Drivers Standards Agency continues it’s attack on cycling

The Drivers Standards Agency have now produce the revised
Highway Code following the consultation. 70% of the returns (see
page 4 of the report
on the consultation) were from cyclists and the most contentious
changes were about the new wordings of rules related to cycling. So
the Drivers Standards Agency have continued their attack on cyclists
by making the wordings even worse for cyclists.

Rule 61 for example in the
previous draft said:

Use cycle routes when practicable and cycle
facilities such as advanced stop lines, cycle boxes and toucan
crossings where they are provided, as they can make your journeys
safer.

The
objection
being that the definition of practicable allows an argument that any
time you are not using one of these facilities you could be held as
negligent if there is an accident. Here is what they say in the
report on the consultation (page7):

It was felt that other road users needed to be made
aware that the choice to use
these facilities remains with the
cyclist, and there is no law forcing their use. The
phrasing of the
rule has therefore been amended to take this into account. The
standard of cycle routes remains the responsibility of the relevant
highway
authorities and so falls outside the remit of The Highway
Code.

So
they have change the rule to be:

Use cycle routes and cycle facilities such as
advanced stop lines, cycle boxes and toucan crossings wherever
possible as they can make your journeys safer.

So they have
removed any doubt about where you should cycle. You should take
cycle facility if it is possible. Even if it more dangerous, does not
go where you are going, is less convenient, slower or badly
maintained.

Meanwhile the CTC
has been strangely silent on the issue, which considering that they
encouraged so many to take part in the

I urge
anyone who rides a bike or cares about cyclists to sign the petition
here and write to your MP before it is too late. I confess I
don’t hold up much hope that the Department for Motorists
Transport will listen as this would not help drive cyclists off the
road.

Tags topic:[cycling]
topic:[highway+code]

ZFS pool in an ISCSI ZVOL

My last post about backing
up ZFS on my laptop to iscsi targets exported from a server
backed by ZFS Zvols on the server prompted a commend and also
promoted me to think about whether this would be a worth while thing
in the real world?

Initially I would say no, however it does offer the tantalizing
possibility to allow the administrator of the system with the iscsi
targets to take back ups of the pools without interfering with the
contents of the pool at all.

It allows you to split the snapshots for users, which would all
live in the client pool from the snapshots for administrators,
essentially for disaster recovery which would all be in the server
pool.

If the server went pop the recovery would be to create a new
server and then restore the zvol which would then contain the whole
client pool with all the client pool’s snapshots. Similarly if the
client pool were to become corrupted you could roll it back to a good
state by rolling back the ZVOL on the server pool. Now clearly the
selling point of ZFS is an always consistent on disk format so this
is less of a risk than with other file systems (unless there are
bugs) however the belt and braces approach seems appealing to the
latent sysadmin in me who knows that the performance of a storage
system that has lost your data is zero.

I’m going to see if I can build a server like this to see how well
it performs but that won’t be for at least a few weeks.

Tags: topic:[zfs] topic:[iscsi]

Commuting Buddy

This morning as I left Ottershaw there was a cyclist that was a
few hundred yards up the road from me. I thought I was gaining on
him and indeed just as I was doing the very short Climb I passed him,
slightly worried that this would lead to a more competitive ride to
work. He got on my wheel and stayed there all the way to Chobham and
then up towards the roundabout on the A322 where we became less
focused and had a quick chat.

He was riding from Richmond to Fleet and it turns out must work
only a short distance from me. Now I never tried to drop him and with
the exception of the climb of hill on the Red Road never did. However
it did make me ride faster and in a more consistent way, you don’t
want to slow down and have the person who is sucking your wheel run
up the back of you. I enjoyed the ride more, I got to work quicker
and I felt better for it. Whether I will still feel this way on the
way home is another thing.

It has left me wondering two things:

1. How many other riders do the same journey as me but at
   approximately the same speed so we never meet?

   
   

2. Given a 1mph speed difference over 20 miles within how many
   minutes after the slower rider does the faster rider need to leave
   to be sure of meeting somewhere on route? (First rider does Xmph
   second will be doing (X+1)mph. 20 miles will take 20/X hours for the
   first rider and 20/(X+1) for the second. The longest gap would be
   when they both reach the end together so the time difference would
   be (20/X – 20/(X+1)) which cancels down to be 20(1/X –
   1/(X+1)). If X is 20 that becomes 20(1/20 – 1/21) which when
   you work out and then multiply by 60 to get minutes gives 2.86
   minutes.) So my chances of
   meeting a rider of a similar performance on the way to work is
   pretty small as I have to join the route in a window that is less
   than 3 minutes long and if I am to get any real benefit the window
   is more like 1 minute.

   
   

I do however wish I could find a
“commuting buddy” as it would certainly make the commute
more interesting, unlike this post.

Tags: topic:[cycling]
topic:[commuting]

NFS futures at LOSUG

We were privileged to have the legendary Calum Mackay talk at the
London Open Solaris User Group last night on the topic of NFS
futures. Including everything that is in the up coming NFS v4.1
specifications:

• Parallel NFS aka pNFS

  
  

• Directory delegations

  
  

• Sessions.

  
  

He also covered the rest of what is going on with the NFS v4.0
work. In particular the namespace work that he has been doing which
will provide Mirror mount support and Referrals.

Mirror mounts will change the way a client behaves when it
encounters a directory that is a mount point for another file system
on the server. For example given 2 file systems:

/export/home/cjg and /export/home/cjg/Documents

Currently if you mount /export/home/cjg from a server using NFS v2
or v3 on an NFS client and look in the Documents directory you should
see an empty directory which if you then write into can cause loads
of confusion and potentially more serious consequences.

However with NFSv4 & mirror mounts now you see something
different. The client would automatically mount the sub file systems
without recourse to the automounter. This is kind of cool as the
layout I describe above is exactly what I want for my home directory.
That way when gnome or firefox or thunderbird go pop and corrupt
their start up file I can roll back to the last snapshot without it
messing up my data that is in Documents.

Referrals have the potential to be as useful and I suspect also
the potential to be as dangerous as symbolic links. They allow you to
move a file system onto another server and yet the client application
can continue to access the original path. The client kernel gets sent
a referral and mounts the file system from the new location.

All in all an excellent evening.

Tags: topic:[opensolaris] topic:[nfs] topic:[zfs] topic:[losug]

Backing up laptop using ZFS over iscsi to more ZFS

After the debacle of the reinstall
of my laptop zpool having to be rebuild and “restored”
using zfs send and zfs receive I thought I would look for a better
back up method. One that did not involve being clever with partitions
on an external USB disk that are “ready” for when the
whole disk is using ZFS.

The obvious solution is a play on one I had
played with before. Store one half of the pool on another
system. So welcome to ISCI.

ZFS volumes can now be shared using iscsi. So on the server create
a volume with the “shareisci” property set to “on”
and enable the iscsi target:

# zfs get  shareiscsi tank/iscsi/pearson

NAME                PROPERTY    VALUE               SOURCE

tank/iscsi/pearson  shareiscsi  on                  inherited from tank/iscsi

# svcadm enable  svc:/system/iscsitgt

#

Now on the client tell the iscsi initiator where the server is:

5223 # iscsiadm add discovery-address 192.168.1.20

5224 # iscsiadm list discovery-address

Discovery Address: 192.168.1.20:3260

5225 # iscsiadm modify discovery –sendtargets enable

5226 # format < /dev/null

Searching for disks…done

AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:

0. c0d0 <DEFAULT cyl 3791 alt 2 hd 255 sec 63>

/pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,1/ide@0/cmdk@0,0

1. c10t0100001731F649B400002A004625F5BEd0 <SUN-SOLARIS-1-11.00GB>

/scsi_vhci/disk@g0100001731f649b400002a004625f5be

Specify disk (enter its number):

5227 #

Now attach the new device to the pool. I can see some security would
be a good thing here to protect my iscsi pool. More on that later.

5229 # zpool status newpool

pool: newpool

state: ONLINE

status: The pool is formatted using an older on-disk format.  The pool can

still be used, but some features are unavailable.

action: Upgrade the pool using ‘zpool upgrade’.  Once this is done, the

pool will no longer be accessible on older software versions.

scrub: scrub completed with 0 errors on Wed Apr 18 12:30:43 2007

config:

NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM

newpool     ONLINE       0     0     0

c0d0s7    ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

5230 # zpool attach newpool c0d0s7 c10t0100001731F649B400002A004625F5BEd0

5231 # zpool status newpool

pool: newpool

state: ONLINE

status: One or more devices is currently being resilvered.  The pool will

continue to function, possibly in a degraded state.

action: Wait for the resilver to complete.

scrub: resilver in progress, 0.02% done, 8h13m to go

config:

NAME                                        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM

newpool                                     ONLINE       0     0     0

mirror                                    ONLINE       0     0     0

c0d0s7                                  ONLINE       0     0     0

c10t0100001731F649B400002A004625F5BEd0  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

5232 #

The 8 hours to complete the resilver turns out to be hopelessly
pessimistic and is quickly reduced to a more realistic, but still
overly pessimistic 37 minutes. All of this over what is only a
100Mbit ethernet connection from this host. I’m going to try this on
the Dell that has a 1Gbit network to see if that improves this even
further. (Since the laptop has just been upgraded to build 62 the
pool “needs” to be upgraded. However since upgrading the
pool would then not be able to be imported on earlier builds I won’t
upgrade the pool version until both boot environments are running
build 62 or above.)

I am left wondering how useful this
could be in the real world. As a “nasty hack” you could
have your ZFS based NAS box serving out volumes to your NFS which
then have Zpools in them. Then on the NAS box you can snapshot and
backup the the volumes which would actually give you a back up of the
whole of the client pool, something many people want for disaster
recovery reasons. Which is in effect what I have here.

Tags: topic:[opensolaris] topic:[ZFS]
topic:[iscsi]

Off to see the Marshall in Horsham

Once again we were off to Horsham this to meet up with one of our
members who was sitting on the roundabout above the A24
marshalling a 25 mile time trial for the Redmon cycling club. Now I’m
pretty much all in favour of riding a bike in any situation but I
struggle to see why 200 riders wanted to be riding up and down the
A264 and A24 on a Sunday morning. Yes it is quite a laugh cruising
along at 25mph or more on the flat roads for a short while, and yes
statistically these busy roads are not more dangerous than other
roads but it certainly feels more dangerous and the risks some riders
took entering the roundabout while we were, in my opinion, greater
than is conducive to a long life.

Anyway we were forced to take the A24 for 2 junctions and then a
short section of the A264 East which since we were on fast A roads
it would have been rude not to have put the hammer down for some
proper speed work. Then we returned to minor roads and a much more
civilised ride back through Rusper, then a blast to Newdigate and on
to Henfold lakes for some breakfast. The Sun was out the day is
glorious and so trying to ride at more than 25mph was the order of
the day, perhaps I can see the pull of those A roads after all.

After that it was the quick flat way home to wind up with a
distance of 72 miles and an average speed of 16.9mph.

Tags: topic:[cycling] topic:[molesey+bbt]

Good Morning Build 61

This post is late due to having to catch up from my holiday.

On arriving back build 61 had hit the Sun Ray server:

: estale.eu FSS 1 $; uname -a

SunOS estale 5.11 snv_61 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire

: estale.eu FSS 2 $;

All is working fine.

tags: topic:[solaris] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[nevada] topic:[good morning build]

Holiday reading

Whilst away I managed to finish “The
Death of Marco Pantani” by Matt Rendell which I found to be
a difficult read. I suppose the title should have given me the clue
but to have documented the self destruction of a person, a cyclist,
who achieved so much was difficult to read. Add to that that it
appears that most of his greatest feats were EPO assisted and it did
not make for an uplifting read.

At the other end of the Scale was “One
more kilometre and we are in the Showers” by Tim Hilton. It
covers so much of the British cycling scene and British cycling clubs
that it even describes the informal one I ride in. Even if it is not
by name. It seems we are not at all unique. The slightly depressing
nature of the book was to refer, probably rightly, to the 1950s as
the hay day of British (club) cycling and that we are now in a long
slow decline. I hope that this is not the case but see little to
support my hopes. My local “club” has no members under
40, although we do continue to pick up members. That we don’t
compete and sometimes loose members temporarily or permanently due to
not being fast enough does not make us completely typical. It also
allows me to delude myself that we have helped a few riders start or
restart. My thanks to Gary
for recommending it.

Tags: topic:[cycling] topic:[books]

Five to Henfold Lakes

Five riders out for todays ride was to Henfold lakes via Epson and
Headly. When had descended Pebble coombe we caught up with a cyclist
from Addlestone cycling club, who joined us in the cafe at Henfold
Lakes. It turns out that Jim was 80 and was out for a short ride.
Most impressed.

On the way back we detoured over Box Hill, up the Zig-Zags (8
minutes 10 seconds, very disappointing but I had an excuse, which I
won’t document here for reasons of good taste). Then back down and
home via Leatherhead.

60 miles average speed 16.4mph, max 48mph.

Tags: topic:[cycling] topic:[molesey+bbt]

recovering my laptop using zfs send and receive

First I owe Windows
and apology. It was not making itself the active partition, grub
was due to me copying the wrong entry in there after Solaris deleted
it.

However before I went on holiday grub decided it would cease
working. It could not find the menu.lst at all on this laptop. After
a bit of investigation and failing to recover it (due I think to the
laptop having two Solaris fdisk partitions, one had the zpool in it
and the other the boot partitions, Installgrub and grub itself did
not like this, though what pushed it over the edge I’m not sure.
Perhaps some change in build 60.)

Anyway I decided to reinstall solaris without the extra fdsik
partition which was a hangover from when the system had Linux on it
as well. It should be simple. ufsdump the current boot environment
(BE) and then install the system and let the zpool resilver from the
external USB disk and ufsrestore the BE. The install would only need
to be an end user install as I was going to restore from backup
anyway. Strictly I did not need to do the install at all. All would
have been fine had I not decided to detach the internal disk from the
zpool (after scrubing the pool) prior to the install but the install
would sort out grub for me without me having to do to much fiddling.

Once I had reinstalled the system I could not attach the new
partition to the pool as it was to small. This was all thanks to my
“thinking
ahead” when I created the USB partition. Since eventually
the partition will grow to be 30Gb that was how big the external disk
partition was. As soon as I detached the smaller partition it “grew”
to fill the partition it had. Doh.

So now I had to fit a 30Gb pool into a 10Gb partition. Next time
I won’t detach the mirror first! Being in a hurry, to go on holiday,
I just knocked together a short
script that would take a source file system and using zfs send
and zfs receive copy all of it’s snapshots to the target file system.
So first doing a recursive snapshot of the pool I then ran the
script which and copied the file systems into the new pool I created
on the laptop. I then had to fix up a few of the attributes of the
file systems that were copied. I’m not immediately sure how to handle
this in a script since some attributes are obvious (compression,
sharenfs etc) but others are less so (mountpoint). Even with
attributes like compression you have a problem in that the zfs
receive creates the file system with inherited attributes so there is
no way to set them before the file system is populated unless the
inherited file system attribute is correct. When I say no way, I
mean, no simple way. There clearly are ways by using temporary
container filesystems which you create with the right options for the
file system to inherit and then use zfs rename to move the file
system to the correct location. However that was not required by me
and would cease to be a simple short script.

Tags: topic:[zfs] topic:[solaris] topic:[laptop] topic:[usb]