ckdake.com

Running (and not too slowly it seems)

ckdake — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 04:07:52 +0000

This past Saturday was my first timed/official/paid-entry run, the Charles Harris 10K in NE Atlanta.

After not having run since high school, I started running last November as a supplement to biking. With 22 runs under my belt, slowly increasing in mileage to about 9k (heres a look at most of them), a 10k seemed like a reasonable thing to conquer. My last run before the race was last Monday with my friend Jim. I've biked with him a lot over the last year (6 Gap for example) but this was my first run with him, and he has a bad habit of running marathons so I wasn't sure what to expect. Things worked out pretty well and he commented that I seemed to be running faster than I told him we would be, which was a sign that my Nike+ might not be as calibrated as I'd hoped.

Early Saturday morning I set out in sub-freezing temperatures to meet up with 1400 people that I don't know to run down Lawrenceville highway. There were a lot more really young looking people and really old looking people than the somewhat generic crowd that I'm used to seeing at biking events, and the number of people standing in the 30F weather in nothing more than shorts and t-shirts was a little unsettling. I had on long running pants, two long sleeve shirts, gloves, and a fleece hat, and was pretty cold. It ended up being the right amount of warmth for the run, but I'd probably leave the hat at home next time.

Bus ride, wait in gym, and walk to the starting line over, I found a place about in the middle of the pack and got mentally prepared to take off at 7:45 sharp, but that time came and went. At about 7:50 or so there was a very quiet pop that turned out to the starting gun and 20 seconds or so later the people around me started moving. The first 15 minutes was a mess of passing people and slowly squeezing down from 4 lanes of road to one lane, but after that things settled in and judging by the clocks each mile, my pace was pretty consistent at a little over 8 minutes/mile. My "training" runs never were faster than 8:15/mile. I expected things to be a bit more hectic, with people tripping over each other but I didn't bump into anyone and didn't see anyone else around me trip or run into anyone else. The "place yourself in the starting pack at about where you think you'll finish" actually worked surprising well.

Throughout the run I felt pretty good, pushing a little harder than I wanted to but not too much. Some people around me were breathing like they weren't going to make it, and others seemed to be trying to stomp through the pavement with every step. The number of people running my pace all looked like pretty fit people, and I realized that this might be the most fit people I had every seen in one place. At about 9k I started feeling worse but the end was near and I didn't slow down much, and shortly crossed the finish line for my t-shirt, banana, Powerade, and some stretching.

I'm still a little sore today, but the results were just posted and I came in at 50:34 which was 27th place of 55 in men age 25-29, which was 415th of ~1400 overall. (Full Results) Thats a 8:08 mile pace for 6.2 miles which I'm pretty happy with! This time beats my goal of 54 minutes and gets me a "B" wave in the Peachtree Road Race. 34 seconds faster and I would have been in A. The Bs are the 7th wave of 24 which isn't bad for using my first time running a 10k as my qualifying time.

Given that my Nike+ only registered 9.7k, and that heart rate data for running seems like it would be more interesting over time than it is biking, I've decided to give the Garmin GPS watches a try for collecting elevation/HR/speed data over time and picked one up at REI. After seeing the results from a very casual road ride with Jim today, this would have been pretty nice to have on Saturday, but it will provide plenty of useful data in the future.

Hopefully photos will be posted soon so that I can see if I look as ridiculous running as I do kitted out on a bike!

Charleston

ckdake — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 23:10:39 +0000

San's last day at work was last Friday (She's fulltime freelance illustrator now, let her know if you need something illustrated!), President's day was a company holiday for me, and I owed my friend David a trip to Charleston because he is stationed there with the USAF and has stopped by Atlanta a few times, so I put in for PTO for Tuesday and San and I took a long weekend and drove to the coast.

It was a pretty relaxing weekend of not doing a whole lot other than eating (starting with some midnight Taco Bell on Saturday shortly after we got there) and some light tourism. San, Dave, and I spent a little bit of time exploring and taking photos on a couple of occasions; My friend Campbell from High School joined us for walking around downtown Charleston and a few meals and movies; And Lindsey joined us to go to Joint Base Charleston to see where David works and get a personal tour of a C-17.

All the good photos from the weekend are here, and here's a small selection:

Debugging a (particular) failing boot service on Linux

ckdake — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 00:51:22 +0000

At work I recently rolled out a newer version of the Dell OpenManage tools which included for the first time a build of Openwsman. We didn't specifically need this functionality, but it's good to stay current with the OpenManage tools. To load in the (unrelated) new kernel on a test machine, I rebooted the machine using Cobbler's power management functionality on our administrative system, but after 5 minutes the machine was still not responding to pings so something was broken. I used remote desktop to hop on our one Windows server in the datacenter which we use to get at the interactive consoles of our servers (Thankfully the new DRAC6 card's have console applets that work on Macs!), and pulled up the console for this machine.

The boot process was hung on "Starting openwsman" and didn't seem to be doing anything. Doh!

I restarted the machine again, and at the grub boot menu added a "S" to the boot string to start up the system in single user mode, and booted things up. "chkconfig openwsman off" to disable the service, and another reboot to get the machine back up and running to let me troubleshoot a little better. I took a look in /etc/init.d/openwsman to see what might be hanging, and nothing immediately looked suspicious. It was a pretty standard init script, with the extra feature of generating OpenSSL certificates if they didn't exist already:

if [ ! -f "/etc/openwsman/serverkey.pem" ]; then
        if [ -f "/etc/ssl/servercerts/servercert.pem" \
                -a -f "/etc/ssl/servercerts/serverkey.pem" ]; then
            echo "Using common server certificate /etc/ssl/servercerts/servercert.pem"
            ln -s /etc/ssl/servercerts/server{cert,key}.pem /etc/openwsman/
        else
            echo "Generating Openwsman server public certificate and private key"
            FQDN=`hostname --fqdn`
            if [ "x${FQDN}" = "x" ]; then
                FQDN=localhost.localdomain
            fi
cat << EOF | sh /etc/openwsman/owsmangencert.sh > /dev/null 2>&1
--
SomeState
SomeCity
SomeOrganization
SomeOrganizationalUnit
${FQDN}
root@${FQDN}
EOF
        fi
    fi

It's a little strange, but not unheard of practice to do this, and shouldn't cause any problems. (Puppet and Func, two other systems tools we use, generate their certs in the application which is a lot more common.)

I extracted the only possible culprit from the owsmangencert.sh script and tried running the openssl command manually:

openssl req -days 365 $@ -config /etc/openwsman/ssleay.cnf \
  -new -x509 -nodes -out cert.out \
  -keyout key.out

and it seemed that this was indeed the problem. It just sat there and didn't complete with the speediness I expect from OpenSSL. Time for strace!

cat << EOF | strace openssl req -days 365 -config ./ssleay.cnf.2    -new -x509 -nodes -out cert.out   -keyout key.out
> --
> SomeState
> SomeCity
> SomeOrganization
> SomeOrganizationalUnit
> test
> root@test
> EOF

This ended up doing a long read with output like:

open("/dev/random", O_RDONLY)           = 3
read(3, "\323K\372u_ya'\27\266\320\25\22\373\240\330~'\224\310\243\356\225\350.\245\362\3058\230Zb"..., 1024) = 128
read(3, "K\7:\273Zdr\274\25\227\263\366\260U\337Owp\6y\2333c\361\322\334\217\370.k\375]"..., 896) = 128
read(3, "dH\375V\327\230Bi\221\342\326\26R\301v^Qv5f\347\303g7\2747\345\360\207A!\227"..., 768) = 128
read(3, "X&\254r\331\353<:\36!\333\340\353", 640) = 13
read(3, "\357F\27\347\372atf", 627)     = 8
read(3, "\231\347\232\362\345\215n\227", 619) = 8
read(3, "\324\304\323\30\325\10G\332", 611) = 8

Looks like /dev/random wasn't returning random data nearly fast enough, which makes a whole lot of sense! /dev/random is "good" random data because it is based on environmental entropy and the entropy data is only used once, but on a modern multi-core systems doing lots of things, there usually isn't much entropy available. That means that while this command would eventually finish, it could take a very long time.

The fix: using /dev/urandom instead. It is "not quite as good" random data because the output may have less entropy than /dev/random, and it uses internal entropy bits multiple times to generate it's output, but it's "good enough" for generating cryptographic keys. And, it is non blocking which means that a caller will never have to wait inane amounts of time for enough "random" data. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//dev/random for a longer explanation.

I replaced the two occurrences of /dev/random, one in /etc/openwsman/ssleay.cnf and one in /etc/openwsman/owsmangencert.sh, and initial startup of openwsman (including key generation) became pretty instantaneous. "chkconfig --levels 2345 openwsmand on" to turn it back on, and a reboot (after removing the generated keys and certs) to confirm, and the machine booted up as expected. To make this work everywhere, I customized those two config files and added them to our Puppet system so that all Dell servers would get Openwsman set up properly when the update is run globally:

 file {
    "ssleay.cnf":
      path => "/etc/openwsman/ssleay.cnf",
      source => "puppet://$server/dell/ssleay.cnf",
  }
 
  file {
    "owsmangencert.sh":
      path => "/etc/openwsman/owsmangencert.sh",
      source => "puppet://$server/dell/owsmangencert.sh",
  }

Problem solved and all machines will automatically get the correct fix, so the next time a machine won't finish starting up, it will be a new and different problem to debug.

Snake Creek Gap Time Trial 2010 #1

ckdake — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:31:19 +0000

Last year, I rode the 17 mile version of the Snake Creek Gap Time Trial (and wrote about it here) on a full suspension bike in January at 50F. This year, I rode the 34 mile version on a hard-tail bike at 25F. I've written about not enjoying mass start, short, XC races, and SCGTT is definitely a different sort of beast. Spaced individual starts so there is no constant battle to stay out in front, and completion time instead of crossing the line first is what counts so passing is generally pretty spread out and done safely at good places. Additionally, the section of the Pinhoti that this race takes place on is extremely brutal with lots of climbing (6000+ feet on the 34 mile) and miles and miles of technical rocky sections that had most people walking. The 34 mile version had the special treat of a knee high stream crossing:

Photo taken one mile into the course (and at 22F) by mtbepic61.

Some people did what I did and had a dry rest of the day. Other people attempted to put bags over their shoes or ride it and many of them were wet and miserable for the rest of the day, experiencing fun things like frozen solid rear derailleurs. The only thing that froze up on me was my camel-bak hose, which was new and surprising, but made a lot of sense, and was fixed by re-routing the hose under my jersey. My ride started at around 22F at around 10am and finished up over five hours later at around 28F and I finished 14th of 21 people in the male 30-and-under 34-mile category, including 3 or 4 people that didn't finish.

As awful as this race sounds, I actually had a lot of fun! I took this event as a "pre-ride" of the 34 mile course because the first half was new to me and I'll have two more chances to push for a better time, so I pretty much took it easy riding the entire time and even stopped to give a guy a tube and let him use my pump to fix a flat. This was the longest time I've been in the saddle on a mountain bike which was fine, and the coldest weather I've ridden in which was great. Smartwool socks, neoprene toe covers and keeping my feet dry kept them nice and warm, Smartwool glove liners under my usual cold-weather bike gloves kept all my fingers happy, and by the end of the race I was down to (and plenty warm in) a longsleeve Smartwool base layer under a short-sleeve wool jersey on the top and insulated tights on the bottom. I've heard stories from other people about feeling horribly cold and getting frostbite on fingers and toes, but I think it mostly comes down to clothing and a tiny bit of luck. The only uncomfortable part of my ride was lower back pain from an extra liter of water or so in my camel-bak that I didn't need and the extra clothing I packed and removed while riding. These things would have saved me from freezing if I had a nasty mechanical and had to walk out, but my back just wasn't use to carrying them.

Unlike last year, I remembered to eat enough and felt pretty good energy-wise until the end, but it does make sense to be kind of worn out after 5 hours of riding. I was pretty tired afterwards and slept like a rock, but got up Sunday morning feeling pretty good and had the energy and the legs for a 5K run.

I'm looking forward to riding this course again in February and March, and I'm trying to figure out what my next mountain biking adventure will be that can outdo the Snake.

2010 Goals

ckdake — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 00:24:29 +0000

2009's goals were all pretty reasonable and it worked out pretty well, so I'll make things a little crazier for 2010 and see what happens!

Personal

Save over 20% of my post-tax income
Double ithought revenue
Pay off a big chunk of my mortgage so I can get rid of PMI and escrow requirements
Take a big vacation somewhere new
Make significant progress on programming my exercise tracking tool, and open it up to a public beta

Photography

No more 365, and no more flickr uploading. Use a "stream" album here for uploading from my phone and one-off photos: ckdake.com/gallery/2010/stream
Submit a photo to a DPChallenge challenge every week. I bought a paid subscription today, so I have a few more challenge choices each week.
Print a few 8x10s or larger and frame them

Biking

Do a few more century rides (hospitality, macc one love, tour de cure)
Mountain bike at 10 new places
Get points in a Pro Series event at the velodrome
Do some team pursuit and madison racing at the velodrome
4day+ trip of mountain biking in another state
Ride 150 miles in one day

Running

What? Running. yeah... 30 min of running in 35F weather beats 2 hours on a bike in 35F and supposedly has similar overall fitness benefits, and should help out biking a little bit
Get a sub-54 min qualifying time in a 10k before Peachtree Road Race registration
Run the Peachtree Road Race
Run the Atlanta Marathon

SugarCRM

Build a new app deployment system for dev/stage/test of our production web properties
Finish moving all system configuration into puppet (major things left to go: MySQL replication, automatic building application server groups using puppet stored configs)
Finish removing all legacy hardware, legacy VLANs, legacy IP space, and legacy routing policies
Implement password synchronization between dataenter LDAP and office AD systems
Build a new application server logging system using Spread
Build a Hadoop cluster and use it for generating real reports
Go to Velocity 2010 and SugarCon 2010