Nate Carlson's Blog (aka Ramblings of the Village Idiot)

Some small wins..

nc — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:23:52 +0000

So I’ve been trying to have some wins in life.. and in the last weeks, I’ve managed to make a few, albeit small ones. I figured I’d post these publicly so all my friends, enemies, and random haters on the ‘net can mock me mercilessly if necessary. ;)

No drive-thru since 2/18. I apologize to my local McDonalds for putting them out of business.
No non-frozen/non-homemade pizza since 2/19!
For the last two weeks, I’ve been successfully getting up by the time I target (~6:30 on work days, and whatever time I need to be up on weekends) a majority of the days.
For the last two weeks, I’ve been averaging two cans or less of sugary caffeinated goodness, down from ~6-8 cans (I know, I know!) I’ve discovered my addiction is caffeine and not the cola itself – so coffee and the occasional 200mg “evil” booster.
For the last two to three weeks, I’ve been getting the pups out for a walk whenever I need to (IE, when Tiff, Kai and I are going to be out of the house) – next up, at least once a day, every day

I know, nothing major at all – but hey, small steps, right? :)

No related posts.

Sun’s Unified Storage 7210 – designed to disappoint?

nc — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:49:59 +0000

At my day job, we purchased 3 Sun (er, Oracle) 7210’s (part of their ‘Unified Storage’ platform; the machines are X4540’s with their specialized Unified Storage OS) on the recommendation of one of our vendors. The models we purchased contained 48 250gb disks and 32gb memory — no SSD’s. Our intent was to use these for our VM image storage (VM infrastructure is Xen, using LVM-over-iSCSI to the 7210’s.) We planned to install two units in production, one in our DR environment, and to use ZFS replication to have VM disaster recovery bliss.

It’s been a disaster.

Update [2010/02/26]: Sun has really stepped up to the plate and gotten the right people on this issue. I’m not sure if it’s what I posted here, the numerous ex-Sun contacts that I had who pinged people they knew, or the president of our VAR hammering at some of his contacts within Sun/Oracle. I will keep updating as we work towards RCA’s and a resolution.

Here’s the pre-sales issues we had with the unit..

ZFS does not use traditional raid controllers, and uses your system memory as cache. This is great for reads (massive cache!), but for writes, it means that it’s extremely dangerous to turn write caching on. The memory used for write caching (which could be up to 32G in our system, or more in one with more memory) is not battery-backed, so if the system fails in any way (power supply failure, crash, power failure, etc.), any data in that cache is gone. On a “normal” ZFS configuration with SSD’s for the ZIL, there wouldn’t be a need for write caching in memory – data is cached on the write-optimized SSD’s, and if your system crashes, it will still be there. However, the model we ended up with does not contain a SSD, and the Sun Oracle-supported SSD for this unit is around $6000 (18gb ‘Logzilla’.) YIKES.
Without SSD or write cache (we need the write cache disabled for the reasons described above), the maximum streaming synchronous write speed I have been able to get over iSCSI is ~35MB/s – that’s with triple-mirrored disks. With this configuration, if I have multiple virtual machines running and start a write-heavy process, the other VMs will slow to a crawl with high I/O wait. Not acceptable in production.
For the reasons above, I firmly believe that Sun Oracle should NOT sell any ZFS-based storage appliances without SSDs – at least not without a big warning sticker that says “Make sure you can afford to either lose any data in cache (in some environments this would not be a huge issue), or work with the speeds described above.
Sun Oracle no longer offers Try-and-Buy programs. We’ve been told that once you open the unit, it’s yours. Not a strong sign that they are confident in their technology. Oh, and we were told this after we had purchased and installed the units.

Now, for the technical problems we’ve been having..

The DR unit has had problems since a few days after we installed it. It’s been throwing fan errors, which Sun Oracle has told us is a ‘firmware bug’ with no fix (even though it only happens on one of three nodes) – the workaround is to restart the service processor. It also has had a bad CPU, and worst of all, it started rebooting every night. Sun Oracle support had us jump through a zillion hoops for over a month to try to debug the nightly reboot issue, replaced various components (including the motherboard), and never came up with a workable solution. Then, a few weeks ago, after 4-5 days of not touching the system (I had been assigned to other tasks and the coworker who was taking it over was on vacation, plus a weekend), the reboots suddenly stopped. We were never able to get the reboots to either alert Sun Oracle via the phone home mechanism, or trigger the alerts we had set up via the web GUI – even though it was rebooting unexpectedly. There was no easy way to figure out that it had rebooted, in fact – I ended up having to go to the shell (naughty!) and run ‘last’ to see the reboot times. If we were relying on the GUI, and didn’t have monitoring set up of the system (which is what alerted us to the reboots), we wouldn’t have known until we put a production load on it — which, since this is a DR unit, would only have been when we failed to our DR site. Sun Oracle support has not been able to offer a RCA, except to say that whenever it rebooted the mpt driver threw errors. Since it ‘fixed itself’, Sun Oracle considered the case closed. The combination of the machine being flaky from the start combined with the fact that Sun Oracle couldn’t debug the issue has made us push for a replacement unit, but it seems nobody in Sun Oracle support has the authority to replace a chunk of hardware that can’t be trusted.
A few weeks into debugging the issues with the DR unit, both of the production units (which were taking a test workload) developed problems at the same time. One of them stopped answering on the VLAN that we were running iSCSI on (which was trunked on top of the management VLAN; that VLAN continued to work fine), and the other turned itself off. The best part is this happened within 10 minutes of each other. Again, Sun Oracle support is unable to give us a root cause for either issue. The systems are completely isolated from each other physically (separate circuits, separate racks in different areas of the data center, etc) — the only shared component is the network (both are dual-homed to two switches.) Nothing else in the data center exhibited any issues during this period – the switches didn’t show any oddities, other systems and PDU’s on the same UPS branch did not show power issues, etc. Again, Sun Oracle’s response was “if it happens again let us know.” Even though we would have taken a full production outage of _everything_ because of this. Again, neither of the units triggered the phone-home or self-alert functionality when these issues occurred.
When troubleshooting with Sun Oracle, their first step is to reboot the system into a debug mode. These are production storage appliances – having to reboot to get a RCA for a previous issue is *not* acceptable! Again, this makes it feel more like “this a server that should be in a redundant zero-shared config” more than a storage appliance.

Really, I can understand technical issues; they happen with every product. However, it appears that the way the specialized version of Solaris is set up on these, they are incapable of getting useful logs. On top of that, the support has been worse than useless. They have chewed through a ton of our time (we’ve probably spent at least 4 man-weeks working with them on this), and have not come back with anything useful. After escalating the tickets, nobody has the authority to either replace a box or allow us to return it. The escalation process is slow and doesn’t actually really seem to do anything; after requesting escalations, we don’t get higher-level contacts (the only way I’ve managed to do that so far is by blind-calling the service center when our regular tech wasn’t available, and requesting a callback), and the people it’s escalated to still have no power to resolve our issues. Every time we request escalation it also seems to slow the process by at least a few days – it’s crazy. The support people all seem to want to help, but the system is stacked against them.

So, right now I’m stuck with 3 7210’s that have all had issues, that I don’t trust in production, and I can’t return. Thanks a lot Sun Oracle! What happened to the old-fashioned Sun, where the gear was way too expensive (and yes, these 7210’s were expensive), but the support made up for it?

My advice to you if you are looking at a Unified Storage appliance is to run far away – the ones with SSDs included would in all likelyhood perform as expected, but the quality of the support and lack of customer service will scare me away from ever making a Sun Oracle purchase again.

Update [2010/02/24] – After chatting with many contacts that I used to have within Sun, I have changed most of the relevant ‘Sun’ names to ‘Oracle’. It seems that when Oracle purchased Sun, many, many good people were let go. Bummer.

Sarah Anthony of The Letter Black (aka Rock Photography is Fun Part 8)

nc — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 05:25:47 +0000

Sarah Anthony of the band The Letter Black singing; shot at the Minneapolis Convention Center on November 14, 2009 during Skillet’s ‘Awake and Alive’ concert tour.

More Sarah Anthony of The Letter Black. Again, they rock — buy their album.

Sarah Anthony of The Letter Black performing during Skillet’s Awake and Alive tour

nc — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 02:51:47 +0000

Sarah Anthony of the band The Letter Black; shot at the Minneapolis Convention Center on November 14, 2009 during Skillet’s ‘Awake and Alive’ concert tour.

This is Sarah Anthony of the band The Letter Black. I had never heard of this band before Skillet’s Awake and Alive tour, but they are awesome. Remind me a lot of Evanescence, but different. Highly recommend you pick up their album, Breaking the Silence – it’s not expensive. I’m also looking forward to their next one, and seeing them live in concert again!

I should note that they were significantly easier to photograph than Skillet.. no pyro and no fog == happy photographer. ;)

DRBD accepted to mainline kernel for 2.6.33!

nc — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 18:07:04 +0000

As announced on Florian Haas’s blog, DRBD has been accepted into the mainline Linux kernel, and will be released with 2.6.33. Congratulations to the DRBD team on this major milestone! This will make the lives of all DRBD users much, much easier.

For those of you who are not aware, DRBD is a synchronous block-level replication solution for Linux that allows you to do nifty things like active/active fileservers, active/passive database configurations, and many other nifty solutions. With a commercial add-on called DRBD proxy, it’s possible to do long-distance replication for DR clusters or whatnot. DRBD is also completely filesystem independent.

In any case, if you’ve been hesitating to try DRBD because of the pain of out-of-tree modules, this will no longer be an issue.

Mediacom, stop messing with my packets!

nc — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 03:55:52 +0000

Mediacom keeps getting worse and worse. As I’ve mentioned before. Mediacom is my ISP at home. Unfortunately, it’s the only service of reasonable speed at a decent price available for my address.

For the past few months, I’ve noticed that I seemingly randomly get redirected to a “Mediacom Assist” page, located at http://assist.mediacomcable.com. I assumed that they were being evil, and inspecting dns packets for NXDOMAIN (I don’t use their DNS servers, so it couldn’t just be Sitefinder-type junk.) However, I seemed to randomly hit links to working sites (ie, google.com) that also returned this error – just figured it was a fluke in their mechanism, and moved on. I just had a kid, after all, I’m too busy to be digging into what stupid things my ISP is doing! ;)
Tonight, I was reading the fun thread about MacPadd at Tom’s Hardware, and they have a link to the LiveJournal blog that MacPadd was posting at for awhile. The given URL was macpadd.livejournal.com. When I hit this page, Mediacom sends me over to “Assist”. I know that LiveJournal has a wildcard set up, so this should not be possible. For the fun of it, I set up a tcpdump, and checked what happens when I try to hit that page.. here are the results:

Request:

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: macpadd.livejournal.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091109 Ubuntu/9.10 (karmic) Firefox/3.5.5 FirePHP/0.3
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflatehttp://www.natecarlson.com/wp-admin/plugins.php
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive

Reply:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
The Search Guide redirection service has been enabled to provide helpful searches from browser queries. You entered a non-existent url and your browser attempted to redirect you with Javascript. To enable this please update your browser preferences. To turn off this feature please click this here

Ahem. The same query from a non-mediacom machine returns the expected 404 page from LiveJournal. So, apparently Mediacom is doing deep packet inspection, and rewriting 404’s under certain circumstances. The page that they redirect you to also has a pile of ‘Sponsored Links’ that are going to make them cash. Chances are this is all about the cash for them. They offer an opt-out, but who knows what else they are hijacking? This is just wrong and EVIL. For all I know, they could intercepting ads for Comcast or satellite TV and replacing them with their own. Or just about anything else, as long as money is involved.

Could we please get a net neutrality bill passed that says that ISP’s are not allowed to muck with our packets in this way? Well, maybe not – any net neutrality bill that would actually get passed would probably contain more harm than good. ;)

After figuring out what they were doing, I found lots of other posts about this.. anyone else find this to be pathetic?

Web interface with Java console for XenServer (and Xen Cloud Platform)

nc — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 22:36:12 +0000

One of the things that is nice with the release of Xen Cloud Platform (which I mentioned previously) is Project XVP. As the site mentions, it has four major components – xvp (a VNC proxy to allow you to connect to the console of a VM hosted on XenServer or Xen Cloud Platform), xvpviewer (TightVNC’s Java client extended to support XenServer-specific functions), xvpweb (a simple web interface to manage your VM’s), and xvpdiscover (an app to build a config file suitable for xvpweb and xvp.)

The executive summary is that there is now an open-source project available to get console access to XenServer machines – without the need for XenCenter on Windows. I believe this is also the only method to get access to the console on Xen Cloud Platform machines, but would love to be proven wrong. ;)

I followed the directions provided at the xvp page to build the RPM’s.. I was building on a CentOS 5.0 x64 system (I’m usually a Debian user and this was a spare VM I had laying around), and while building libxenserver, ran into the following errors:

/usr/bin/ld: skipping incompatible /usr/lib/libgssapi_krb5.so when searching for -lgssapi_krb5 /usr/bin/ld: skipping incompatible /usr/lib/libgssapi_krb5.a when searching for -lgssapi_krb5

It looks like older versions of RHEL/CentOS5 on 64-bit put the wrong development libraries in /usr/lib, gah! This page has one method of fixing this; the other is to remove the devel packages, and re-install only the 64-bit versions.. RHEL/CentOS bugs me on 64-bit since they install both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of stuff in the same areas, sigh.

In any case, after fixing the dev libraries, the xvp SRPM built as expected. Be sure that you have the CentOS ‘Extras’ repo enabled (needed for php-mcrypt), and install the RPM’s generated.

To generate a config file, you can run the ‘xvpdiscover’ command. It will prompt you for a hostname, username, and password (these are creds for a XenServer host), vnc password (this is a password needed to VNC in), and output file. Save the output to /etc/xvp.conf, and make sure the permissions are set so that your web server can access it. Once this is done, fire up xvp with ‘/etc/init.d/xvp start’.

After doing this, when I tried to hit the web page. I got a blank page back, and the Apache error log shows:

PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in /var/www/html/xvpweb/index.php on line 35

Turns out that CentOS leaves short_open_tags turned on by default. Edit /etc/php.ini, and change ’short_open_tag = On’ to ’short_open_tag = Off’, and restart Apache.

After doing that, I hit the web page again, and after a few moments, a list of all the VM’s along with their status popped up. There is a small Console icon by each VM, click it, and you’ve got the console. The console gives you simple operations such as shutting down the VM, rebooting the VM, etc. Nice!

The web interface is actually not necessary at all if you just want to use a raw VNC client and don’t care about those extra functions – you can check /var/log/xvp.log once xvp is started, and get the VNC port number for each VM. Then you can use your favorite VNC client to connect.

Things I’d love to see in the future:

Automatic reconfiguration — if you add or remove a VM right now, you will need to regenerate the config file. You can do this via cron, but it’d be nice if it could happen dynamically.
Ability to authenticate both the web page and the VNC passwords against the XenServer database. I guess VNC password doesn’t matter if you never manually connect to VNC, but it would be great to not have to configure authentication sources in two different places.
Ability to see tags, descriptions, etc in the web interface, and sort in various ways (next item down covers this, though.)
The web interface is very, very basic. It’d be nice to see other simple features integrated – IE, reboot, live migrate, etc. Shouldn’t be hard at all to do, just needs someone to do it.
It would also be nice to see the web interface extended to fully replace XenCenter, at least for monitoring functions (ie, graphing, etc.). That will take a lot of development. ;) I’d love to be able to delete XenCenter (and my Windows VM).
Debian or Ubuntu packages. ;) This would not be difficult at all.

In any case, this means I no longer have to fire up a Windows VM just to access the consoles of my XenServer VM’s, which is very much appreciated!

Google launches new public DNS resolver service, OpenDNS competitor

nc — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 19:30:10 +0000

Google recently launched a new Public DNS resolution service. I’m very excited to see this.. the most commonly-used public resolver up until now has been OpenDNS, which works fairly well, but has some features that I do not likely — namely, it will (by default) redirect any requests for non-existing domains to a host on their network, which will then reply to web pages with a pretty “This doesn’t exist” page. However, this can cause havoc for other services, such as SMTP. They will also attempt to auto-correct mistyped domains, which is handy, but just gives me the creeps. All of this can be disabled, but to do that, you have to sign up for an account with them, and register whatever IP you happen to be on. Pain in the rear. And it also gives them the ability to track your queries to a username, although you can ‘disable’ that feature too.

I did some quick tests against Google’s service, and it looks great so far – excellent response times, and not doing any of the “naughty stuff”. It seems that the “naughty stuff” was actually one of the things they wanted to prevent, which I completely agree with.

If you’ve been beta testing this or trying it out since the announcement, let me know how it’s going for you!

What a cute puppy!

nc — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:28:01 +0000

This is Lucky Ehrlich – a black and tan Cavalier King Charles spaniel who stayed with us for a few days while their son was being born.

He’s a little sweetheart! Our friend’s parents adopted one of Lucky’s brothers, who was a Ruby Cavalier King Charles. Both of them are great dogs. If you are looking for a small to medium size dog, they are awesome, and cute.. he gets along very well with our husky and lab malamute too. And did I mention cute?

Why I made a “stupid” financial move – intentionally

nc — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:31:51 +0000

On my previous post, I mentioned that we were debating making the switch from a PPO to an HSA. Thanks to all who commented! We’ve decided to go the HSA route, and what’s more, we’ve decided to use the option to roll over funds from an IRA to the HSA (we are contributing the maximum contribution for 2010 via the IRA transfer.)

Many financial experts would consider this to be a stupid decision (we’re touching our retirement funds!), and usually I would agree. However, with our new arrival, Tiff isn’t working.. this means that money is very tight, and making this move allows us to not worry about health expenses at all for the next two years. Once our debt is paid down to a reasonable level, we’re planning on contributing 15%+ to retirement, so I’m not overly concerned that I’m taking $6000 away from the pool of money that can earn long-term compound interest.

If the IRA transfer had the regular penalties (even if it was just the 10% tax for early withdrawal), I would not have considered this – however, in this case, it lets us use our IRA funds with zero penalties. I was also able to sell funs in the IRA that was worth more than we paid for it.. I’d hate to be taking a loss on fund sales right now, as they would likely recover within the next few years.

In your opinion, is this a real boneheaded move, or is it reasonable in our situation? I’d love to hear what you think!

John Cooper of Skillet playing his bass, singing, and lit up by pyrotechnics

nc — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 19:09:54 +0000

John Cooper of the band Skillet; shot at the Minneapolis Convention Center on November 14, 2009 during the ‘Awake and Alive’ concert tour.

Non-silhouette shot of John Cooper of the band Skillet playing his bass in front of the pyro. Skillet’s use of pyro is great – not overly distracting, and very well timed to the music. You can also see some of his ‘Forgiven’ tattoo on his left forearm.. at some point I’d like to get a similar one. ;) If anyone knows what kind of guitar his bass is, I’d love to know – it’s gorgeous!

Ben Kasica of the band Skillet with pyrotechnics in the background

nc — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 15:07:50 +0000

Silhouette of Ben Kasica of the band Skillet; shot at the Minneapolis Convention Center on November 14, 2009 during the ‘Awake and Alive’ concert tour.

Once again, Skillet loves pyro. Here’s a shot of their lead guitarist, Ben Kasica, with fire in the background.

Close-up of Korey Cooper of the band Skillet singing with fog in the background

nc — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:04:57 +0000

Korey Cooper of the band Skillet; shot at the Minneapolis Convention Center on November 14, 2009 during the ‘Awake and Alive’ concert tour.

Korey is Skillet’s keyboardist, backup guitarist, and backing vocalist. In other words, she stays busy on the stage! She’s very hard to get pictures of, as she never stays still for more than about a second! I was able to get a few decent shots though.

Jen Ledger of the band Skillet singing and playing the drums

nc — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:59:39 +0000

Jen Ledger of the band Skillet; shot at the Minneapolis Convention Center on November 14, 2009 during the ‘Awake and Alive’ concert tour.

Jen is Skillet’s drummer, and also performs vocals on many of their new tracks (Hero, Awake and Alive, etc.) It’s quite impressive to see a drummer singing while they play – I can’t imagine that’s easy! She also does a vocal solo in ‘Yours to Hold’ in the Awake and Alive tour, like she did on the Comatose tour.

It was difficult to get pictures of Jen, as the drumset is near the back of the stage, and generally covered with fog and smoke. Managed to get a few usable shots though!

Ben Kasica of Skillet during a guitar solo in front of fog

nc — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:54:09 +0000

Ben Kasica of the band Skillet; shot at the Minneapolis Convention Center on November 14, 2009 during the ‘Awake and Alive’ concert tour.

OK, so I enjoyed the Skillet concert a little too much, and decided to post some more of the pictures. ;) This is a shot of Ben Kasica (Skillet’s lead guitar player) during his guitar solo – quite impressive. At some point I’d really like to learn to play.. on my list of things to do! He was in front of a nice backdrop of fog.. I like how it turned out.

One thing I found with rock photography is that I didn’t have much time to compose my shots. For example, in this picture, I would really have liked to have the head of the guitar included. Can’t have everything, I suppose..

Site updates; switched themes to Headway, then Thesis

nc — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:20:16 +0000

As I’m sure my regular readers have noticed (and as I mentioned here), my site has undergone a redesign. Instead of having my articles sections managed via a custom (and ancient) php mini-framework that I wrote many years ago, I’ve imported everything into WordPress. This means that people can now leave comments on all pages, and that I can apply updates in a much easier way. Plus, it allows for easier site-wide changes, etc.

I decided to try out a so-called “premium” theme for Wordpress, as they are supposed to have more features than the free ones (although that is debatable), and more importantly to me, it should be possible to do more things without any customization (again – my goal here is to keep it as easy as possible to maintain this site.) They are also relatively inexpensive. At first, I switched to the Headway theme, as it’s new and glitzy. However, I ran into one major annoyance (for me) – there was no easy way to add categories to the navigation menu and still have the “tab” effect work properly. This probably wouldn’t be an issue for most people, but since that’s how I was designing my navigation, well, it caused issues for me. Plus, when I attempted to upgrade to 1.5 (released a few days after the transition), I completely broke, well, everything related to the theme. At that point, I decided to call Headway quits (the author offers a 30-day money-back-guarantee, and did not give me any hassles at all to get a refund), and migrate to the tried-and-true Thesis. Its setup interface is not near as nice as Headway’s, but I managed to get it set up the way I’d like. I’m still going to be doing a lot more tweaking over time, but at least it’s getting there. ;)

Let me know what you think of the new layout.. I’m also going to try to do some photoblogging (starting with a couple more shots from the Skillet concert), so hope you enjoy!

John Cooper of the band Skillet with his fist up in the air and silhouetted by pyrotechnics

nc — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 04:41:35 +0000

Silhouette of John Cooper of the band Skillet; shot at the Minneapolis Convention Center on November 14, 2009 during the ‘Awake and Alive’ concert tour.

NOTE: Wallpaper-sized copies of this available here. Make this your background!

For once, I brought a real camera (my trusty Nikon D200) with a real lens (Nikon 70-200 f/2.8 VR) to a concert. And I had good seats (second row, just off center.) And it was a lot of fun to photograph! This is one of my favorite shots.. they had lots of pyro during the show, which made for great effects, but also made it difficult to get good shots. And the entire auditorium was filled with smoke by the end of the show. This is one of the ones that I was really happy with; a lot of them had lots of fog and smoke in them. In any case, it was a great show — I may decide to post more pictures later too.

Are there any open-source worm filesystems?

nc — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:59:20 +0000

I recently came across Nexenta’s WORM plugin for their commercial storage system, which is based on the OpenSolaris kernel and ZFS. For those of you that aren’t familiar with the term, WORM means ‘write-once read-many’ — in other words, after it’s written it cannot be modified, but can be read any number of times. I’d love to see support for this in an open-source filesystem (specifically, I’d like to store my photo archive on WORM, where once I’ve copied the photos off the flash disk any updates/edits need to go to a parallel read/write folder), but am not finding anything – if anyone is aware of a project that implements this, I’d love to hear about it!

under construction..

nc — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 04:54:41 +0000

You may notice a few changes around here; I’m changing my entire site to be managed by WordPress. If you find any links that are broken, hate the new design, or just want to tell me I’m crazy, please leave a comment on this post. Thanks!

Help! Health insurance – Blue Cross PPO, or Blue Cross HSA?

nc — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:37:55 +0000

Open enrollment for health plans starts at my day job soon. Now that I have a child, I’m looking at the HSA (Health Savings Account) combined with a HDHP (high-deductible health plan) with a high deductible versus the PPO (traditional) health plan option again, and with a few changes that have been made in the HSA plan over the last few years, it looks quite appealing. I’m not seeing any real downsides, but though I’d ask for opinion from my friends on the good ‘ol interweb. ;)

Basics of HSA:

HSA paycheck deductions will be ~$2000/yr less than PPO
HSA has a single deductible for the family of $3000
Preventative care is paid at 100% at all times.
All other care is not paid until deductible is met; then is paid at 100% (including prescriptions.)
Reading through the plan summary, post-deductible coverage appears identical to PPO

Basics of PPO:

$300 individual / $600 deductible
$1500 individual / $3000 family out-of-pocket maximum (not including prescription copays)
$30 office copays
80% coinsurance after deductible for most other services, including lab

As far as expenses go on the HSA, I’ve added things up, and we will be paying around $225/mo for medication copays for the three of us. This means that our monthly expenses will be a little bit more than the premium savings just for medication. If we add any office visits (which we will — chiropractor, etc.), the monthly expenses go up much quicker. However, once we hit $3000 total, we’re done paying out of pocket. In the year in full, HSA can only possibly cost us $1000 more than PPO (if we never buy medications or see the doctor under the PPO, which isn’t the case).. and it will likely cost us much less, because of the $600 family deductible under the PPO and the copay cost for medications (one medication alone ends up being $400/yr, as there is no generic available.)

The only real downside I see to the HSA is that it may end up “frontloading” medical expenses — if an emergency room visit was required in January or February, for example, it’d be a $3000 expense out of pocket. However, we wouldn’t have to pay another penny for the rest of the year, as I understand it at least.

Have any of you made the switch to HSA, and if so, has it been a positive move for you? Are there any downsides that I am not seeing?

Appreciate your comments! HSA vs PPO isn’t an easy choice..

Why I made a “stupid” financial move – intentionally