. We recently built a 6.7 terabyte storage array at work using a HP 320S chassis, a pile of disks, and ZFS. ZFS volumes aren’t bootable in FreeBSD but we had already installed a USB thumb drive as the boot partition.

After working with ZFS, I decided that gmirror was no longer sufficient for my personal file server. It needed ZFS, which meant upgrading to FreeBSD 7. This server has been running off a 256MB CF card for years. The CF card is so old it was actually made in the USA! While upgrading to 7.0 I ran into a snag, the FreeBSD kernel (and modules) now use over 100MB. That means 256MB is no longer enough space for the new kernel and the old one to both fit.

Backing up my Mac

Last September I wrote an article about backing up a Mac. I’ve received several inquiries about how best to back up while using Time Machine.

I find I have two distinct needs for backup. The first is total disk loss. If my system disk fails, I need to get back up and running with a new disk. If that disk is pre-populated with the OS and all my data, then I have an extremely fast and reliable way to recover. I consider this part of my backups absolutely essential and I use SuperDuper for making and updating these disk disks.

Creating a bootable snapshot requires a spare disk. My dual G5 had extra drive bays so it was easy, buy and insert a spare disk. When I switched to the Intel iMac, I connected those same backup disks to the iMac and laptops via my Wiebetech ComboDock. That worked but wasn’t very convenient so I picked up an external dual drive Firewire to SATA enclosure with a spare hot-swap drive tray.

My other backup need is file recovery. If a file is deleted, incremental backups allow recovery from a specific point in time. A bootable snapshot can only help if that particular file existed when the snapshot was taken. Fortunately, the few times when I really needed to recover a file, that was the case.

Time Machine fills a void in my backup regime and works out perfectly with the dual disk enclosure. One disk stays in the enclosure and is my designated Time Machine disk. Time Machine manages incremental backups automatically. I maintain my bootable snapshots using two disks and the other drive bay. Every other month I swap out the snapshot disk and store the eldest offsite.

A hard won lesson on investing

I started saving for my retirement in 1991 because my employer offered matching contributions. Matching money is free money so I saved exactly as much as they would match. Since I started at $7/hr, two percent of my check was about $6 per week. It’s a trifling amount but when I quit to found MichWeb 3 years later, I had saved about $900.

I paid no attention to that account until Kysor was acquired a couple years later. I was forced to roll over my retirement account and the dollar value was quite surprising. I had invested $900, the company match had kicked in another $900, and over 5 years it had grown to around $5,000. I invested for the match but learned a valuable lesson on leveraging compound interest.

Years later I read a book by Peter Lynch. One of his most famous bits of investing advice is, “buy what you know.” Instead of taking the advice of Wall Street or your neighbor, invest in companies whose products you are familiar with. If you eat Cheerios every morning, General Mills might be a good stock for you. If you ride a hog, Harley Davidson might be a great choice.

I know AAPL because of my familiarity with their products. For several years, I got into the habit of buying their stock at $15 and selling at $25. That was fun until one day I sold and the stock never came back down! After months of waiting, I bought back at (gulp) double the price I had sold at. This brings me to my hardest won lesson on investing: every notable error I’ve made investing was a sale. Over all, I’d be better off if I had never sold anything.

I ran the numbers to answer a nagging question, “How much more would we have in our retirement accounts if I had never sold AAPL stock?” $15,950. Tomorrow, that number will be even bigger.

my $0.02 on Leopard

Disclosure: I own Apple stock.

I first installed Leopard in early 2007. I backed up my system and installed. Since I have a spare mac, I can tolerate a fair bit of breakage on my main system but the pre-WWDC builds of Leopard exceeded my threshold. After a few days I reverted back to 10.4.

At WWDC, Apple seeded a new build and I backed up and installed again. After a few days of using it, I deemed the bugs I ran into as tolerable and have been running Leopard on my main desktop system since. Note when I placed my order.

Order Date: June 28, 2007
Order #: ***-*******-*******
Recipient: Matt Simerson

Items not yet shipped:
1 of: Apple Mac OS X Version 10.5 Leopard Family Pack
Sold by: Amazon.com, LLC

Amazon was running a promotion and guaranteed their lowest price on Leopard Family Pack if I pre-ordered. My experience with the pre-release versions had me convinced that it was just as compelling an upgrade as its predecessors. If you do buy from Amazon, which I recommend, please use the link above and it’ll provide me with a referral bonus. If you don’t need the family pack, here’s a link to the single license version.

Since then, new beta releases of Leopard have arrived and all the worst bugs have been exorcised. I find that build 9A559 is far less problematic than the four days I spent with the release version of Vista. Despite having a Vista license that came with a new machine, my experience with it compelled me to upgrade to XP.

iBought an iPhone

On Jan 17th, I wrote about the iPhone:

The ease of using all the devices is likely the phones most endearing feature, but I’m not in love. Yet.

And I went on to detail my reservations about the $599 iPhone.

Cons:
Painfully slow data access (EDGE).
Cingular AT&T only
No tethering (with a PDA / laptop)
Expensive.

Concerns:
SSH client
Email: multiple IMAP accounts? SSL/TLS encryption?

A lot has changed since January. Continue reading “iBought an iPhone”

Even Windows is better on a Mac

You’ve probably heard it from me, and if you follow Mac news at all, you’ve probably heard it from Gruber and now you can hear it from another that a Mac is the best PC to run Windows. I couldn’t agree more.

I have used Windows under emulation almost as long as Windows has been shipping. I ran Windows on SGI hardware first and then later on Mac OS. I wrote the Kysor Fan Program for Windows, using Visual Basic. The notable part of that is that Kysor bought me a license for SoftWindows and I wrote the vast majority of the KFP on my personal Mac, because it was so much more stable than Windows on bare iron.

Since then emulation moved from software to hardware and now Windows can run natively on my Mac via Boot Camp or virtually under Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion. As I’ve blogged about before, getting a clean and happy install of Windows has never been easier than when installing it on a Mac.

MacBook for sale sold

This MacBook is the one I reviewed here. The MacBook was an interim laptop, to bridge the gap between my PowerBook and my new MacBook Pro, due to arrive later in the year. I skipped the first edition MacBook Pro, substantially because the MBP wasn’t substantially better than the MB. So I waited.

With the July 2007 MacBook Pro, Apple finally made the upgrade compelling. Continue reading “MacBook for sale sold”