DIGITAL39, Digital home of Peter Manis

Slicehost Plug

Peter Manis — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 12:24:30 +0000

A few posts ago I mentioned how happy I was with Slicehost. In the last 85 days, which is my current uptime, I have had 14 minutes that the website was unreachable and 4 minutes that the machine could not be pinged.

23:56:54 up 85 days, 1:31, 2 users, load average: 0.05, 0.06, 0.01

If that reliablilty doesn’t encourage you to get a slice account than I don’t know what will.

Finding Emails without Labels in Gmail/Gapps

Peter Manis — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 20:50:27 +0000

Being able to find emails that do not currently have labels is a feature that has been requested a number of times and for me would be very very nice. On some of my accounts I have gone through and setup filters for absolutely every type of email I get, but those accounts get less random email. The email coming in is more predictable like friends or certain mailing lists. For my main DIGITAL39 account I get a lot of random email, and a lot of predictable email. I am also using it to archive email from accounts I no longer have. So I looked at my email today and I found out that 4370 out of 8735 (remember these are threaded so it is actually a lot more email) were not labeled. You could go through all of the email and move all of the ones without labels to another label called _FILTER_ or something with a symbol in the front so it will be at the top of the labels list. However there is a better way, which still takes time, but nearly as much.

Create a new label “..filter..” and go into “All Mail”. Click the “All” link to select all of the email and then click the link to select all of the emails in “All Mail”. Label all of the emails with the new “..filter..” label. Once all of that has been done, go down through your existing labels and select all emails and remove the “..filter..” label. After you go through all of these steps you will be able to click on the “..filter..” label and see only email that does not currently have a label.

This doesn’t help for new email coming in, but it will allow you to setup filters for email that has not been filtered or labeled yet. You can easily label incoming mail with this label to make sure you catch new email. One account that I have that has thousands and thousands of emails I have done this with and there is only 1 or 2 emails a week that slip through without a filter.

My Move to Desktop Linux

Peter Manis — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 03:26:42 +0000

I spent the evening moving formatting my desktop and moving to Linux full time for my desktop. In some ways this was a difficult move and in other ways it wasn’t. What made it difficult is that there are applications in Windows that I have not found a decent replacement for. An example would be FlashFXP, I have tried other apps, but so far none have given me the feel that FlashFXP did. Another is Photoshop… now I am aware of GIMP, but I am not a fan of it, I am sure over time I would enjoy it, but right now I enjoy the feel of working in Photoshop. Also with the way I have everything setup Windows wasn’t bad. Most of the complaints I hear about Windows are from people who hardly ever use Windows, or haven’t used Windows since 3.11. They complain about things they don’t know anything about or they say they tried to fix a Windows machine for someone and spent X hours trying to get something to work. In some cases it was simply because they don’t have a lot of experience with Windows and it is not fair to blame Windows for that.

I use Linux on my company laptop, so I have gotten pretty used to using it the majority of my day for all kinds of stuff. I found myself coming home and getting on my Windows machine needing to write some bash scripts or integrate with Linux machines better or just little tasks that are, in my opinion, easier in Linux. All the days of using Linux I never said to myself… if I only had Windows, but at home I have countless times said… if this was only Linux.

I do need to continue to run a Windows virtual machine so I have been testing out VMware server and VMware workstation on Linux. Server is free, but does not handle USB and will most likely not support unity anytime soon. Unity will make a lot of things much better, it will allow me to use the few apps I need to without having to be inside the Windows vm all the time.

When I opened the Linux VMware server client it would crash and I would get the following errors.

/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4′ not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0′ not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4′ not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0′ not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4′ not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0′ not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6)

I had to install gcc 4.3, and run the following commands to get it working

cp /usr/lib/gcc/i486-linux-gnu/3.4.6/libgcc_s.so
/usr/lib/vmware-server-console/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1

Speedtest of Charter 16meg

Peter Manis — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 23:37:17 +0000

I couldn’t resist upgrading… even though it was expensive. Now I pay like 115/mo for TV and internet

Speedtest of Charter 10meg

Peter Manis — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 23:54:51 +0000

I am very happy with Charter’s 10meg connection

LinkedIn, what a gap it can bridge

Peter Manis — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 00:59:58 +0000

I used to like LinkedIn much more than I do now, but one thing I do like about them is the gap they bridge between people. I currently have 39 connections, 3 of those connections have more than 500 connections themselves. One is Jeremy Zawodny, another is Corey, who networks like crazy for his VC company, and the last is Roger who has traveled all over the U.S. for work and connects with a lot of people on a normal basis. The other 36 connections all have less than or equal to 180 connections so you can really see a huge contrast it the number of connections others have.

I have tried to keep my connection list limited to those that I know or that I have a legitimate reason to be connected to. I know Roger personally, Corey commented on a previous LinkedIn post and said I could add him. I do not know Corey other than his comment, but his role in the VC community may help my connections, or he may be looking for people within my connection list so he is an overall good connection to have. Jeremy is someone I have followed off and on, mainly because of his role in the MySQL community, but also because he was a pretty popular guy. I have found his blog to be very interesting and if I ever needed someone to consult with about MySQL he would probably be the one.

The rest of my connections have all been people I have met at conferences and had conversations with after the event, someone I have been friends with, a family friend, or people I have worked with. Networking is very important, but I have really tried to keep it to closer relationships.

Tonight I was talking with Jermaine about famous people within companies and how I don’t know the names of an incredible number of well known people. He said, “you know of Kevin Rose”, right after that I searched LinkedIn for Kevin Rose. What surprised me is that he only has 118 connections, which was shocking when you consider how well known he is. My guess would be he either doesn’t use/like LinkedIn or he is picky like me about who he connects with. The other shocking thing is that 5 of my 39 connections we connected with Kevin, so over 10% of the people I know connected with him and almost 5% of the people he is connected with are connected to me. Maybe it is just me, but I find that to be pretty crazy. I have never met Kevin, other than using Digg and seeing him on his online videos and TechTV I haven’t had any interaction with him. We are also 2500 miles across the U.S. from each other. Maybe it is just me, but I think that is just wild given the number of people in the U.S. Now if I was well known it would not surprise me because once you are well known you will naturally connect with other well known individuals.

So my point is that this is very much like the theory that people are only 6 people apart from knowing each other.

Yet another file server update

Peter Manis — Sun, 11 May 2008 15:52:21 +0000

Drives and cages are in. I am sorry for the bad picture my camera broke and I had to use a flashlight and cell phone. I still have the parts in burnin, which I started out with a very very long ext3 format with block checking. Since there will be no need for a CD/DVD I have the drive sitting on top until I install a distro.

Originally I was going to use FreeNAS, and I have looked into NASLite and Openfiler, but decided to make my own distro. I may actually make it public in the end, but I just didn’t feel that I would use FreeNAS forever and therefore did not want to use UFS as the file system. I am also considering using it as a desktop since I have so much power to spare, but that would only be for a little while.

P.S. I know how ghetto a flashlight and cell phone is

Slicehost

Peter Manis — Mon, 05 May 2008 05:07:05 +0000

I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with Slicehost, but it is a VPS solution that is affordable and very stable. Slicehost does not oversell system resources, so when you purchase a “slice” you aren’t getting some bogged down server loaded with virtual environments. I have been using them for many months now and I encourage people to sign up. I have 2, 512mb RAM Slices that have 20gb hard drives and each get 200gb of bandwidth each costing $38/mo. I run Pingdom on each one and there have only been a few occasions that I have been emailed about downtime and most of those were self inflicted. This website was taken down and just moved over, but since it has been on Slicehost the slice has been up 100%. One of my client’s has a Slice as well and his has not dipped below 99.9% for the past 3 months and the only times it went below that were for events unrelated to the virtual environment. All Slices are prorated so if you only use one for an hour the money would be refunded, or if you start a new one mid month you are only charged for the percentage of the month you used.

For those of you wondering what distros you can choose from:

Arch 2007.08
CentOS 5.1
Debian 4.0 (etch)
Fedora 8
Gentoo 2007.0
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (dapper)
Ubuntu 7.10 (gutsy)
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (hardy)

If you decide to try them out, I would appreciate it if you used my referral link below.

File Server Update

Peter Manis — Sun, 04 May 2008 03:17:47 +0000

I received the drive cage and loved it so I ordered some more parts for my file server. In all this is what I have (drives were just ordered).

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+, Socket AM2
G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800
ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe AM2 Motherboard
MSI GeForce 7300LE 128MB 64-bit GDDR2 PCIe Video Card
SYBA SD-CF-IDE-BR IDE to Compact Flash Adapter (Bracket Version)
3x SUPERMICRO CSE-M35T-1B Black 5 Bay Hot-Swapable SATA HDD Enclosure
9x Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 750GB Hard Drives

I went ahead and bought a 9th hard drive so that the model and firmware would be the same if a drive happened to die. I am going to be doing a burnin on all the hardware when the drives arrive to make sure anything that is bad will fail so I can RMA it. I changed from Areca to Adaptec for my RAID card and they just sold out of the Adaptec. Hopefully the price will not go back to $500. After being formatted and put in a RAID6 array I will have 4.09TB of storage space.

Border Searches

Peter Manis — Sat, 03 May 2008 19:03:20 +0000

It looks like our electronic devices can be searched by customs when entering the US. This somewhat violates the 4th amendment, however there is a border exception to the 4th amendment and unless I am wrong you are not officially in the US until you pass customs/border so the amendment would not apply.

A lot of company policies state that you should not be holding confidential information on laptops in the first place, but email, and browser cache can contain that information. To help prevent the information from intranets from being cached you can install JohnnyCache. JohnnyCache lets you enter in a url pattern and will prevent disk and memory based cache from being accessible when viewing a site matching that pattern. I highly recommend you install this extension regardless of your traveling habits.

I am going to be writing additional posts about handling these searches. These posts are going to be directed at protecting corporate information and personal information.