I decided to get fancy with my small home network and get a server. My goal is to make it a file server and then eventually configure other services such as web server, backup server, and perhaps others. If I really get fancy and figure out how to do it, I'd like to make this system an LDAP server and have network logins for my computers. I'll chip away at this piece by piece over the upcoming months.

I bought a mini server, an HP N36L, and two 2 TB drives to go with it. It came with a 250 GB drive, so I bought the two 2 TB drives to setup a mirror. Great little box at a good price, but it didn't come with an optical drive so I install Debian Squeeze 64 bit via USB memstick.

The first thing I want to do, after getting the server up and running basic services, is to consolidate files (music, videos). After that, get my notebook computers backing up using backuppc (backuppc.com). But before all that, I need to create a mirror using those two 2TB drives. That means using mdadm for RAID, then creating an LVM volume on top of that space.

Create a RAID mirror:
sudo /sbin/mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=mirror --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdb /dev/sdc

Check on it:
sudo /sbin/mdadm --detail /dev/md0
cat /proc/mdstat

Create the logical volume:
sudo /sbin/pvcreate /dev/md0
sudo /sbin/vgcreate lvm-mirror /dev/md0
sudo /sbin/vgdisplay lvm-mirror
sudo /sbin/lvcreate -l 476931 lvm-mirror -n mirror

Note: the 476931 came from the total number of PE's available in the volume group.

The mirror resync was crunching along fine, so I formatted the logical volume:
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/lvm-mirror/mirror

I mounted this, then unmounted and added a line into /etc/fstab, double checking it mounted with "mount -a". So far so good!

I decided to redo my linux notebook and install either Debian or Fedora. Both Debian and Fedora have great communities and great support, so either would be fine. My notebook previously ran Ubuntu 9, Mint, and Ubuntu 10, so I cut out the middle man (so to speak) and went with the underlying distro for Ubuntu and Mint: Debian!

I downloaded and burned the Debian Squeeze netinst CD, and started the install. It went smoothly and the only thing I did differently was to opt for LVM instead of straight partitioning - I ended up choosing LVM with a separate /home, /usr, /var, /tmp. I also picked a few software packages: file server, web server, notebook, etc. I didn't choose everything, for instance I'm not interested in DNS, mail, or print server, and didn't select SQL/database since I wasn't sure what that would install (MySql? Nah, I rather take PostgreSQL) so I'll add what I want later.

Once the install was finished, I added a few more: VirtualBox, Videolan, Chromium browser, Eclipse, and a few other misc packages.

I went to test the sound, and hear nothing. After trying the volume settings and getting nowhere, I googled for help and found a suggestion that ended up working:

alsactl init

After this, I had sound. I'm not sure if that need to be done every boot, but if so I'll figure out what script I can add it to for that to occur automatically.

While fiddling with the system I noticed that "su" worked, but "sudo" didn't. It seems Debian doesn't enable sudo usage for the account created during install. After looking at the /etc/sudoers file, I saw it is configured to allow members of the "sudo" group to use sudo. So a quick:

usermod username -aG sudo

and that was fixed (I logged out and back in so the system would pick up my new group membership).

I thought I would expand on my recent comment if anybody happens to look at my journal.

I was laid off in Nov 2008. Typical story, company had up and down quarters, and held small layoffs every year since 2005. I survived three or four rounds, but was finally caught up in it. I received 14 weeks of severance, plus my unused vacation time. I had 6+ months of living expenses in addition to what I received from my former employer, and I would have been in major trouble without that cushion. My mortgage was $2000/month and COBRA was $350, so with utilities and food I was definitely spending above $3000 a month, probably around $3200 to $3300. You can cut back the obvious stuff but you still need a phone, gas, my car insurance payment came up, etc. I can now see how people that are laid off can get into mortgage trouble, and how easily you can go to affording your home to defaulting on it. Unemployment added $250 a week, which sounds small, but it REALLY helped out.

The layoff was right before Thanksgiving, so I took a few days to de-stress, and then started the job search. I looked through dice.com, careerbuilder.com, fedjobs.gov, reached out to local contacts, updated my LinkedIn profile, and so on.

I also heard from recruiters that got my info from the job boards (dice.com, careerbuilder.com). I was moderately bummed most of those listings seemed to funnel into recruiters but I guess that is the reality.
The job I wound up getting was the gov't job I applied for via their website fairly early in the process. It took months of back and forth, interviews and paperwork, but I got a phone call and job offer in June 2009, after being unemployed for 7 months.

About recruiters - it is inevitable you have to deal with them, since they do have job leads. But only one of the six different ones I dealt with seemed interested in matching me with a reasonable fit, and most importantly, keeping me on the radar of the prospective company. Recruiters get paid by placement fees from companies, so that is who they really work for. Most probably want to do the least work for the most payoff - fill interviews at companies that pay them the highest fee, and deal with candidates most likely to get a job within a few interviews. My experience was literally "two and out" - you didn't hear from the recruiter again if two interviews didn't work out. When a recruiter talks about how many companies they work with and how many "opportunities" they have, none of that matters. You'll get two or three interviews, then you become too much effort to deal with.

My reorganization of my home computers is partway done.

I opted for a Sager Notebook (NP9280) with 64 bit Windows 7, since that meets my gaming needs well enough. My MacBook Pro continues to be my main machine. My old desktop, currently running 64 bit Ubuntu (karmic koala) is chugging along, but I am looking at replacing it with another notebook, possibly a System 76 linux notebook. I've come to value the portability and low-noise of notebooks versus desktop computers, and am willing to pay a bit more for the same functionality to get it in a notebook.

I've installed as little as possibly on the Windows 7 box. Besides games, I have: Dropbox, Eclipse, Firefox, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Handbrake, OpenOffice.org, Picasa, Stellarium, Truecrypt, VirtualBox, VLC. All of those are open source, and cross platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) and I am quite pleased with the great quality of open source projects! Rather than install Adobe's PDF reader, I went with Sumatra, hoping it has fewer bugs and/or security problems. ;)

When I get the new linux notebook I'll install all this same stuff too.

Wow I forgot about the journal facility here, until I looked over my account settings and noticed an "achievement" for it!

I've changed my home systems around a huge amount since my last post, in addition to some life changes like a move or two, new job, etc.

I got a new job over the summer, and decided to celebrate by buying myself a MacBook Pro. See what the other side lives like, so to speak. ;) Plus I have an interest in fiddling with Objective-C and Cocoa programming. Before I bought the Mac I paid attention to the software I actually use, and made a list: browsers, open office, pidgin, picasa, videolan, eclipse, virtual box, true crypt, handbrake, google earth, dropbox, jungledisk... all these apps are all cross platform, available windows, mac, and linux. A few were just windows and mac - iTunes, and the Garmin ANT (usb stick to pull data off a Garmin 405). Some were just windows - CalorieKing, Skymap... but these also work great inside a virtual machine! After paying attention to the bulk of my usage and not counting games, I could basically use windows, mac, or linux interchangeably.

As for games, well that's trickier. I'll just mention the ones I play right now. Some are also cross platform - freeciv, wesnoth, dominions 3 (an obscure fantasy turn-based strategy game I like) - including linux. Many are available for mac - Zuma 2, Warcraft 3, Jade Empire, EVE Online, World of Warcraft, Civilization 4 - although only the Blizzard games are nice enough to include windows/mac versions on the same DVD and not make me buy another copy of a game I own (like Civ 4). Some I can play via Codeweaver's CrossOver Games product - Guild Wars, Lord of the Rings Online, D&D Online - but LoTRO doesn't run that well in CrossOver (low FPS).

So I bit the bullet, and made a bootcamp partition on my Mac. For ~85 GB of space, I now can boot into Vista and run some games I installed there - Dragon Age Origins, Mass Effect, Civilization 4, Lord of the Rings Online. (Just to compare FPS, on the Mac via CrossOver I got about 15 FPS in LoTRO; in Vista via Bootcamp, I get about 60). This way I have a nice compromise - Mac for everything except the few games installed on my Vista partition. I also made a Vista virtual machine (yes, I had two legit copies of Vista I had never installed before, so I decided to use them now) and installed a few Windows-only apps onto it, such as CalorieKing, Skymap, and a few gaming utilities for EVE Online - EVE fit tool, and EVEmon.

My previous main computer was a Windows XP MCE going on 4 years old. And over that time, like all Windows installs, it picked up some cruft. Stuff like partially uninstalled apps leaving ghost registry keys, conflicts with various startup and shutdown sequences, apps trying to out-default each other, explorer context-menus out of control. That system had two disks available, so I blew the entire install away and put Ubuntu Linux 9.10 (karmic koala) 64 bit on it, and then tweaked it by adding the apps listed above. It works great! I had a minor install issue getting sound working (had to click a checkbox) and other than that, it is working great. I also configured samba to share out a directory for some common files.

I tried to install XP in a dual boot config, but XP didn't recognize the network card. I bought that system pre-installed, and had no extra disks (or maybe I did but they were lost in a move) with drivers to try. I decided to chuck it, after all Linux recognized the network card just fine, and instead went with OpenSolaris. Unfortunately, that wouldn't boot either because (I think) Ubuntu's grub boot loader doesn't recognize ZFS. I can fiddle with a few "under the hood" settings, but I'm not good enough to hack the boot loader. So... I just formatted that extra disk ext4 and have that much more room for Ubuntu.

I used to have multiple Windows machines, and now over time have migrated to a situation where I have no machine that boots Windows as the primary OS. I'm not philosophically opposed to Windows or Microsoft or anything like that; I'm just trying to get more cross-platform experience. Plus, my new job is a lot more cross-platform than others I've had... more on that another time.

I've decided to try out the Journal facility that Slashdot provides. Since this site is generally a positive Linux site, I figure my first post should be on Linux!

I first used Linux in 1994, as a grad student. Installing Linux on a spare notebook saved me from pulling late nights at the computer lab. I still pulled late nights, just in the comfort of my apartment ;) Anyway, it was Slackware something or other, the old distro you had to "download" on about 50 floppy disks - the "A" series of essential system files, the "D" series for development, the "N" series for networking... maybe somebody remembers what I am talking about. Linux came through for me on two classes: Network Programming, and Intro to Programming Languages (a theory class taught in Scheme).

For the next several years, I went away from Linux, mostly because I wasn't using it at work. I kept up with it (mostly) by reading, I just didn't run it anywhere. Yes, I was running Windows instead at work and at home (Win 3.1, NT 3.51, NT 4.0, Win95, Win98, Win2000, WinXP, Win2003). Plus, some experimenting with OS/2.

Anyway, in 2002 I took a new job at a company that has some Linux business. My job initially involved Java programming, some coworkers on a different project actually had Linux desktops... it was a shock/fascinating/etc. as my previous employers were Microsoft shops. My group was largely Windows based, and we reorged, and that is still true. However, there is a team looking at the feasability of a linux port... sorry I can't be more specific. I am on the Windows programming team though, not this other one. I may interact with them because of what I'm working on as far as the existing Windows product.

As part of my job, I got a copy of VMWare which included a home license, so I began to play around with Linux again. I started to read LWN, and try out various distros (Gentoo, Debian, Arch, Yoper, Knoppix), and recently set up a linux machine at home.

I'll write journal entries for these later...