Elektronkind

I took this photo of the 1st half Moon while at the April 10 HAL star party at Alpha Ridge Park, Maryland.

Although I’ve taken many photos through my telescopes, I really consider this one to be my first “real” astrophoto, having gone through the motions of equipment setup, settings selections, and a bit of post-processing in Photoshop CS3 for this one shot of the moon.

These two books - Michael Covington’s Digital SLR Astrophotography and R. Scott Ireland’s Photoshop Astronomy - lent me a big hand in teaching me what to do before and after taking a photo or series of photos of an object. I highly recommend them.

I accidentally left my trusty 3rd gen 40GB iPod on the plane when I arrived in San Francisco yesterday, so I headed to the Apple Store around the corner from my hotel in downtown SF to treat myself to a new 160GB iPod Classic. I happily bought a silver one, and headed back to the office to christen it and put some music on it.

Apparently I got a lemon :(
Mar 11 15:27:47 cobalt kernel[0]: disk3s2: I/O error.
Mar 11 15:27:47 cobalt kernel[0]:
Mar 11 15:28:14: — last message repeated 1 time —
Mar 11 15:28:14 cobalt kernel[0]: disk3s2: I/O error.
Mar 11 15:28:14 cobalt kernel[0]:
Mar 11 15:28:34: — last message repeated 1 time —


… and on and on… eventually after spending 2 hours syncing only 47 songs (out of 940) did iTunes figure something was wrong and proceeded to beach ball.

Time to see how easy it will be to exchange this one.

I’ve started a project of my own to port the HFS/HFS+ filesystem driver from Apple’s XNU kernel to OpenSolaris/Nevada.

Hopefully this will work well enough to allow Solaris users to read and write to HFS or HFS+ formatted disks and disk images. This includes iPods that were initialized on a Mac. Please check out the page I made for it and lend a hand if you’re interested!

Technorati Tags: solaris, opensolaris, sun, mac, macos, apple

I’ve been really quiet with the astronomy-related blog posts over the past year, but that doesn’t mean that I’ve been straying from the hobby of amateur astronomy - far from it. I’ve signed up with two local clubs and have been brining my scopes out to star parties (or just my back yard) whenever I can.

Up until recently my only two telescopes have been a Orion XT10i, a 10″ dobsonian, and a Coronado PST for viewing the Sun in Hydrogen-alpha wavelengths. This past holiday I treated myself to a new scope, a 90mm apochromatic doublet refractor made by William Optics (WO) named the Megrez 90.

The Megrez 90, as the name implies, is a high-quality refractor telescope that uses calcium fluoride optics. The objective lens is 90mm in diameter and the scope has a focal length of 621mm, which means it has a focal ratio of f/6.9. When WO brought this scope to market, it took it by storm as it was quickly regarded as a high quality instrument at an astonishingly low price, easily comparable in optical quality, fit and finish to long-standing fonts of quality such as TeleVue and Stellarvue.

I found the reviewers to be spot-on with their assessment of this telescope’s construction and features. Its dual-speed (10:1) Crayford-style focuser has made me wish I had it on my big Orion XT10i. The stars are beautiful pinpoints with no detectable (to me at least) chromatic aberration. I have only spent a few nights outside with this ’scope so I don’t have a full feel of its capabilities… more on that later. But I will say that I have been impressed so far and would at least offer it as a suggestion to anyone who is looking for a telescope in its class.

Along with the telescope, I purchased WO’s EZTouch alt/az mount and wooden surveyor’s style tripod to put it on, as well as their Red Dot Finder instead of a classic finder scope. I found with my XT10i+Telerad that I prefer to star-hop to my target rather than bungle around inside a restricted FOV.

I foresee many nights out under clear skies with this fine instrument.

Technorati Tags: astronomy, refractors, telescopes, william optics

With a bit of sadness, yesterday marked my last day of work at UMBC where I spent the past 3½ years learning lots of new things. It’s where I developed my deep interest in mass storage and furthered my Solaris knowledge even more, where I delved into kernel programming by participating in the OpenAFS project.

I learned a lot about people there, too, and how different sectors of the IT industry just have sometime inexplicably different mindsets about how to do things. Coming from the .com world to the .edu world was a bit of a whiplash event for me then having grown up around profit-based and customer service-centric organizations. I know I did leave UMBC with some lasting friendships and deeper appreciation skill sets in other people that I gave barely a thought to before.

Onward and upward, I transition to my new job and re-enter the .com world. On Monday, I start with Salesforce.com and will focus on storage (and Solaris) there. It’s an exciting opportunity for me and I’m sure I’ll be immersed in the technology and tasks I enjoy. I’ll work with a top-notch team in helping to keep SFDC at the forefront if its industry. Good times ahead!

Technorati Tags: salesforce.com, umbc

After almost 8 years of running elemental.org mail, mailing lists, shell accounts, many websites (such as this one), database servers and essentially being a one-server ISP, the Sun Ultra 2 which ran all those things as lithium.elemental.org was retired and replaced this past weekend with a new server. Say hello to mercury.elemental.org.

Mercury is a Dell PowerEdge 860 with a Intel Xeon X3220 (quad core, 2.4Ghz) and 4GB 8GB of 667Mhz DDR2 RAM. Unlike lithium, mercury’s storage is entirely internal in the form of two mirrored 500GB SATA drives. This is to keep the entire package in 1 rack unit of space to keep colocation costs down.

What really excites me about this new server is that it is running Solaris 10 8/07 (lithium was running a very patched Solaris 8 FCS!). Solaris installed without a hitch and the 860’s onboard BCM5721 NICs are recognized by the bge driver, as are its IPMI baseboard controller by the bmc driver. The chipset on this system is the Intel ICH7 and unfortunately the Solaris ahci driver supports only the ICH6 at the moment, so the drives are running just fine in IDE compatibility mode.

This upgrade wasn’t just a mere update of hardware and OS. I also completely changed how the mail storage works and also make use of ZFS file systems for each user home directory and virtual web site:

1. Out with uw-imap, in with Cyrus. All mail is delivered to Cyrus, so there are no more maildir-style spools sitting in each person’s home directory.
2. To take advantage of Cyrus’s features, elemental.org is now operating its own Kerberos realm, ELEMENTAL.ORG. This is my first time running my own Keberos KDC, and I love it. Cyrus and Sendmail, via SASL, now offer GSSAPI authentication. Using Solaris’s pam_krb5_migrate.so.1 PAM module, as people log in with their UNIX passwords, a Kerberos principle is made for them and they are granted tickets. Pine is configured to connect to Cyrus and authenticate with GSSAPI, so shell users don’t have to type in or save their password when accessing their email!
3. As I mentioned, all user data is now stored on a mirrored ZFS pool. Each user and virtual website gets their own ZFS file system and this will allow me to keep tabs on disk usage (and easily delete a user or site if the need should arise.) The zpool’s net size is 442GB.
4. All incoming email is goes through greylist, ClamAV, and finally SpamAssassin milters.
5. I’m more at ease and familiar with Solaris’s SMF facility now, having made a point to write SMF manifests for the services I’m running rather than plain old init scripts.

In addition, I’m now monitoring several aspects and services on the new system using Cacti.

Here’s to another 8 years of hopefully trouble-free operation!

Technorati Tags: Sun, Dell, Solaris, ZFS

I’ve had Verizon’s FiOS service for about a year now, and by and large I’ve enjoyed it quite a bit. One thing that has bothered me, though, is the big ActionTec router that they supply. It’s a nice router and all and you do need it if you also have Verizon’s digital cable service. But I have just the internet service and I already have a gaggle of Apple Airport Extreme and Airport Express base stations around the house, so this Actiontec router was just a superfluous thingy and I felt that my Airport Extreme base station could be put to better use in its place. Now, the Actiontec router is what the VZ tech installs. It takes the 100Mb ethernet connection coming into the house from the ONT outside. According to VZ support, only it can be used to terminate the FiOS internet, but I doubted this. I wanted this thing out of the picture and was successful at doing so.What you need to do is the following:

1. Log in to the Actiontec’s web interface (typically by going to http://192.168.1.1/)
2. Select Network, click on “Ethernet (Broadband)” and its edit icon. Down the page, you’ll see a button labled “Release”. It’s important to release the IP address VZ’s network has given the Actiontec, or it’ll refuse to allot one to your Airport Extreme once you bring that up in its place.
3. Immediatly turn off the Actiontec. Remove the “WAN” ethernet cable from it, and plug it into the “WAN” port of your Airport base station. Turn the Airport on.
4. The Airport base station should boot up and request an IP from VZ’s DHCP server. Speaking of which, the “Internet Connection” setting in the Airport should be “DHCP” and not “PPPoE”. VZ no longer uses PPPoE on its FiOS lines.
5. Configure your Aiport wireless network as you see fit and you’re done. No more Actiontec.

Step 2 is muy importante. If you don’t do that, your Airport base station will be sitting there with a blinking amber light because the VZ network is refusing to give it an IP, simply because it still thinks that your (no longer operating) Actiontec has it.

Technorati Tags: apple, airport, verizon, fios

The first official list of new stuff added in Solaris 10 via its 4th update is available on docs.sun.com now:

http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-0547/getjd?l=en&a=view

Technorati Tags: sun, solaris

This past week, the 2007 AFS & Kerberos Workshop went on at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) near Palo Alto, CA. Many people from an array of places eductational, government, and commercial came and presented papers and discourse on a wide range of topics involving AFS and Kerberos.

I was lucky enough to present a slide show on how we at UMBC have been combining OpenAFS with new ZFS and Zones features of Solaris 10 to obtain a more resilient AFS server infrastructure. You can view a PDF of my presentation here.

Technorati Tags: afs, solaris, zfs, zones, opensolaris

So today I was reading over the release notes for patch 126400-1, which is the latest OpenBoot PROM and SC update for the T1000/T2000, and came across an interesting bug ID listed under the Problem Description section:

6510364 “War Mode” in ALOM-CMT is required by the US NAVY which is currently missing

Awesome. I love knowing that my T1000s have a “war mode” now. Perhaps Sun should call it the SkyNet T1000 ;) Hopefully it’s the feature and not the US Navy that was “currently missing.”

Technorati Tags: sun, coolthreads, sparc, ultrasparc, solaris, navy, war