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So when most people think about how they are going to spend a birthday they probably think about cake, cocktails, dinner, maybe presents. I thought a reasonable way to celebrate another year in the books was to complete a pretty major milestone in my flying career.
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It is hard to describe the experience of learning to fly to people who have not done it. It is equal parts elation and frustration as you try to assimilate all the procedures, regulations, and knowledge required to become a pilot. Instead of a ``learning curve'' it is periods of frustration followed by discovery and joy. It is an investment in brain real-estate and muscle memory as well as the more obvious time and money.
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I provide BaaS (Backup as a Service) on a NetApp FAS2020 to a number of friends using a vFiler on the system that hosts my public virtual machines (such as the one that runs this particular website). This provides separation and allows me to delegate administration of the backup location to the users that actually consume this data. When it came time to monitor the vFiler though I found that check_nac (which I use to monitor my instance) does not have access to vFiler resources. It looks like this is a limitation of the SNMP agent so the solution was to use the wonderful NetApp Manageability API.
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Nothing major to report, went down to the Rochester Air Center last Thursday and after buying a new plotter (I seem to have lost mine between taking the practice test to get the sign-off on Monday evening and Thursday afternoon...) took and passed the written exam. I scored a 92% (missing 5 questions).
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Last night was a perfect night to fly. No clouds, clear, nice strong wind from the south to help us scoot home.
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In typical Rochester weather news, this week was forecast to be crap but all of a sudden it ended up being quite nice. In fact it was nice enough that I was able to get my night orientation flight in the book.
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Last weekend I finally had the opportunity to get out and fly my first dual cross country. For those who aren't versed in the bowels of the FAA's flight training requirements a 'cross country' is a flight in excess of 50 Nautical Miles from your 'home' airport. The dual means I had my instructor along as opposed to the 'solo' variety which is still coming up. We planed to fly KSDC SYR KRME then KRME GGT KSDC.
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So it's not a secret that I am a big fan of Debian Linux, and also not a secret that I am a big fan of NetApp's storage technology (I did go work for them when given the chance after all), however in the "Enterprise" world Debian is kind of a second class citizen. Most people have heard of it but RedHat kinda rules the day... Thankfully if you do it right Linux is pretty much Linux from a compiled binary standpoint.
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| I have been spending a lot of time lately with the handy NetApp Data ONTAP 8.1.1 cluster mode simulator, including getting a lab setup at home. It's a fantastic product and stands to be a very disruptive revolution in the way enterprises manage and think about storage but all of that has been covered over and over again by people more articulate on the messaging than I. But since I monitor all my personal IT infrastructure with Nagios already I wanted to monitor my cluster (even though it is a simulator) as well.
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So NetApp is starting to push Data ONTAP 8.1 running in Cluster Mode as the Next Big Thing in storage technology because among other things is brings scale-out to our already industry-leading storage management technology.
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So I've been playing around with getting the Data ONTAP 8.1 simulator running on my MacBook Pro under VMware Fusion 4.1 and during the initial configuration I realized that there was no obvious way to determine the IP address automatically assigned to the host only network (vmnet1) during installation. Unfortunately it appears that VMware does not expose this from the UI. There is not a lot of good information via Google or on the NetApp Simulator Communities website that I was able to find so I figured I'd write it down in hopes that Google's spider notices.
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I recently have been re-architecting my network at home and one of the big transitions has been back to NFS home directories across my Linux systems. I previously used NFSv3 shares to provide this functionality years ago but now that modern Linux systems (I am running mostly Debian 6.0 (squeeze)) support the more secure, performant and robust NFS version 4 I standardized on that. Thanks to my use of nss_ldap for user authentication it has been pretty straightforward but there have been a couple of interesting gotchas.
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So, if all this technology worked right this should actually post as I am leaving ROC for ORD, my only stop enroute to NRT (Tokyo, Japan). Over the last few weeks people have been asking me if I am still going to Japan on holiday and my answer has been an unwavering yes. Granted things looked a little sketchy for a bit there, the trains from Narita into Tokyo proper were running at reduced rates (and even briefly closed) and I admit I was not really liking the idea of tossing down 23,000円-25,000円 ($280 - $310) right out the gate for a taxi, or rolling around in a bus for 2 to 3 hours after flying for 20 but if that was the price I was going to have to pay I was willing to pay it. Once the trains resumed service last week I felt confident that the trip would be problem-free and the anxiety was left behind. I have full faith in both the Japanese government, people and the international group of scientists that are working on the problems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant as well as the relief workers bringing aid to the victims of the massive earthquake and tsunami. Along with donating to the Red Cross, bringing in a little tourism money and showing some faith is about the best I can come up with to do to help.
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Introduction, or Why I care...
I have been meaning to install ESXi on a server I have sitting in the house for a while but a lack of CD-ROM drive has been stalling things for a while so I wanted to see if there was any chance of booting the ISO image from the network.
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What a whirlwind week, last Tuesday I flew from Rochester to Edinburgh to finally meet a friend from one of the IRC channels I frequent. So I landed early Wednesday morning and we spent some time wandering around Edinburgh. I can report in that in fact Haggis is actually pretty good, and in spite of what I've heard about the Guinness the USA gets being different from the real stuff, it's really not.