Good advice from the Department for Transport for Drivers & Cyclists

Here
is a moderately good page from the Department for Transport for
cyclists and drivers. It’s good. It seems odd that drivers want
cyclists to know that they drive to fast (Motorists usually
travel faster than cyclists and may have less time to
take account of hazards.) and don’t look enough (Motorists may
not always see cyclists), which while
true is not really what drivers should want to cyclists to know.

If however some more motorists read this and understand it that
would be a step in the right direction. The best thing about this is
that it comes from the Department for Transport which does not
have a reputation for being pro cycling.

Off to Newcastle for the mash up

This is worse than being on a mobile, but I’m on the train o.k.?

Tomorrow I will be a the System Admin Mash up event at Newcastle. If you are going to be there I suggest you don’t bother asking us about Sun/Oracle and instead go straight to www.oracle.com/sun then you will know as much as us.

Horsham and around

Today we had six riders out today and headed out over Coombe
Bottom At the top of Coombe Bottom one rider turned for home but the
rest of us continued over Pitch Hill towards Horsham. Just outside
Rowhook one rider took a bath in an enourmous water filled pot hole.
Fortunately no harm done. In Horsham food was required but no open
Cafe could be found so we had to make do with a corner shop and then
headed for Henfold Lakes.

The nasty 10% hill between Horsham and Rusper was a bit of a shock
but once over we had good run to the Cafe. Henfold was very busy,
there was a CTC group that arrived while we were there so the place
was awash with bikes.

My invitation to include Ranmore on the ride home was declined due
to tired legs so we went the flat way through Dorking and
Leatherhead.

Ended up with 70 miles done and I think I have been sun burnt
(very mildly).

User and group quotas for ZFS!

This push will be very popular amoung those who are managing
servers with thousands of users:

Repository: /export/onnv-gate

Total changesets: 1

Changeset: f41cf682d0d3

Comments:

PSARC/2009/204 ZFS user/group quotas & space accounting

6501037 want user/group quotas on ZFS

6830813 zfs list -t all fails assertion

6827260 assertion failed in arc_read(): hdr == pbuf->b_hdr

6815592 panic: No such hold X on refcount Y from zfs_znode_move

6759986 zfs list shows temporary %clone when doing online zfs recv

User quotas for zfs has been the feature I have been asked about
most when talking to customers. This probably relfects that most
customers are simply blown away by the other features of ZFS and the
only missing feature was user quotas if you have a large user base.

zfs list -d

I’ve just pushed the changes for zfs list that give it a -d option
to limit the depth to which recursive listings will go. This is of
most use when you wish to list the snapshots of a given data set and
only the snapshots of that data set.

PSARC
2009/171 zfs list -d and zfs get -d
6762432
zfs list –depth

Before this you could achieve this using a short pipe line which
while it produced the correct results was horribly inefficient and
very slow for datasets that had lots of descendents.

: v4u-1000c-gmp03.eu TS 6 $; zfs list -t snapshot rpool | grep ‘^rpool@’

rpool@spam                         0      –    64K  -

rpool@two                          0      –    64K  -

: v4u-1000c-gmp03.eu TS 7 $; zfs list -d 1 -t snapshot

NAME         USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT

rpool@spam      0      –    64K  -

rpool@two       0      –    64K  -

: v4u-1000c-gmp03.eu TS 8 $;

It will allow the zfs-snapshot service to be much more efficient when
it needs to list snapshots. The change will be in build 113.

Ride to Windsor

With it being Easter this was always going to be a short ride.
Family commitments abound for all. We had two new riders but that
still only made five. We headed out to Windsor via Ascot and the
usual “sprint” through the park which left the new riders in for
a bit of a surprise when it all kicked off.

Slight rain did not dampen the ride and the tail wind on the
return made for a fast and furious return to Molesey.

53 miles.

Native solaris printing working

The solution to my HP
printer not working on Solaris is to use CUPS. Since I have a
full install and solaris
now has the packages installed all I had to do was switch the
service over:

$ pfexec /usr/sbin/print-service -s cups

then configure the printer using http://localhosts:631
in the same way as I did with ubunto. Now I don’t need the virtual
machine running which is a bonus. I think cups may be a better fit
for me at home since I don’t have a nameservice running so the
benefits of the lp system are very limited.

The bug is 6826086: printer
drivers from package SUNWhpijs are not update with HPLIP

Recovering our Windows PC

I had reason to discover if my solution for backing
up the windows PC worked. Apparently the PC had not been working
properly for a while but no one had mentioned that to me. The
symptoms were:

1. No menu bar at the bottom of the screen. It was almost like
   the screen was the wrong size but how it was changed is/was a
   mystery.

   
   

2. It was claiming it needed to revalidate itself as the
   hardware had changed, which it catagorically had not and I had 2
   days to sort it out. Apparenty this message had been around for a
   few days (weeks?) but was ignored.

   
   

Now I’m sure I could have had endless fun reading forums to find
out how to fix these things but it was Saturday night nd I was going
cycling in the morning. So time to boot solaris and restore the back
up. First I took a back up of what was on the disk, just in case I
get a desire to relive the issue. I just needed one script to restore
it over ssh. The script is:

: pearson FSS 14 $; cat /usr/local/sbin/xp_restore

#!/bin/ksh

exec dd of=/dev/rdsk/c0d0p1 bs=1k

: pearson FSS 15 $;

and the command was:

$ ssh pc pfexec /usr/local/sbin/xp_restore < backup.dd

having chosen the desired snapshot. Obviously the command was added
to /etc/security/exec_attr. Then just leave that running over night.
In the morning the system booted up just fine, complained about the
virus definitions being out of date and various things needing
updates but all working. Alas doing this before I went cycling made
me late enough to miss
the peleton, if it was there.

Solo cycle

I was a bit late to the meeting point and there was no one there.
I decided to guess which way they had gone, or more accurately I used
the old trick of choosing a route that if they had gone that way I
would catch them. This took me to Cobham and then through Effingham
and up Coombe Bottom. This week was much warmer, my water bottle was
clean and there was no repeat of the problem of last
week. Having still not caught them I went in search of what I now
know is called “Weare
Street” a delightful road that I have been taken along but
never really known how to find it. One day Street view will fail to
show the beauty of the place, you really need to be on a bike to
apprieciate it.

I was very pleased to find it with only one mistake and then
having ridden it turned left when I should have turned right.
Fortunately both mistakes lead me very quickly to places I recognised
and so I was able to rectify the error. Having a map would have
solved the problem but is really not worth it if you know most of
roads.

Ended up at Henfold Lakes for a Cup of tea where I met another
rider who had also been late and not found anyone. We rode back via
Ranmore Common.

Ended up doing 60 miles and was back at 11:30.