Hard May Flyer

Today was the 2009 South West Road Club’s May Flyer. I vowed this
year to not try and get on the wheel of a fast group early on as that
enevitably leads to pain later in the day. I kept this up for about
30 miles which meant I was riding mostly solo but humming along
nicely when a pair of faster riders caught me and I did catch their
wheel until the halfway point. After that I was quite quickly dropped
and so that allowed me to enjoy the headwind on the return journey.

I was at least pleased that the route goes through Peaslake thus
avoiding Pitch Hill on the way home or at least it did last year.
This year it did not! Taking us up Pitch Hill and then down around
Peaslake along Lawbrook Lane which also has a sharp climb in it. All
this when you still have Coombe Bottom to face.

Not sure how long it took me, but it was a long time, much longer
than last year.
I failed to zero my bike computer before the start and I have mislaid
my GPS!

I was planning a slight detour for my 1000^th blog
entry but time has not allowed me to finish the entry before a normal
cycling entry arrived. The detour may appear later.

Why everyone should be using ZFS

It is at times like these that I’m glad
I use ZFS at home.

  pool: tank

state: ONLINE

status: One or more devices has experienced an unrecoverable error.  An

attempt was made to correct the error.  Applications are unaffected.

action: Determine if the device needs to be replaced, and clear the errors

using ‘zpool clear’ or replace the device with ‘zpool replace’.

see: http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-8000-9P

scrub: none requested

config:

NAME           STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM

tank           ONLINE       0     0     0

mirror       ONLINE       0     0     0

c20t0d0s7  ONLINE       6     0     4

c21t0d0s7  ONLINE       0     0     0

mirror       ONLINE       0     0     0

c21t1d0    ONLINE       0     0     0

c20t1d0    ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

: pearson FSS 14 $;

The drive with the errors was also throwing up errors that iostat
could report and from it’s performance was trying heroicially to give
me back data. However it had failed. It’s performance was terrible
and then it failed to give the right data on 4 occasions. Anyother
file system would, if that was user data, just had deliviered it to
the user without warning. That bad data could then propergate from
there on, probably into my backups. There is certainly no good that
could come from that. However ZFS detected and corrected the errors.

Now I have offlined the disk the
performance of the system is better but I have no redundancy until
the new disk I have just ordered arriaves. Now time to check out
Seagate’s warranty return system.

Fixie!!!

Today was my first ride to work on my Sun’s new
bike. This year my bike to work bike I have chosen a single speed
fixed wheel bike. Fixed wheel bikes are supposed to improve your
pedaling action and that is my excuse.

I’ve
not ridden a fixed wheel bike since I was a teenager when a boy at
school had one and I rode it a bit. However that was all before
clipless pedals. I don’t even recall if it had toe clips but I
suspect not as I was considered a bit odd for having them.

I was expecting hills to be a problem having no gears going up,
but in reality the problem is when going down where I’ve not managed
to just relax my legs and let them spin or effectively use them to
slow the bike without it all being a bit scary. Once I had got my
self scared as my legs were whirling round it was not instinctive to
use the brakes to slow the thing down. All very odd.

Traffic was less of a problem than I expected and I managed to get
into the habit of slowing before junctions so I could just roll upto
them. Since there is no freewheel you can’t just lift the pedal to
the top of the stroke to start again so you end up planning where you
want to stop. It came as quite a suprise how far you move forward on
a single pedal stroke.

The real surprised was how long the journey home took. I have no
computer on the bike so I was only able to time myself approximately
using my watch but it was 1 hour 10 minutes which was quite
pleasing. I’m pondering whether a slightly larger gear might be a
good idea.

Another update to Sun Ray access hours script

I have made a change to up access
hours script for my Sun Rays. Now the access file can also
contain a comma separated list of Sun Ray DTUs so that the control is
only applied to those DTUs:

: pearson FSS 3 $; cat /etc/opt/local/access_hours

user1:2000:2300:P8.00144f7dc383

user2:2000:2300:P8.00144f57a46f

user3:0630:2300

user4:0630:2300

: pearson FSS 4 $;

The practical reason for this is that it allows control of DTUs that
are in bedrooms but if the computer is really needed another DTU can
be used for homework.

Now that bug 6791062
is fixed the script is safe to use in nevada.

The script is where it always was.

Stopping find searching remote directories.

Grizzled UNIX users look away now.

The find command is a wonderful thing but there are some uses of
it that seem to cause confusion enough that it seems worth
documenting them for google. Today’s is:

How can I stop find(1) searching remote file systems?

On reading the documentation the
“-local” option should be just what you want and it is,
but not on it’s own. If you just do:

$ find . -local -print

It will indeed only report on files that are on local file systems
below the current directory. However it will search the entire
directory tree for those local files even if the directory tree is on
NFS

To get find to stop searching when it
finds a remote file system you need:

$ find . \( ! -local -prune \) -o -print

simple.

Installing support certificates in OpenSolaris

For some reason you only get the instructions on how to install a
certificate to get access to supported or extras updates on your
OpenSolaris system after you have downloaded the certificate. Not a
big issue as that is generally when you want the instructions.
However if you already have your certificates and now want to install
them on another system (that you have support for) you can’t get the
instructions without getting another certificate.

So here are the instructions cut’n'pasted from the support page,
as much for me as for you:

How to Install this OpenSolaris 2008.11 standard support
Certificate

1. Download the provided key and
   certificate files, called
   OpenSolaris_2008.11_standard_support.key.pem
   andOpenSolaris_2008.11_standard_support.certificate.pem
   using the buttons above. Don’t worry if you get logged out, or lose
   the files. You can come back to this site later and re-download
   them. We’ll assume that you downloaded these files into your Desktop
   folder,~/Desktop/.
   

   
   

2. Use the following comands to make a directory inside of
   /var/pkg to store the key and certificate, and copy the key
   and certificate into this directory. The key files are kept by
   reference, so if the files become inaccessible to the packaging
   system, you will encounter errors. Here is how to do it:
   

   
   

   
   

           $ pfexec mkdir -m 0755 -p /var/pkg/ssl
   
   $ pfexec cp -i ~/Desktop/OpenSolaris_2008.11_standard_support.key.pem /var/pkg/ssl
   
   $ pfexec cp -i ~/Desktop/OpenSolaris_2008.11_standard_support.certificate.pem /var/pkg/ssl 

   
   
   
   

3. Add the publisher:
   

   
   
   
   

           $ pfexec pkg set-authority \
   
   -k /var/pkg/ssl/OpenSolaris_2008.11_standard_support.key.pem \
   
   -c /var/pkg/ssl/OpenSolaris_2008.11_standard_support.certificate.pem \
   
   -O https://pkg.sun.com/opensolaris/support/ opensolaris.org 
   
   

   
   

4. To see the packages supplied by
   this authority, try:
   

   
   

   
   
   $ pkg list -a ‘pkg://opensolaris.org/*’ 
   
   

   
   

If you use the Package Manager graphical application, you will be
able to locate the newly discovered packages when you restart Package
Manager.

How to Install this OpenSolaris extras Certificate

1. Download the provided key and
   certificate files, called OpenSolaris_extras.key.pem and
   OpenSolaris_extras.certificate.pem using the buttons above.
   Don’t worry if you get logged out, or lose the files. You can come
   back to this site later and re-download them. We’ll assume that you
   downloaded these files into your Desktop folder, ~/Desktop/.
   

   
   

2. Use the following comands to make a directory inside of
   /var/pkg to store the key and certificate, and copy the key
   and certificate into this directory. The key files are kept by
   reference, so if the files become inaccessible to the packaging
   system, you will encounter errors. Here is how to do it:

   
   

           $ pfexec mkdir -m 0755 -p /var/pkg/ssl
   
   $ pfexec cp -i ~/Desktop/OpenSolaris_extras.key.pem /var/pkg/ssl
   
   $ pfexec cp -i ~/Desktop/OpenSolaris_extras.certificate.pem /var/pkg/ssl
   
   

   
   

3. Add the publisher:
   

   
   

           $ pfexec pkg set-authority \
   
   -k /var/pkg/ssl/OpenSolaris_extras.key.pem \
   
   -c /var/pkg/ssl/OpenSolaris_extras.certificate.pem \
   
   -O https://pkg.sun.com/opensolaris/extra/ extra
   
   

   
   

4. To see the packages supplied by this authority, try:
   

   
   

           $ pkg list -a ‘pkg://extra/*’
   
   

   
   If you use the Package Manager graphical application, you will be
   able to locate the newly discovered packages when you restart
   Package Manager.