I've been talking serial consoles with a couple of the other guys at work:
how nice they are to have for machines in the datacenter, how annoying it
is that
vPro
serial-over-LAN doesn't seem to be robust (yet?), and how serial
access concentrators are lung-and-kidney expensive (especially when you've
got 50-some racks to outfit).
This discussion, combined with my ongoing embedded-hardware-fascination
lust for a
SheevaPlug
appears to have spurred my brain into coming up with a Brilliant Idea: tie
a SheevaPlug to a pile of USB to serial adapters and use that as your
per-rack serial concentrator. Imagine:
faffenheimer, a dedicated server
you manage for a customer, and located in rack 27 of your DC, has just crashed, and
you'd like to know WTF has happened rather than just blindly reboot, but
you're in the office 15 minutes away from the DC floor, and the customer's
going to want that machine back up and running pretty quickly.
workstation:~/porn$ ssh rack27.serial
rack27:~$ sconsole faffenheimer
[screen session attached]
[minicom running, shows the horror of a kernel crash dump]
[oh look at that, kernel bug]
^A ESC
[pgup pgup]
[enter]
[pgdn pgdn]
[enter]
^A >/tmp/faffenheimer-crash-dump
^A d
rack27:~$ exit
workstation:~/porn$ scp rack27.serial:/tmp/faffenheimer-crash-dump ~
workstation:~/porn$ powercycle rack27 faffenheimer
Shiny! We got a crash dump in a minute or so (rather than having to take
phonecam photos of KVM screens in the DC), never had to leave our comfy
seat, and the machine's on it's way back up. We're now free to pursue
diagnostic activities on that crash dump at our leisure.
10 minutes later, the downtime for
faffenheimer that was
automatically set when we ran
powercycle runs out and Nagios
sends us threatening messages. Hmm, something's gone wrong here. Back
into the console...
workstation:~/porn$ ssh rack27.serial
rack27:~$ sconsole faffenheimer
[screen session attached]
[Boot is hung waiting for root password after initrd has bombed]
[Type root password]
[Oh look, the root MD appears to have come asunder]
[clickety-click... fixee fixee]
[reboot]
The more I think about this, the more I reckon I'm onto a bona fide
winner. The sheevaplug is a powerful ARM-based system with
USB/ethernet/SD ports that is packaged literally in it's own power supply
wall wart -- it's a plastic box with power plug prongs poking out the
side. That's all there is to it. The USB to serial adapter things are
likely to be a bit more of a pain, but I've played with enough of them by
now to not be too scared. So, you plug the Sheeva into a power socket,
plug an Ethernet cable and USB hub into the Sheeva, configure things a bit
so that the system knows which serial adapter maps to which machine, and
you're away. Oh, and the best bit: the Sheeva apparently draws as little
as 2W when idle. A whole datacentre's worth of serial goodness for about
a server's worth of power. The cost per rack should be somewhere
below AU$250, especially in bulk.
Let's see if I can convince work to spring for a Sheeva, a USB hub, and a
half dozen or so USB to serial adapters to test this whole thing out.
Given that the whole thing looks like it'd cost less than AU$250 (plus my
R&D time), I can't imagine it'll be too hard a sell to at least give
it a go. Watch this space...
It is curious to see that the eleventh movie in a series is the first to bear the series name with no adornment. It is apt, however: Star Trek is a clear attempt at rebooting the universe and basically forgetting most of the decades-heavy baggage. It seems to me that the reboot was fairly well done, too.
The movie opens with the birth of James Tiberius Kirk, and follows his development into the Captain of the Enterprise. Along the way, we also see the growth of Spock from adolescence into Kirk s trusted sidekick and also into well. Despite the fact that the action plot macguffins are time travel and planet-killer weaponry, it is mainly a story of personal vengeance, personal tragedy, and personal growth. Curiously enough, although Kirk gets a lot of screen time, it is really the personal story of Spock.
Besides Kirk and Spock, we also get to meet reimagined versions of Uhura (I like!), McCoy, Sulu, Chekov and Scott. And Christopher Pike, the first Captain of the Enterprise. The appearance of Leonard Nimoy as the pre-reboot Spock merits a special mention and a special thanks.
I overheard someone say in the theatre, after the movie ended, that the movie was a ripoff and had nothing to do with anything that had gone before. I respectfully disagree. The old Star Trek continuum had been weighed down by all the history into being a 600-pound elderly man who is unable to leave the couch on his own. This movie provided a clearn reboot, ripping out most of the baggage, retaining the essence of classic Star Trek and giving a healthy, new platform for good new stories. One just hopes Paramount is wise enough not to foul it up again.
It was worth it, I thought.
It took me a while because of travel and other projects, but I finally
released a tar ball containing Debian lenny for the SheevaPlug along with
some 
What seems like eons ago, I ordered one of those 
I just noticed Matthew Palmer's 
I received a 
I received a sample of QNAP's new TS-219 Turbo NAS today. The TS-119 and
TS-219 devices are an upgrade to QNAP's TS-109 and TS-209 devices and were
announced earlier this month at CeBIT. The new TS-219 uses the same robust
case as the TS-209 but offers much more performance:
I was not in a work mood tonight and then decided to lose my time
reading about timezones (thanks to a 
The last day of each year
sees one of the strangest
traditions I've ever noticed.
A 40-year-old English-language film of
an 80-year-old music hall comedy is
played repeatedly on various stations
in Germany - and in Austria, Switzerland,
Denmark and Australia too.
There's not only the film, but
edited versions, localised versions,
spoofs and other shows based around it too.
The film still isn't shown on any English
stations, as far as I can tell.
I'd never heard of it before getting
