musings { Testament to our consumption

What it looks like after a foreclosure and who cleans it up:

musings { whats $1T look like?

Almost unimaginable. Once upon a time 1000 was an incomprehensible number to us humans.

1 trillion numerically looks like this: 1,000,000,000,000 (1x10^12)

Google fails to give us an image of what $1T looks like.

Our money is almost a make-believe thing. The vast majority of us do not carry our wealth around with us, we just trust it is in a bank somewhere.

Its a make-believe thing with real impact.

I still can't believe we bailed out the Banking Industry with no clauses for prosecution or any kind of oversight. But I often feel like the only sane person in the asylum.

work { solaris 10 + VCS 5.0 + solaris 9 branded zone, shared configuration

I had a problem where I needed to run a Solaris 9 image for an application group that required special permissions and a compiler. Since we have budget cuts and no where else to put them, I decided to use a Solaris 9 branded zone within our Solaris 10, shared zone (i.e. the zones failover from node to node) VCS cluster.

The installation and configuration of the zone worked, up to a point.
Switchover didn't work because branded zones, when migrated have to run a
physical:virtual mapping to be optimized for running on the node. I
tried various things to no avail, preonline triggers, custom scripts,
but none worked well or reliably or were just too unwieldy to implement, especially in the short deadline I had.

So I decided to modify the VCS Zone Agent.

NOTE: This probably invalidates your support with Symantec, so use at your own risk.

This procedure has to be done on all nodes. The agent is written in perl.

Steps:

1. make a backup of /opt/VRTSvcs/bin/Zone/online
2. Add following to /opt/VRTSvcs/bin/Zone/online

to the "# Zone specific commands" section:

my $SOL9P2V = "/usr/lib/brand/solaris9/s9_p2v";

change the following:

$cmd = "$ZONEADM -z $ZoneName boot";
`$cmd`;

to

# modified for use with Branded Solaris Zones - 1/29/2009
my $BrandedZone = `$ZONECFG -z $ZoneName info | $GREP brand`;
$cmd = "$ZONEADM -z $ZoneName boot";
if ($BrandedZone =~ m/brand: solaris9/i ) {
$cmd = "$SOL9P2V $ZoneName && $ZONEADM -z $ZoneName boot";
}
`$cmd`;

All the variables except for "$BrandedZone" and "SOL9P2V" are defined elsewhere within the agent.


What this little snippet does is check to see if the zone has a 'brand' defined, if it does it adds the part to run the P2V mapping command and boot the zone, otherwise it does what it would normally do (just boot the zone).

It does lengthen the boot time of the zone a little and the output of the command will look odd as the P2V command also tries to update any patches needed to run on the node (which is handled at branded zone creation time).

Running a shared zone is fairly easy to setup. You create the zone on one node, copy the appropriate .xml files from /etc/zones/ to the other nodes, add appropriate line to /etc/zones/index, make sure your mountpoints exist, define the resources into VCS and enjoy. This setup will let you have one zone that can float to multiple nodes.

Note the assumptions are that the networking and storage is setup properly.

Other things to note, Solaris branded zones cannot use the "inherit-pkg-dir" functionality. So this means you can't inherit /opt/VRTSvcs/bin, so some functionality will be different. However this did not seem to impact the running or viability of the zone for use.

casual_friday { the concept of terrestrial time is meaningless, so...

Music videos today:

'Around the Bend' by The Asteroids Galaxy Tour



'Magic' by Ladyhawke

musings { Wednesday is 6 and 1/2 years post-remission

Wednesday is my yearly check up to make sure the cancer is still in remission. I always get nervous a few days before hand. Scared a little even. The shadow in my life gets a little bigger. But hope remains.

books { tMoQS has been dusted off

The Ministry of Questionable Science has been dusted off. Originally I intended this to be a sci-fi book club for the Rochester MN area. But after the events of the last year, that isn't going to happen. So instead I thought I would try my hand at a literary review site. Partly to hone my writing skills which I had been working on diligently (like learning the bass guitar) but which I've let slip. Also partly in an attempt to get me to start reading more books again. I'm not a good writer, nor will I probably have anything illuminating to say at first, but I'm going to try. This is going to be a personal scratch space for me.

I'm also thinking of trying my hand at a blog from the perspective of Pernox as an experiment in creative writing. But my nerd factor is already so high I may not need to push the bar higher.

musings { Put something on the internet...

And someone will be a douche.

Penny Arcade said it best:

machinima { Amazing work

The Craft of War: BLIND


The Craft of War: BLIND from percula on Vimeo.

Awesome video (and its about rogues). The guy who created this worked professionally as an animator and was recently laid off from his job.

musings { Where have we been?

I know the blog has been pretty idle for the last few months. 2008 has been a year I'm ready to put behind me. Its been an escalating painful year, one bad thing after another, none of which were caused by anything we could have prevented. Its been a year of experience. Its been a year of declining health and an increasing withdrawn outlook and attitude to the world. We've broken off contact with most people we know, we have gone low-key because this year every time we stepped out and tried to do something or be ourselves we were smacked down.

Those people, all of them, who decided that we were enemies suddenly and out of the blue and went above and beyond in an attempt to destroy us, people whom we trusted and thought of as friends, will never be forgotten, nor can I ever forgive them. All of them.

This year, much like 2002 when I underwent my ordeal with cancer, was also a year when we found out who our true friends were, and for that I am grateful. These people are cherished and loved by us.

Our love for each other has been renewed and strengthened. We've been through a lot in the nearly a decade of marriage. We will survive.

2008 was going to be a year of dreams and hopes. We had a lot planned, but it became a year of nightmares. Stolen dreams. Crushed hopes.

I will not allow my spark of hope and optimism go out however, for I've been there and that is the deepest darkness. 2009 will be better, for there is only one place to go, up.

music { Clouds

some music about clouds:

game { "I've been the Prince of Darkness since 1979!"

(of course Ozzy would be a warlock, although I thought for sure he'd be a death knight)

politics { Prop 8

Saw this on KnightofNothing and this should be spread around.

politics { Is Azeroth a blue state or a red state?

I know its a little late, but the servers have been down all day and I was jonesing for some WoW.

music { Lykke Li...recent discovery of mine

"Little Bit"


"I'm Good, I'm Gone"

musings { A new day...

President-elect Obama.

A new chapter in our world has started. Lets try and work together to heal the country and reconcile our difference. A lot of hard work remains.

We've stepped forward, but the path is still long and difficult (Prop 8 passed in CA, so there was a small step back too last night).

Obama had a powerful acceptance speech:




McCain had an equally powerful and gracious concession (I would say it was the best moment of his campaign, not because he lost, but because of what he said):





and some U2:

music { "And I awoke, faintly bouncing round the room..."

Phish, 'Boucing Round the Room'



Nouvelle Vague, 'Blue Monday'



and just because, some Bauhaus

election { Election erection or...

Get thee to the votery!

Serious. I don't care which side you choose. Vote damn it!

election { endorsements

Vote tomorrow Nov 04!

My endorsements (does not reflect on other CubeZoo contributors)

President/VP: Barack Obama/Joe Biden

US Senator MN: Al Franken (this was nearly no endorsement)

US Representative MN-1: Tim Walz

MN State Rep 30A: Tina Liebling

Constitutional Amendment - Clean Water, Wildlife, Cultural Heritage and Natural Areas: YES

Associate Justice 3 MN Supreme Court: Paul H. Anderson

Associate Justice 4 MN Supreme Court: Lorie Skjerven Gildea

MN Court of Appeals Judge 16: Terri J. Stoneburner

3rd District Court Judge 1: Lawrence E Agerter

politics { End of the World?

Its odd. In talking to some acquaintances and friends who are of the conservative leaning...far leaning (but not religious leaning), I've noticed a theme. They're all convinced tomorrow will be the end of the world and there will be rioting in the streets. To quote one:

"If Obama wins, the racists will be up in a fit. If Obama loses, Detroit will burn."

A couple of them have even stocked up on ammo, as if riotous looters will be coming to their suburban homes.

Hmmm. I don't think so. In discussing this they said we as Americans riot over sports teams, and why wouldn't we riot over this election. Well, no one rioted when Bush 'stole' the election in 2000. Why would anyone riot now? Sadly more people care more deeply over sports games than they do over our government. So I feel rioting over an election is not likely to happen.

Is this really how conservatives think? That a democrat President and Congress is the end of the world? Is this what 8 years of the GOP hate-machine has created, a belief in conservatives that liberals are evil?

Maybe they are right, I hope to whatever powers there may be it is the end of /their/ world. Their world is a scary, hateful, fear-mongering, greedy place of corruption, ignorance, jingoism and constant terror.

I hope that world burns.

samhain { Boys and ghouls of every age...

THIS IS HALLOWEEN!


(Marilyn Manson cover)

ala World of Warcraft...(in game Halloween is Hallow's End...my favorite in-game time of year)



and a perennial favorite, The Simpson's 'The Raven':

The Simpsons 203 Clip @ Yahoo! Video