So I was practicing on one of my guitars (a Schecter C-1), and all the sudden the amp started buzzing like crazy, and I couldn’t hear any output from the pickups. I realized that I had just shifted, and that the cable had shifted on the guitar’s jack.. so I unplugged it, and saw that the jack was loose. Being the geek that I am, I figured I’d set the guitar on my desk, grab the soldering iron (which was about a foot away), and figure out what was going on.

I pulled the backplate over the electronics off, and didn’t see anything obviously wrong under there, but did note a few wires that were interesting.. hmm, we’ll get back to that. I then disconnected the output jack, and saw that the ground had come loose from the output jack – it was probably wired in a way that would cause any twisting of the jack to pull directly on the ground – bah. Here’s what it looked like after I had stripped back an extra 1/4″ or so of the outer plastic shield back, and twisted the ground wire back up to solder it:

Apologies for the picture quality – this was in my basement with my flash-less camera phone..

It was a pretty easy job to remove the old wire, and get the ground soldered back in properly. I am a bit out of practice, so it’s not pretty, but it is functional:

I tried to solder it at an angle that would make sure that the guitar cable couldn’t snag it when it was plugged in. It seems to be pretty good:

I then made sure that there wasn’t any extraneous noise, and that the guitar worked — as expected, this fixed it – yay! Now, back to the fun part.. as I was reassembling the guitar, I took a closer look under the back coverplate:

After some cable tracing, I found out that the stray wires were what I was hoping for.. take a look at the red and white wires in this picture:

The humbuckers installed on this guitar (a Seymour Duncan SH-6b Distortion on the bridge, and a Seymour Duncan SH-2n Jazz on the neck) can be set up to allow them to split into single-coil pickups, and to run in parallel — *nice*! However, on my guitar, they are just hardwired for humbucking mode.

This means, of course, that by repairing the guitar, I “inherited” (aka gave myself) a new project — to set up the guitar for push/pull operation to split the pickups. ;) It’s a relatively cheap job, and fairly easy to do.. sounds like fun! This particular model has two volume knobs (one per pickup), and a shared tone knob.. so I need to decide if I want to replace both volume knobs (to allow me to split the pickups individually), or just replace the tone knob and split both pickups together.

If you’ve done this type of project before, I’d appreciate any advice!

Related posts:

1. Ben Kasica of Skillet during a guitar solo in front of fog
2. guitar hero 3.. embedded?

(Note: Not geek-related in any way, shape, or form. Enjoy! Alternate title — “How chicken became my mortal enemy”)

On Sunday, March 6, our second boy was born! His name is Joshua Xavier Carlson, and I may be a bit biased, but I think he’s a cutie. ;)

We’re all doing great.. but that’s not really what this post is about. Instead, it’s about how Daddy was stupid and did something that you should never do if you’re helping take care of a momma and baby! Let me tell ya, I really earned my self-given moniker of ‘village idiot’…

So it was Sunday night, about 16 hours after Joshua was born.. I was absolutely exhausted; I’d been up since about 6am Saturday morning, with a grand total of somewhere around an hours worth of sleep.

We were putting in our dinner orders, and I made my first major mistake — I ordered the chicken alfredo. *Insert some ominous sounding sound from the movie when an idiot makes a huge mistake*.

Our food arrived, and I realized I was absolutely famished. Sat down at the table, and started chowing like crazy. Next thing I knew, I felt some food stuck in my throat. Sigh. That’s happened a few times before, and I’ve always been able to cough it up.. so, of course, I assumed that this time would be no exception. I then spent the next two hours or so trying everything I could think of to hack up the food.. alas, it was not meant to be. Eating more food didn’t work. Chugging water didn’t work (wouldn’t get past the food at all either.) Internet-provided suggestions of slamming diet coke, eating pudding, trying to hock a lugie, and various other methods didn’t work. Crud.

This wouldn’t be a big deal.. except that I couldn’t eat anything, drink anything, and figured that at the rate I was spitting up saliva, this couldn’t be good. I finally took a walk of shame down to the emergency room, and sheepishly admitted what happened to the triage nurse. She laughed with me, and said I was the first time she’d ever had a daddy come down from family birth with stuck chicken.. although if I’d passed out and slammed my head on something I’d be in great company!

The ER docs decided to try a few minimally-invasive methods to try to get the chicken to come loose. The first was some sort of medicinal pop rocks.. he had about an inch of them in a styrofoam cup, and another cup with a tiny bit of water. My instructions were to immediately slam as many of the pop rocks down my throat as hard as I could right after he added the water, and try to hold it in.. the hope is that it would jar the obstruction loose. This actually sounded kind of fun to me.. with the puke bag at the ready, I slammed the cup of watered rocks, and did my very best to not let them go back out. I think I probably lasted about half a second.. and let me tell ya, the result redefined the phrase ‘projectile vomit’ — it was quite an amusing mess! After laughing a bit about it with me, the nurse asked it it had done anything.. alas, my new foe was still firmly lodged in place.

Next line of attack — some sort of medication that is supposed to relax the esophagus and hopefully let things slide down. And.. no dice. (I guess this rarely works, but when it does, well, it saves time.)

So what do you know.. it was time for an emergency egd! My ER doc paged the GI on-call, and the staff moved me into an emergency room ‘deluxe suite’ with enough room for all the equipment. Hurrah!

About an hour later, after an IV, some drugs, and a garden snake down my throat, my nemesis was dislodged – hurrah! After making sure I didn’t crash from the drugs, they sent me back up to the birthing center to hang out with my wife and son.

In any case, thanks to the staff at Saint Francis for taking care of my stupid idiotic mistake, and more importantly, for laughing hard about it with me! They got me out of the ER and back to my family in record time (just over two hours start to finish!), and then the birthing center nurses made sure that I had plenty of Popsicles to keep the throat semi-usable. ;) Biggest downside – I couldn’t sing with Joshua any more!

Oh, and if you’re a dad who is trying to take care of your tired wife and son, and have had almost no sleep.. take advice from someone who’s made the mistake… and please, *order the soup*.

No related posts.

CVS Pharmacy just managed to lose any chance of my future business without me ever actually walking through their doors.

Our second child just arrived (I’ll post on that in a bit!), and it looks like he is going to have some issues with acid reflux, just like his big brother did — but starting earlier. Not wanting to start a child who was only born about 68 hours ago on Zantac yet (especially since he hasn’t even met his primary care doc yet, which would probably make it difficult to get the medicine prescribed), I figured I’d look around for a symptom reliever that would be safe for him to use. After doing a fair bit of research, it looked like Colic Calm was probably the right choice; unfortunately, our regular pharmacy (Walgreens) doesn’t carry it; it’s only available at CVS. I’ve never been to a CVS store in my life, but figured that it was worth it to get the “right stuff.” I pulled up the CVS web site to look up the store hours, and saw that the closest store closes at 10pm – doh! I then looked up 24-hour locations, and the closest store is 24 miles away.. sigh. I then looked back at the hours for closer locations, and saw that there were two locations nearby that were open until midnight — hurrah!

So I hopped in the car, and headed out to the Eden Prairie location. I got there, and the store was still lit up, but when I walked up to the door it refused to open. I figured out where the store hours were posted, and saw 10pm — sigh!! Hopped back in the car, and pulled out my phone to figure out if I was going to drive to Plymouth (the 24-hour location), or if I could go to Apple Valley (another midnight location.) It looked like Apple Valley would get me home faster, so I figured I’d call the store just to make absolutely sure it was open until midnight. I called, pressed the button for hours, and was happy to hear that it was open until 12:00. Hopped in the car, arrived, and the store was completely dark — what?! Apparently both the CVS website and the store phone number have incorrect hours. Nice. At this point, I just needed to get back home, so I swung into the Walgreens that is about a mile from our house on the way home, and picked up a bottle of Wellements Gripe Water, which should get us through until Amazon’s delivery of Colic Calm arrives on Thursday.

Considering that inaccurate information from CVS’s site and phone number cost my child and wife an hour of frustration (again, the Walgreens is about 3 minutes away from our house — instead of a trip that took a total of about 75 minutes, I could have been gone for under 15), I am not going to shop at CVS anytime in the near future.. just wouldn’t make sense. If their site had just had correct hours to start with, I would have either gone ahead and driven up to the 24-hour Plymouth location, or decided to go the Walgreens route.. but in either case, I wouldn’t have had any resentment towards CVS. Since they just wasted an hour of time that I consider to be truly precious (both because of my very young child’s frustration, and the inability to sleep for that hour), however, I won’t be shopping at CVS, well, ever.

I guess the short story is to get the info on your website right, or else you will lose customers, without even knowing it.

Related posts:

1. how to *not* get my business..

I recently ran into an issue with newer versions of XenServer that had me really really confused. I recently moved a VM that is acting as a router from a XenServer 5.0 machine to a XenServer 5.6 machine. This machine runs both OSPF and a DHCP server on top of VLAN interfaces in XenServer, and oddly, both of these services stopped working after I moved the VM.

The network configuration was pretty much identical on the old and new XenServer machines — two NICs, each NIC with a native VLAN of ’1′ (internal network), and a pile of VLANs on top of each NIC for actual networks I care about. A ‘tcpdump’ on the XenServer 5.6 dom0 would show both the DHCP and OSPF packets, but a ‘tcpdump’ within the VM would not show anything. It seemed *odd!*.

After doing some digging, I ran across a forum post at Citrix which described the same issue. The basic issue appears to be that Linux’s bridging implementation in newer kernels eats the 802.1q packets for broadcast addresses (for example, DHCP packets are addressed to the mac ‘FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF’).. in my case, I had the VMs on tagged interfaces on top of ‘eth1′, which XenServer had put into a bridge called ‘xenbr1′. I did not have any VMs using the raw interface for eth1 (ie – adding a VM virtual interface to xenbr1), so I just did a ‘ifconfig xenbr1 down ; brctl delbr xenbr1′ to get rid of that bridge, and everything started working.

This obviously isn’t a long-term solution; just a ‘works-for-now’ hack.. I need to look into a method to disable the native VLAN bridge, and also look into the possibility of using OpenVSwitch to handle the networking, which is supposed to resolve this issue. If you’ve run into this issue, I’d love to hear what you did to get around it!

Related posts:

1. citrix to open-source xenserver
2. Web interface with Java console for XenServer (and Xen Cloud Platform)
3. Android: AT&T Captivate’s wifi networking is broken

If you’ve been a fan of Skillet within the last few years, you’ve probably heard their song Lucy from their album Awake. The song is extremely emotional, and it seems that it immediately resonates with many, many people (I know that it sure did for me.) At previous concerts, and interviews, John Cooper (who is the lead singer and bassist of Skillet, and the author of this song) declined to detail what the song was about.

He said that it was about regret, and that people have adopted it for themselves, and he didn’t want to ruin it for them with the real story. However, during Skillet’s recent tour, he has told the story of Lucy before singing it. Here is what he said at their sold-out double-headliner show with TobyMac at the Target Center on November 13, 2010..

“..this week is the very first time that I’ve ever told what this song is about, because, uh, it’s very special to me, but I feel like it’s time to talk about it a little bit, so.. listen up while I tell you a story about a young girl and a young guy who found themselves in a hard situation. They didn’t know what to do when they found out that she was pregnant; they were young, they didn’t have any money, they were scared, they didn’t want to tell anybody, they didn’t know what to do, and the only option that they could see was to terminate the pregnancy. So that’s what they decided to do… they went to a clinic, they had the procedure done, and at first they felt relieved that all their problems had gone away. But then something happened that they did not expect… and that’s over the next few weeks, which turned into a few months, they began to feel an intense sadness… and a pain and an agony and a guilt that wouldn’t go away. They didn’t know what to do, so they finally went to see a counselor; they said look — tell us what to do, we just don’t know, and the counselor made a suggestion. The counselor said here’s what you need to do — stop acting like you had a procedure, and act like you had a death in the family. So the couple went home and they made three decisions; number one, they decided to have a funeral service for the baby; number two, they bought a tiny little headstone; and they last decision to make was what to name the baby. After a couple weeks they finally decided they would call her… Lucy.”

– John L. Cooper in concert, November 13, 2010; transcribed by Nate Carlson, natecarlson.com

Many people had their theories about what the song was about.. my wife was right, I was wrong. “Lucy” is about the pain that can follow an abortion.. it’s kind of ironic to me, as “Lucy” is one of the songs that I often sing to Kai when he is really upset, and it really helps calm him down.. so Lucy, whoever you were, you live on in the hearts of your parents and in all the people your song has helped, and as the song says, you’ll one day meet your parents again:

Here we are, now you’re in my arms
Here we are for a brand new start
Got to live with the choices I’ve made
And I can’t live with myself today

Me and Lucy walking hand in hand
Me and Lucy never wanna end
Got to live with the choices I’ve made
And I can’t live with myself today

– Lyrics from “Lucy” by John L. Cooper, as performed by Skillet

Related posts:

1. John Cooper of the band Skillet with his fist up in the air and silhouetted by pyrotechnics
2. Ben Kasica of Skillet during a guitar solo in front of fog
3. Jen Ledger of the band Skillet singing and playing the drums

Yup, this post has nothing to do with geekery, and is not humorous or anything like my usual posts. It’s a serious post, and involves religion. If this bothers you, please move on.

My wife and I went to a Skillet/TobyMac double-headliner concert at the Target Center on November 13 with some friends. The show was awesome (as those bands always are), but that’s not what this post is about. Before the Diverse City crew started in on a song (I believe it was “City on our Knees”), Toby shouted out “this is for someone” — I couldn’t catch it. After the song finished, they splashed up the Minneapolis skyline on the screen, and started into the chorus of “God of this City” by Chris Tomlin, which I thought was awesome — my church has kind of adopted that song as an unofficial theme song. When the song was done, the room went dark, with the words “for Kinley” on the screen.

I had no clue what it was about, but hey, I was shooting pictures, and got a few shots of the screen. A few days later, I’m finally processing my concert photos, and figured I’d look it up. It was actually hard to find anything that I could associate with this, until I ran across this article at MinnPost. It turns out that Kinley Ogendi was a 12-year old boy who was murdered by his father, along with one of his sisters and his mom. I couldn’t believe this happened — I had heard about this on the radio, but it was a quick report, and didn’t really stick with me. This is such a sick thing, especially since it could have been prevented.

So how does this relate to the concert? From the MinnPost article linked above, apparently TobyMac was Kinley’s favorite musician, and his classmates knew that, and contacted Toby to see if it was possible to have him play at their school. That wasn’t doable; instead, 60 kids from Kinley’s school were brought to the concert on Toby’s dime.

In any case, I can’t say it better than the song that was played just before “for Kinley” splashed up on the screen..

“For greater things have yet to come
And greater things are still to be done in this City”

We all need to band together and do everything we can to prevent something like this from happening again.

No related posts.

One purchase I regret making is a cruddy little ‘brulee torch’ – underpowered, expensive, and just not worth it. It made its way to the trash can a long time ago.

I took Alton Brown’s advice and picked up a real torch. At the hardware store.

And it makes yummy things.

Like grapefruit brulee. No kidding.

Seriously, try it. It’s delicious! The combination of the burnt sugar and a little bit of salt completely takes away the bitterness of the grapefruit, as promised.

And if you do not have a torch in your kitchen, well, you are missing out.

Related posts:

1. i will never steam asparagus again

A letter to my Grandpa Norm, who passed away on October 16, 2009.

Grandpa Norm,

You died a year ago today. I’ve been very fortunate; you were the first person that I’ve been really close to who has passed away. I still think about you every day, and cherish my memories of the time that I spent with you. It was an honor to be able to be with you the last days before you died; I hope that you knew that your family was with you in your last moments, telling you how much we loved you and remembering you.

I am so glad that you were here long enough to meet your great-grandson Malakai. I tell him on a regular basis how much you meant to me, and how much of a Carlson he is already becoming. My dad reminds me often how tools would disappear from his toolbox when I was young, and when he went looking for them, he’d find them in my toolbox.. and then he’ll grin as he remembers that you use to say the same thing about him. Well, this morning, as I was fixing a window screen, I looked down for one of my tools, and it was missing. What do you know – at 14 months old, Malakai is already “borrowing” his dad’s tools! I guess that is one tradition that does not want to end! I think I first saw the Carlson genes in him when he was a few months old, and thought it was a blast to sit on his bouncer, reach over to the wall, and unscrew all of the speaker terminals.. yup, he’s one of us!

Grandpa, I hope and pray that I will become a man like you. You were the type of Christian that I strive to be — you didn’t just talk the talk, you walked the walk, and showed the love of Christ through your life. If anyone you knew (or didn’t for that matter) needed anything, you were there for them, and never asked for anything in return. You didn’t wait; you just got it done. I may have had my rebellious periods, but I always looked up to you as a role model.

One of my favorite memories from my childhood is each Christmas Eve; after dinner, all of us grandkids would gather around you, and you’d read the Nativity story to us. At the time, I may not have seemed all that interested (there were presents coming after all!), but Grandpa, thank you for taking the time to do it. You helped shape my beliefs on what Christmas is really about.

Thank you for raising my dad, and helping him to follow in your footsteps. I look forward to continuing that tradition with my kids. Thank you for being an involved and loving husband, and not just a breadwinner. Thank you for being willing to punish me and tell me the hard truths, and not just leaving it up to my parents; it is so crucial for kids to have consistency on what they are being taught. I may have had tons of fun at Grandpa and Grandma’s house, but it wasn’t because I was getting away with things that I wouldn’t at home.

Grandpa, I am so sorry that I did not come to see you more often in your later years. My intentions were good, but that means nothing – actions speak louder than words. Once you moved back to Minnesota, I found it so hard to see you — I know that your mind was still with you, and that you understood what I was telling you and that you needed time with your family, but it broke my heart to see you like that, so I didn’t come nearly as often as I should have. Now that you are gone, though, it breaks my heart that I didn’t get those moments in with you; I pray that my grandchildren will be stronger if I am ever suffering like you were.

It was such an honor to attend your funeral, and join with so many friends and family members to celebrate your life. I never had expected that I would want to be a pallbearer, but Grandpa, it was such an amazing honor to be able to help bring your earthly remains to their final resting place. At the reception, it was so much fun to hear the stories about you, and see how much of an impact your life made on others. I saw Stan Harder there, and mentioned that it was great that he was in town so he could join us… turns out that he wasn’t in town for anything else; your impact on him was enough that he took a quick trip up to Minneapolis to say goodbye. Grandpa, your life mattered.

There’s so much more that I could say.. but just know that I love you, I miss you, and I wish you were here.. but I also praise God that you are in a better place. It was so great that you knew where you were going, and that one of the things you were able to say in your later days is that you wanted to go home.. we all knew exactly what you meant, and you are home now. It brings tears to my eyes as I can almost see you being greeted with the phrase “Well done, my good and faithful servant!” Know that your legacy lives on here on earth; I try to remember every day to take the opportunity to help people as you would, and I know that others do as well. You live on through those you left behind.

Your grandson,

Nathan Paul Carlson

A snippet from a song that reminds me of your life every time I hear it — “One Day Too Late” by Skillet:

Today I’m gonna try a little harder
Gonna make every minute last longer
Gonna learn to forgive and forget
‘Cause we don’t have long, gonna make the most of it

Today I’m gonna love my enemies
Reach out to somebody who needs me
Make a change, make the world a better place
‘Cause tomorrow could be one day too late

No related posts.

At my day job, we have recently started rolling out NexentaStor 3 for our VM image storage as a trial. If all goes well, our long-term plans are to eventually migrate all storage from Netapp to NexentaStor. As we started rolling out our NexentaStor trial, one missing feature we quickly ran across is the lack of IPMP (IP Multipathing) support. The network configuration interface that they provide can currently configure aggregated interfaces with the LACP protocol, but they do not have any mechanism to configure IPMP to aggregate interfaces from multiple switches. We were able to work out an approach to configure IPMP manually, and received Nexenta’s blessing to use it in our environment. (Important note: if you are going to try this on a licensed copy of NexentaStor, please check with your support team to ensure that they are ok with you making these changes.)

Updated 2010-Sep-16 — Added information on how to add static routes to configure ipmp ping targets

Server hardware configuration

First of all, I should detail what we are trying to configure. Our production machines are quite similar to the SuperMicro build I documented earlier, with a few varying specs. Here’s what is in it:

• 2x Intel E5620 CPUs
• 48G memory (6x 8G modules)
• 10x 1TB Seagate Constellation ES SAS drives
• 6x Intel 32gb X25-E drives
• 2x Crucial 128gb RealSSD drives
• 2x Intel Gigabit ET quad-port NICs

The machine has an 8TB license, with 2 of the disks configured as hot spares. The Intel SSDs are configured as 3 log-mirrors, and the RealSSDs are configured as cache devices.

Caveats

The only major caveat that I’ve hit with this configuration is that the ipmp interfaces will not be viewable via the Nexenta utilities. You can still see all the underlying interfaces; just not the ipmp ones. It’s mostly cosmetic, but is distracting and annoying.

Of course, YMMV – this worked for me, but no guarantees that it will work for you! :)

Network configuration

Desired configuration

Here is the network configuration we desire:

• LACP Aggregate #1 – 4 gigabit links to Switch-1
• LACP Aggregate #2 – 4 gigabit links to Switch-2
• IPMP Interface #1 (balancing LACP1 and LACP2) – Native VLAN on NICs; access to our management/backend network
• IPMP Interface #2 (balancing LACP1 and LACP2) – VLAN ID 100; VM storage network
• IPMP Interface #3 (balancing LACP1 and LACP2) – VLAN ID 200; NFS storage network

General configuration steps

As far as I know, you cannot do VLAN tagging on top of an IPMP trunk on Solaris, which means that we need to create the VLAN interfaces on each of the aggregate interfaces, and then create three separate IPMP interfaces – one per vlan. Here are the basic configuration steps:

1. Via NMC: Create individual LACP aggregates (aggr1 and aggr2), with igbX interfaces as members.
2. Via NMC: Create VLAN interfaces ’100′ and ’200′ on top of both ‘aggr1′ and ‘aggr2′. This will create the interfaces ‘aggr100001′, ‘aggr100002′, ‘aggr200001′, and ‘aggr200002′.
3. Via NMC: Configure an IP address from within each VLAN on each of these six interfaces. This will allow IPMP to use ICMP probes in addition to link detection to try to find failed links.
4. Via the console: Configure the three IPMP interfaces, and add the six aggr interfaces to the proper IPMP groups.

NMC – Create LACP aggregates

This assumes that whatever interface you configured during installation is *not* one of the interfaces you desire to be part of the aggregate. If that is not true, you will need to be on the system console (via IPMI hopefully!), and destroy that interface first. Here is an example of how to create the aggregates (output from NMC; so this is how it ends up being configured):

nmc@nexenta:/$ setup network aggregation create
Links to aggregate  : igb2,igb3,igb4,igb5
LACP mode           : active
LINK            POLICY   ADDRPOLICY           LACPACTIVITY  LACPTIMER   FLAGS
aggr1           L3,L4    auto                 active        short       -----
nmc@nexenta:/$ setup network aggregation create
Links to aggregate  : igb6,igb7,igb8,igb9
LACP mode           : active
LINK            POLICY   ADDRPOLICY           LACPACTIVITY  LACPTIMER   FLAGS
aggr2           L3,L4    auto                 active        short       -----

NMC – Create vlan interfaces on each aggregate interface

nmc@nexenta:/$ setup network interface aggr1 vlan create
VLAN Id : 100
aggr100001: flags=201000842 mtu 9000 index 39
        inet 0.0.0.0 netmask 0
        ether 0:1b:21:6c:3c:de

nmc@nexenta:/$ setup network interface aggr2 vlan create
VLAN Id : 100
aggr100002: flags=201000842 mtu 9000 index 40
        inet 0.0.0.0 netmask 0
        ether 0:1b:21:6c:3d:de

nmc@nexenta:/$ setup network interface aggr1 vlan create
VLAN Id : 200
aggr200001: flags=201000842 mtu 9000 index 41
        inet 0.0.0.0 netmask 0
        ether 0:1b:21:6c:3e:de 

nmc@nexenta:/$ setup network interface aggr2 vlan create
VLAN Id : 200
aggr200002: flags=201000842 mtu 9000 index 42
        inet 0.0.0.0 netmask 0
        ether 0:1b:21:6c:3f:de

NMC – Assign IP addresses

This assumes the following IP ranges:
Native VLAN: 10.100.0.0/24
VLAN 100: 10.100.100.0/24
VLAN 200: 10.100.200.0/24

It also assumes that aggregate 1 should be assigned .2 within each /24, and aggregate 2 should be assigned .3. The ipmp shared interface will be assigned .1.

nmc@nexenta:/$ setup network interface vlan aggr1 static
aggr1 IP address: 10.100.0.2
aggr1 netmask  : 255.255.255.0
Name Server #1      : 10.0.0.101
Name Server #2      : 10.0.0.102
Name Server #3      :
Gateway IP address  : 172.16.0.254
Enabling aggr1 as 10.100.0.2/255.255.255.0 ... OK.

nmc@nexenta:/$ setup network interface vlan aggr2 static
aggr2 IP address: 10.100.0.3
aggr2 netmask  : 255.255.255.0
Name Server #1      : 10.0.0.101
Name Server #2      : 10.0.0.102
Name Server #3      :
Gateway IP address  : 172.16.0.254
Enabling aggr2 as 10.100.0.3/255.255.255.0 ... OK.

nmc@nexenta:/$ setup network interface vlan aggr100001 static
aggr100001 IP address: 10.100.100.2
aggr100001 netmask  : 255.255.255.0
Name Server #1      : 10.0.0.101
Name Server #2      : 10.0.0.102
Name Server #3      :
Gateway IP address  : 172.16.0.254
Enabling aggr100001 as 10.100.100.2/255.255.255.0 ... OK.

nmc@nexenta:/$ setup network interface vlan aggr100002 static
aggr100002 IP address: 10.100.100.3
aggr100002 netmask  : 255.255.255.0
Name Server #1      : 10.0.0.101
Name Server #2      : 10.0.0.102
Name Server #3      :
Gateway IP address  : 172.16.0.254
Enabling aggr100002 as 10.100.100.3/255.255.255.0 ... OK.

nmc@nexenta:/$ setup network interface vlan aggr200001 static
aggr200001 IP address: 10.100.200.2
aggr200001 netmask  : 255.255.255.0
Name Server #1      : 10.0.0.101
Name Server #2      : 10.0.0.102
Name Server #3      :
Gateway IP address  : 172.16.0.254
Enabling aggr200001 as 10.100.200.2/255.255.255.0 ... OK.

nmc@nexenta:/$ setup network interface vlan aggr200002 static
aggr200002 IP address: 10.100.200.3
aggr200002 netmask  : 255.255.255.0
Name Server #1      : 10.0.0.101
Name Server #2      : 10.0.0.102
Name Server #3      :
Gateway IP address  : 172.16.0.254
Enabling aggr200002 as 10.100.200.3/255.255.255.0 ... OK.

Console – Set up IPMP

First, we need to get into expert mode.

nmc@nexenta:/$ options expert_mode=1                                                                          

nmc@nexenta:/$ !bash
You are about to enter the Unix ("raw") shell and execute low-level Unix command(s). CAUTION: NexentaStor
appliance is not a general purpose operating system: managing the appliance via Unix shell is NOT
recommended. This management console (NMC) is the command-line interface (CLI) of the appliance,
specifically designed for all command-line interactions. Using Unix shell without authorization of your
support provider may not be supported and MAY VOID your license agreement. To display the agreement,
please use 'show appliance license agreement'.
Proceed anyway? (type No to return to the management console)  Yes

root@nexenta:/volumes#

Next step is to set up the hostname files for each of the IPMP interfaces. I will name the interfaces as follows:

ipmp0 – ipmp interface for aggr1 and aggr2
ipmp100000 – ipmp interface for aggr100001 and aggr100002
ipmp200000 – ipmp interface for aggr200001 and aggr200002

These files also set the IP address that we would like the system to apply to these.

root@nexenta:/etc# cat hostname.ipmp0
ipmp group ipmp0 10.100.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
root@nexenta:/etc# cat hostname.ipmp100000
ipmp group ipmp100000 10.100.100.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
root@nexenta:/etc# cat hostname.ipmp200000
ipmp group ipmp200000 10.100.200.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 up

Next, the groups need to be configured in the hostname. files. We need to add ‘group -failover up’ to each of these files, before the ‘up’ at the end. Here are the files after the changes are made:

root@nexenta:/etc# for i in /etc/hostname.aggr* ; do echo $i ; cat $i ; done
/etc/hostname.aggr1
10.100.0.2 netmask 255.255.255.0 mtu 9000  broadcast +  group ipmp0 -failover up
/etc/hostname.aggr2
10.100.0.3 netmask 255.255.255.0 mtu 9000  broadcast + group ipmp0 -failover up
/etc/hostname.aggr100001
10.100.100.2 netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast +  group ipmp100000 -failover up
/etc/hostname.aggr100002
10.100.100.3 netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast + group ipmp100000 -failover up
/etc/hostname.aggr200001
10.100.200.2 netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast +  group ipmp200000 -failover up
/etc/hostname.aggr200002
10.100.200.3 netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast +  group ipmp200000 -failover up

Now that all the interface configs are in place, we can apply it.. here’s the easiest way I figured out; if anyone knows a better way I’d love to hear it!

# svcadm disable svc:/network/physical:default
# for i in aggr1 aggr2 aggr100001 aggr100002 aggr200001 aggr200002 ipmp0 ipmp100000 ipmp200000 ; ifconfig $i unplumb ; done
# svcadm enable svc:/network/physical:default

At this point, all of your interfaces should be up, and all the IP addresses should be pingable. Make sure that you can ping the individual interface IPs, and the IPMP IPs. You should be able to use the ‘ipmpstat’ command to see information about your groups; IE:

root@nexenta:/volumes# ipmpstat -a
ADDRESS                   STATE  GROUP       INBOUND     OUTBOUND
nexenta-vl100        up     ipmp100000    aggr100001    aggr100002 aggr100001
nexenta-vl200        up     ipmp200000    aggr200001    aggr200002 aggr200001
nexenta                up     ipmp0       aggr1       aggr2 aggr1

Note that this configuration provides failover and outbound load balancing, but it does not provide inbound load balancing. If you would like inbound load balancing, you need to configure an IP alias on each of the ipmp interfaces, and then mix up which IP you use from the host that is connecting to your Nexenta machine (or use multipathing if it’s iSCSI!)

One last thing – once everything is configured, you will probably want to define your own ping targets. You can view the ones that ipmp picked automatically by running ‘ipmpstat -t’. On our configuration, on one VLAN, two Nexenta nodes picked each other.. so when we took machine two down (intentionally), machine one marked that interface down, and then when we booted machine two back up, it could not reach machine one’s interface, and marked its interface on that vlan down. Nice race condition. Oddly, mpathd (the daemon that does the checking) does not use a configuration file for ping targets, but instead relies on host routes. What we’ve done is added routes to the individual IP addresses that we would like to have it monitor by using the NMC command ‘setup network routes add’, and specifying the IP address to monitor as both the ‘Destination’ and the ‘Gateway’. We picked four to five IPs on each VLAN that were stable hosts (routers, Xen domain-0′s and the like), and added them on both hosts.. this will give more consistent results, as multiple core machines would have to go down before the interface would be disabled incorrectly.

I hope this helps! Please feel free to leave a comment if you run into any trouble getting it working.

Related posts:

1. Review: SuperMicro’s SC847 (SC847A) 4U chassis with 36 drive bays
2. XenServer Networking: VLANs and MAC broadcast packets
3. Sun adds block-level deduplication to zfs

I was walking the dogs this morning, and ran across this car up the street.. Minnesota license plate ’1RQ’.. I don’t know anything that this could mean besides ‘IRQ’.. a rather geeky concept.. what d’ya think? Is there another meaning? Inquiring minds and all!

Related posts:

1. New puppy!

I’ve finally made the switch from Windows Mobile to Android by way of an AT&T Captivate (which is one of the many Samsung Galaxy S phones.) So far, I’ve been fairly happy – app selection is good, it’s great to have the ability to tinker on it (no, have not rooted it or flashed a custom rom yet), and the screen is great. The only major downfalls I’ve run into so far are the lack of a hardware keyboard (I am so used to being able to type on my phone without looking — I know that there are Android options that have a full keyboard, but I wanted the combination of a full keyboard with a large high-res screen and a fast processor.. the only options available right now are on carriers that I don’t want to go with. However, the T-Mobile G2 looks like it would have fit the bill — too bad I already bought!) and the weak integrated mail client — fortunately K-9 Mail took care of that one.

I’ve only run into one thing which really causes problems that I haven’t been able to fix yet — Samsung’s Android build seems to use old-fashioned classful addressing instead of honoring modern CIDR, and then hides the fact that it is doing that from the user. This means that if you are on a Wifi network that assigns an IP in 10.0.0.0/8, it will assign your netmask as 255.0.0.0 at the OS level, and you will not be able to reach any other subnets in 10.0.0.0/8. This won’t be a problem for the majority of users out there, but for people who have advanced home networks (me!), or connect to a corporate/campus network with their phone, it is likely to completely break the ability to use the network.

Oddly, if you look at the networking on the phone using a tool such as Network Info II, it will always show your netmask as the netmask that the DHCP server sent you. This is what really confused me for awhile — Network Info showed the proper netmask, but I couldn’t reach anything on 10.0.0.0/8 outside of the /24 that my phone’s IP was in. Finally, I figured out how to get the Android SDK working, and accessed the phone using adb. Here’s what I found:

nc@nc-desktop:~$ adb shell
$ ifconfig eth0
eth0: ip 10.0.55.201 mask 255.0.0.0 flags [up broadcast running multicast]
$

*Ahem* – no, my netmask is *not* 255.0.0.0. ;) At this point I assumed that the apps that were displaying 255.255.255.0 at the UI level were just assuming that was my netmask, and figured that it was a problem with the way that my DHCP server was configured. I started to dig around the filesystem, and found the /system/etc/dhcpcd directory — the dhcpcd configuration. The file /system/etc/dhcpcd/dhcpcd-hooks/95-configured looked interesting – it appeared to dump out the ip configuration that it received from the dhcp server into the system properties:

case "${reason}" in
BOUND|INFORM|REBIND|REBOOT|RENEW|TIMEOUT|IPV4LL)
    setprop dhcp.${interface}.ipaddress "${new_ip_address}"
    setprop dhcp.${interface}.gateway   "${new_routers%% *}"
    setprop dhcp.${interface}.mask      "${new_subnet_mask}"
    setprop dhcp.${interface}.leasetime "${new_dhcp_lease_time}"
    setprop dhcp.${interface}.server    "${new_dhcp_server_identifier}"

    setprop dhcp.${interface}.result "ok"
    ;;

I figured that I should be able to use ‘getprop’ to see what was set there; I gave it a shot..

[dhcp.eth0.result]: [ok]
[init.svc.dhcpcd]: [running]
[dhcp.eth0.pid]: [26234]
[dhcp.eth0.reason]: [BOUND]
[dhcp.eth0.dns1]: [8.8.8.8]
[dhcp.eth0.dns2]: [8.8.4.4]
[dhcp.eth0.dns3]: []
[dhcp.eth0.dns4]: []
[dhcp.eth0.ipaddress]: [10.0.55.201]
[dhcp.eth0.gateway]: [10.0.55.254]
[dhcp.eth0.mask]: [255.255.255.0]
[dhcp.eth0.leasetime]: [7200]
[dhcp.eth0.server]: [10.0.55.254]

What do you know – it was receiving the info from the DHCP server and processing it correctly! So this means that whatever utility dhcpcd is using to set up the IP interface must not be working properly, and assuming classful networking.

There are a few posts around the ‘net on this; first, a forum post at AT&T, and then something I posted at xda-developers; however, nobody’s had any luck figuring out why this is yet, or how to fix it (short of rooting the phone.) One workaround is to configure a static IP, but that’s a lame solution.

If anyone knows how to get this working properly I’d love to hear about it! :)

Related posts:

1. XenServer Networking: VLANs and MAC broadcast packets
2. using advanced routing to control traffic across your interfaces
3. Configuring IPMP on NexentaStor 3

If you are using a LSI Logic 92xx (ie, 9211-8i, 9211-4i, 9200-16e, etc) SAS2 controller for your OpenSolaris or NexentaStor storage machine (Solaris-based distributions use the mpt_sas driver for these), you may have had trouble finding the utilities to manage it from a command line (this is useful to force a rescan, bus reset, blink a drive, etc.) I also had these issues awhile ago, and ran across the utility at SuperMicro’s FAQ site (of all places!) I still haven’t found an official download link (at LSI, or in the ‘downloads’ section at SuperMicro), but if you are looking for them, you can find them at:

http://www.supermicro.com/support/faqs/data_lib/FAQ_9633_SAS2IRCU_Phase_5.0-5.00.00.00.zip

The zip file includes the utility for DOS, Linux PPC, Linux x86 (which will also work on x64), Solaris Sparc and X86, and Windows 32-bit and 64-bit.

Here’s hoping these appear somewhere a bit more official sooner than later, and in the meantime, I hope this helps someone find them!

Related posts:

1. Review: SuperMicro’s SC847 (SC847A) 4U chassis with 36 drive bays
2. Sun adds block-level deduplication to zfs
3. Configuring IPMP on NexentaStor 3

I recently posted the results of my first attempts at HDR photography. Since then, I’ve been craving more – what can I say, it’s fun! I had some time to myself at home tonight, so I found some random items and, well, took pictures of them. For better or worse, most of this collection should probably be called the ‘vice collection’ — cigars and booze.. I was looking for something with interesting color, and well, that’s what I found!

I’m not planning on posting any of the original images, before and after shots, etc here.. if you are interested in that geek-info, comment, and I’ll get it up!

Also, if you have any suggestions of ‘good things’ to take photos of using HDR, I would love to hear about it!

First, the non-vices. ;)

Crown Moulding ledges with sundries

One thing that caught my eye were the shelves on our living room wall where we have some of our wedding keepsakes, etc, and some of our favorite wedding photos on a 5×20 print above one of the shelves. I like the way this turned out..

Our wooden bassinet

Anyone who’s followed my son’s photo blog for awhile has seen this wonderful white wooden bassinet pop up a few times. My grandpa made it ages ago, and I love the darn thing. I think I went a bit heavy on the HDR on this one, but rather like the result – what do you think?

Now, for the vices..

Doublewood #1 – uncorked bottle

One of the scotches I enjoy on the rare occasion that I drink it is Balvenie Doublewood. Here is an image of a bottle with the cork out along with all the packaging that it came with. I like the way that the HDR makes the caramel color of the scotch pop.

Doublewood #2 – corked bottle

Same bottle of Balvenie Doublewood as above, but with a cork in it. ;) I love the shadow on the tube.. using HDR allowed me to accentuate that much more than a single photo would have.

Doublewood #3 – with a cigar

When my wife and I took a trip down to the Dominican Republic two years ago, we brought some cigars back with us – some hand-rolled cigars from a small shop, and some Dominican “Cohibas.” I don’t know how related these are to Cuban Cohibas, but they seem pretty decent. I am also not much of a cigar smoker, but man alive, it goes well with scotch! In any case, here’s the bottle of Balvenie Doublewood yet again, this time with the cork out and a Dominican Cohiba.

Dominican Cohibas in their box

Here’s a HDR image of the Dominican Cohibas in the cigar box that they came in.

Booze-a-plenty

A selection of liquor from the shelf that I thought looked interesting. In the foreground is a bottle of Grey Goose; behind it stands Sailor Jerry, a bottle of Beefeater gin, and a bottle of Hypnotiq. I’m not sure if it’s sad that only one bottle in this photo has been opened, even though three of them have been on my liquor shelf for at least three years..

I liked the results of many of these shots, but outdoor shooting was much more fun! I will have to go exploring outside and see whatelse my lens can find.

Related posts:

1. Playing around with HDR Photography

My wife and I recently took a quick overnight trip to Stillwater, MN for our anniversary. We came out of the Dock Cafe right around dusk, and I saw some opportunities for some pictures that I thought could be cool, but knew that a single standard exposure would not capture the reality of what is there. I hadn’t ever tried HDR photography before, but knew enough about it to know that it’d take the results of several bracketed images and let me build an image that captured what I actually saw. So I went ahead and took four sets of bracketed images – the first set I did 7 images, and the rest I did 9 images. Once I got back home, I figured I’d do some searching to see how to assemble them, and came across a HDR tutorial at Stuck in Customs. I used that tutorial as a baseline, but edited the workflow a bit as I went.

Set #1: Stillwater Lift Bridge

This is a photo of the Stillwater Lift Bridge – a major landmark in the area. I also love the old-school houseboat in the foreground! The HDR image above was built from 7 bracketed exposures, where the others were built from 9. I think this is my favorite out of these first four I’ve tried. My process for this image:

1. Import the raw images (I always shoot in raw on my D200, got tired of JPEG long ago) into Lightroom 3
2. Select the seven raw images in Lightroom, right-click, go to Export->Photomatix Pro (Note – this assumes that you have Photomatix installed as per the article above!)
3. Select 16-bit TIFF for the output type, ‘Generate HDR Image’, ‘Go Directly To Tone Map’, and enable the automatically-add-to-Lightroom option, with stacking. This will stack the final image with the first image (which is the image that you would get from the camera if you weren’t bracketing), and makes it easy to find for processing.
4. Ran through the Photomatix process as recommended in the Stuck in Customs article, until things looked ‘right’.
5. After I was satisfied with the HDR image, I opened the final image in Photoshop, and did some artifact correction (replaced the wavy flag caused by multiple exposures with a breeze blowing the flag around, and cleaned up some ghosting from a person entering the frame from the right as the images were taken.) I also did a bit of minor color correction to get things to ‘pop’ a bit, and did noise reduction with NeatImage Pro.

If you are interested, here are the original images this was assembled from, in order of exposure:

As you can see, the HDR version just has more ‘pop’ than any of the others – but I didn’t take it to an extreme.

Set #2: “Old Building”

This image is of a building that you can see from the road by The Dock Cafe if you look back towards Highway 36. Not sure what the building is – would love to hear from anyone who does know! This was assembled from 9 images, using the same technique as above – the only difference is that I did not need to do any artifact correction. Original images..

Set #3: Stillwater Trolly

This image is also taken from the street right in front of the Dock Cafe. It is of the Stillwater Trolly, which was shut down for the day by this time. 9 original images; I did not edit the final result, but should have – there are a ton of artifacts present in it. I didn’t really like the final result all that much so I haven’t bothered.. but if anyone else enjoys it I will either make raw copies available or do the work. ;) Originals..

Set #4: The Dock Cafe logo

Last attempt of the night is a shot of the logo for the Dock Cafe (good food and atmosphere by the way!) Again, not all that happy with my HDR result, so didn’t edit out the artifacts in the lower-lefthand corner. Originals..

That’s all folks..

So that’s it for my first foray into HDR! Love to hear what anyone else who has played around with HDR thinks of my results, critiques and flames are welcome. I’d also love to hear from anyone who hasn’t touched it yet but would like to! :) Thanks for reading and hope it was interesting at the least!

Related posts:

1. HDR photography – around the house and vices
2. John Cooper of Skillet playing his bass, singing, and lit up by pyrotechnics
3. Jen Ledger of the band Skillet singing and playing the drums

I was driving to work the other day, and spotted this garbage truck with the best company slogan I’ve ever seen..

The slogan on the garbage truck is “Satisfaction Guaranteed or Double Your Trash Back”.

I love it. From a quick Google search, it appears that this is quite a popular slogan for a variety of trash companies.. this particular one was Highland Sanitation.

No related posts.

A friend of ours was having a engagement party up in New Hope, MN tonight (June 25 2010).. we knew the weather was going to be kind of nasty, but we figured that Tiff’s parents live about four miles from our friend’s house, so Kai could be with a babysitter nearby, and decided that we’d go ahead and partay. ;) However, between the time that we dropped Kai off at Tiff’s parents and left for our friend’s house, the rain had picked way up and made roads that we had been on 15 minutes before impassable. I (as usual) had my camera along, and snapped some photos while we tried to find a route to our friends house that wasn’t covered in a few feet of water.. it took us about 30 minutes to travel those few miles. In any case, the good news is there didn’t seem to be anyone hurt!

Click any image for a larger view

Flooding under the railway overpass on 42nd Avenue/County Road 9 between Quebec Ave and Oregon Ave in New Hope, MN.

Crystal police officers have arrived to help make sure that nobody is in the flooded cars and keep everyone safe.

There are five vehicles in the water that I counted; three of the cars are almost entirely submerged. A witness mentioned that there was a baby in one of those cars, and that the man driving had carried/swam the baby out a few moments before we arrived.. yikes!!

If you look on the right hand side of this photo, you can see some water movement – almost seems like water was channeled into this area.

Sorry for the poor quality photo. ;( One of the three almost-entirely-submerged vehicles.. there is also water pouring down from the apartment complex which has suites for lease!

I believed the SUV in the upper left of the photo actually tried to make it through the water after I started taking shots – not positive though. I was amazed at the number of cars we saw going through water that was far too deep for them to handle as we found a route to our friend’s house.

I was curious what the guy in the blue shirt was looking for in the car.. maybe he was the owner trying to get his belongings? Who knows..

Crystal police officers wading into the water.. about this time a fireman standing near me turned to another officer on the scene and asked if the PD needed the fire department’s boat. That would have been interesting! You can also clearly see the flow of water from the apartment complex above in this picture; look behind the railing in the upper-right third of the picture.

Officers taking charge to make sure that everyone is accounted for. From the moment they arrived (which was about a minute or so previous to this shot), they were putting together who owned each car, making sure that nobody was missing.

Fire department and police officers arriving on the west side of the flooded area.

At this point I think most of the onlookers realized everything was OK, and the cars that were not in the water started trying to get out of there.

About 10 minutes later, as we’re back on the road trying to find a non-flooded route, we came across some kids who were quite enjoying the turn of events.

Swinging above a nice pool of cool water.. life is grand!

Oh, and in case you missed it in the teaser image.. if you ordered a pizza from Sarpino’s Pizzaria (763-746-7990 I guess!), and it failed to arrive on time, and they gave you a long story about the delivery guy getting caught in a flood, they were not lying. You wouldn’t want the soggy pizza anyways, would you?

By the time we were headed back to Tiff’s parents to pick up our son and head home (around 11:15pm?), the roads were totally clear again, and there was no real sign of flooding – crazy! We drove under the same underpass that hours before had at least 3-4 feet of water under it.

For anyone involved in this – hope that you get things straightened out with your insurance companies ASAP, and if anyone was injured in the storms, to a quick recovery! Also, a sincere thank you to the police officers, fire fighters, and other emergency response personnel who respond so quickly to these type of events — your work is appreciated!

Oh, and if anyone wants tips on how to get the stench out of a car that has been flooded.. well, my advice is probably not to, but this stuff might work…. ;)

No related posts.

Our pups (Chimo and Oakley) have been going to Woofdah for a couple years now.. we tried a few different doggy daycares in the Minneapolis area, and this is by far the best one we have found (which is also conveniently located near us in Burnsville.) The staff actually gets to know our dogs, and is able to tell us if they are ever acting abnormal at daycare, and genuinely cares about us and the pups.

They have been renting space in a warehouse up until now, and needed a larger location, so they just finished up their new building. It’s located right across the street from Burnsville High School, so it’s a few blocks closer to us – although my choice of routes to get there will be limited a bit. ;) They had an open house at it today (May 15 2010) for the two-legged customers to explore the new place.. normally customers are unable to go into the dog areas because of insurance reasons, but today there were no puppies present, so we got to check it out. (By the time this goes up, though, the pups will probably be there!) I decided to bring my camera along and snap a few photos.. hope you enjoy a peek into the new building! Make our dogs jealous and tell them how great it is – they won’t get to see it until Wednesday..

I do think that I will miss the old location.. it’s been fun seeing Woofdah grow there. However, this is better in pretty much every way, and will be a great place for our pups!

No related posts.

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