And so has ended the year of the Monkey [2004] and starts the year of the Rooster [2005].
2004 has been quite an interesting year for me..
I moved all the way from Hawaii, back to the Mainland..
I trained and ran a marathon.
Started working at one of the most exciting tech. company.
Made new friends (no links for this unfortunately 🙂 )
In general, life was fun..
Here is wishing that 2005 is going to bring us all more joy, better health and love..
C Novim Godom 🙂
We use Cacti at work to graph the usage of our clients links. It is a pretty popular feature with our customers. A problem (well not really. More like a gotcha) with rrdtool is the way it stores data. Here’ a quote from the rrd tutorial
“Round robin is a technique that works with a fixed amount of data, and a pointer to the current element. Think of a circle with some dots plotted on the edge, these dots are the places where data can be stored. Draw an arrow from the center of the circle to one of the dots, this is the pointer. When the current data is read or written, the pointer moves to the next element. As we are on a circle there is no beginning nor an end, you can go on and on. After a while, all the available places will be used and the process automatically reuses old locations. This way, the database will not grow in size and therefore requires no maintenance. RRDTool works with with Round Robin Databases (RRDs).”
So rrd stores the difference in values (between the last value and current) in the database, rather than the value itself. This creates a problem when routers are rebooted. The counters on the interfaces get cleared and rrd is fooled into thinking that there is a spike in usage. This results to “spikes” in the graphs. Sometimes you see that a 128kbps link has maxed out at 98mbps!!! :). The best way to stop this from happening is to set the correct min and max values for the ds names. Coming back to cacti again. When cacti creates a new rrd database, it does not really give one the option to setup the maximum and minimum speeds of a interface. It defaults to a max of 100000000 (i.e. 100mbps). Occasionally when we have to reboot our routers, I do the following to remove the spikes
cp filename.rrd filename.rrd.backup
Any good admin knows that before you mess with a file, you make a backup :).
rrdtool info filename.rrd | more
This gives us the chance to get the ds (data sources) names
rrdtool tune filename.rrd -a ds_name:MAXIMUM_VALUE
Set the maximum of the ds to the required
rrdtool dump filename.rrd > filename.xml
Export all data in the rrd to a xml file
mv filename.rrd filename.rrd.old
Rename the rrd to make way for the new one.
rrdtool restore filename.xml filename.rrd -r
Restore the rrd from the xml file with the -r (range check) option. So any values that are higher than the new maximum value are ignored.
And the spikes are gone..
DARPA announced a challenge (open to everyone) to build an autonomous ground vehicle which can travel without any human supervision on rough terrain. The track was an undisclosed path between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, passing through the Majove desert. A total of 15 vehicles qualified for the challenge which took place today. Unfortunately none of the vehicles came even close to finishing the 142 mile race. The farthest distance (7.2 miles)was by covered by a modified HUMMV, build by Red Team. Even though none of the teams could finish the race, I think it was a great event and both the government and the industry learnt a lot from it. For a complete list of the competing teams, click here .
While following this threat on slasdot, I came across this site by a system admin who tracks where the spam he fights on a daily basis originates from. This is further proof to break the myth of spamming that “Most spam originates from outside the US”. From this site, we can see that ~35% of spam originates from the US. I am not sure how the author is getting the country of origin from the IP address. I work at an ISP and know that even though all the IP addresses belong (are allocated) to us, they are all allocated to our customers (located outside the US). And we don’t SWIP them as we are required to :). So if any of our customers send out spam, for the rest of the world, it would look as if though it is originating from the US. Wonder how much of the 35% is made up of such spammers.
Tim O’Brien, a colleague from one of my previous jobs maintains a blog on his website. I like his ideology and style of writing. Be sure to check out his latest blog about how outsourcing effected him and his thoughts on it.
I was browsing through Buy.Com’s website and came across this ridiculous price for a refurbished Tivo :). This is also known as Operator error :).
Alright.. I had to put up this picture of a sign we saw on the road while driving in the (wrong) direction of our hotel. No comments 🙂
Mark, Michelle and Tracy flew in from Chicago and I flew in Honolulu. All of us met in Kahului, Maui. I guess they were so excited to see Hawaii that the 10 hour flight from Chicago didn’t turn them off. It was so great to see old friends after such a long time (well.. 6 months is a long time in my dictionary 🙂 ). We all flew together from Maui to Kona, Hawaii. Just so that no one gets confused, the Big Island is also known as Hawai’i. So we have Hawaii the state and Hawai’i the island.
The Kona Airport is such a big difference from the huge hectic airports that we see in many cities nowadays. Actually this was the first airport that I saw in the US that was completely “open”. As you can see from the picture, you can literally see the plane from the baggage checking area. In fact there is only one terminal. I instantly felt at home on the Big Island. The whole atmosphere was so laid back. No hurry to get anywhere. No hustling..No jostling. Not to mention that the weather was just great.
So off we go and collect our luggage. I took out my new toy and started snapping away :). Caught a shuttle to the rental place and we got there, we realized that there is no way all our luggage (Note to self: Women = Lots of Luggage 🙂 ) would fit in a full size car. We decided to upgrade the car to a SUV. And for some reason it took the rental people ~1 hour to get all the documentation sorted out and give us a SUV. So finally we get all our luggage into the SUV and start off to our hotel. Now how can a trip start out without an adventure :). Here is how the Big Island looks like…
So we were supposed to go South from the airport to get to our hotel, but as it happens with such things :), we went North. It was interesting to observe the landscape. I wish I had a picture to show for it. The ground was made up of cooled down lava. It was like a chocolate brownie, but just black in color :). As we drove along the highway, wondering why we don’t see the exit to the town yet, we noticed that there were white stones placed in funny ways on the ground (cooled lava). There were sentences from “I love you Jim” to “Katsumoto was here on 1/1/2001” [Alright.. I made that up] and the usual graffiti symbols. It was great to see them scattered all along the road. Now when one see such stuff, one has to dutifully pull over and take some pictures :). Michelle immediately went into “artist” mode and made up the following…
Why 2..? well that is something that Michelle has to explain. Just make sure that you have a couple of hours to spare when you ask her that question :). After taking some pictures, we hop back into the SUV and start driving. Somewhere around this time, we realize that something is wrong with our sense of direction 🙂 and decide to turn around. An advice for anyone having to drive through Kailua. Don’t ever drive through the town during rush hour. It was a nightmare. Took us ~30 minutes to get across a 2 mile strip. It was faster to walk :). Finally we get to our hotel. It was a great place. I would recommend it to anyone. The condo was pretty spacious and had all required amenities. I took a picture of the condo as soon as we arrived.
It was a long day and when it came time to hit the town for dinner, the girls passed on the offer. Mark and Me went into town and after strolling along for sometime and looking at umpteen restaurents, decided to dine at Beachcombers. People.. I tell you if you ever visit the Big Island, eat the “Lava Cake” at Beachcombers. Hmm..hmmm..hmm… As soon as the waitress said that it was similar to the Morton’s Godiva cake, I knew I had to try it. Mark said that he would split it with me. I was not having any of that :). I told him to get his own order. And I don’t think he regretted it. But before the dessert, I should mention that that I had frilled Ono. The food was great and so was the wait staff. It was a great way to end the day.
Coming soon to a theater near you. “The trip to Hawaii“.
|
Michelle
|
Tracy
|
Mark
|
Vinay [Me]
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
Guest Starring
|
Brian
|
 |
Alright.. fun aside :), As I mentioned in my previous post, I went on a long (10 days) trip to the Big Island and Maui along with my friends. We had a lot of fun and I want to chronicle the trip along with pictures. I have ~ 3Gb of pictures to sort through :). So it might take some time before the final post is up. But this is a beginning.
I went on a 10 day trip to the Big Island and Maui with a bunch of friends recently. I have been wanting to get a good digital camera for a long time and this was the perfect excuse :). So off I run to Circuit City and buy a Canon Digital Rebel. I can list all the mouthwatering features :). But if interested please read this review at dpreview.com. The first picture I took with this camera….
