Recent Journal Comments

Thanks for doing this. I'm impressed with calibre. I've been using it a few weeks with my Nook and it's extremely useful (especially the convert* to epub).
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Calibre package needs love. Currently F12 package it's broken, but not only because the python-cssutils package (I installed it from sources), I get crashes importing ebooks and converting ebooks.

It's a pity, because it's a very interesting application and right now is useless :(
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Interesting.

The rest of the story (which is often more useful in what I usually do with scripts) if getting the fully qualified path of where the script is. I get it with:

SCRIPTDIR=$( cd -P -- "$(dirname -- "$(command -v -- "$0")")" && pwd -P )

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I use smokeping to check for changes in latency over certain links and it uses fping, so I became aware of it through smokeping. Nice tool.
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Excellent article. Thanks for writing it. You're clearly professional system administrators using best practices. I'm impressed with how well you and others at tummy.com write. Good writing is perhaps even more rare than good thinking.

I look forward to learning more from you guys.
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If you like chromium you must also try out SRWare Iron. It is a chrome port reputed to be the most secure graphical browser on the planet. http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php

Been using it since early beta with no problems. Security comes via limiting add-ons/extensions as far as I can tell.
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cronq? IE, a queue of cron jobs with a controller that monitors load on the machine, pops a job off the queue and lets it run if the load is low enough to support it.

If a job is eating "too many" resources, throw it back on the queue for a while.

Since you have multiple machines that you want to have running the same jobs, perhaps a "master queue" where you could enter jobs that need to be run and each local machine grabs the job off the master queue and puts it on the local queue upon startup so you don't need to redundantly enter the same job on multiple boxes.
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It's ext4.

Also, as a correction pointed out to me in email: DRBD wasn't added until the 2.6.34 kernel release, so it was foolish for me to wish for it in 2.6.33 that RHEL6 is basing on. ;)
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What's the default filesystem for RHEL6? EXT3 or EXT4?
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Here are some screen-shots of 2-up and 3-up modes:

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Nice! Its funny how its the simple things that get overlooked sometimes...I too would look at my mess of screen sessions thinking there had to be a better way, but in all those times looking through the manpage looking options to do various things, I always overlooked that....
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I don't have my tracker login on this computer so I'll post here. I'd +1 on making the module python with just the core functionality imported from C (it releases the GIL when doing IO). Then you could replace the few hundred lines of C with just the few lines of python from the prototype. That said... The parens in "return (NULL)" are extra and against PEP 7 (though there are already a bunch in syslogmodule.c). You need to NULL check the saved_hook in newhookobject() before INCREF'ing it. Should the saved hook be called after the syslog call? It might do anything. The patch needs unit tests.
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sys.excepthook apparently still doesn't work when threads are involved. http://bugs.python.org/issue1230540
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Thanks for sharing your letter, by sharing with the world everyone can potentially benefit, even if your 18 year old self cannot. :)

I like your money/things advice. I also was struck by Tyler's comment that we "Work jobs we hate to buy shit we don't need." I think that having too much stuff can put up an enormous barrier to simply moving, and hence prevent someone from taking up new opportunities. (Like moving to CO and working for tummy!)

Your blog led me to the 100 Thing Challenge, which I will have to investigate further.

My mind also resonates with your lament on not finishing things. I agree and I also feel "oppressed" at times reflecting on all the projects I wanted to complete, but lacked the initiative or devotion. I'll have to work on this.

Kyle
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Do you feel this is any different from using PasteScript?

I've used 'paster create -t basic_package ' for the past year to do exactly what you are doing here. The only difference I can see off the top of my head is that your implementation doesn't have the Paste dependency.

Some could argue that PasteScript is over engineered, but that's what makes it extendable. For instance, the basic_namespace template (e.g. `paster create -t basic_namespace my.package') is built from the basic_package template. And there are other packaging templates built from that for more specific cases.
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/me likes

It would be nice if we could easy_install wcfqfu without having to remember long FTP URLs and without having to wait for distutils2 to appear in some future release of Python.
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I'd have liked to have seen that!
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I'm using a variety of drive sizes for ZFS, mostly 250GB and 500GB, mostly because these are what I already have available. If I were buying drives for a new storage box today I'd probably use 5 2TB 5400RPM drives to give me 6TB of storage with RAID Z2, slower but also using less power.

Of course, RAID Z2 makes smaller drives more attractive, because of less overhead (10 1TB drives would have 8TB data 2TB parity, 5 2TB drives gives 6TB data 4TB parity), so it would mostly be a matter of the math.

10 drives would fit internally on my current layout, so anything under 11 would be my best bet.

Sean
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What size of drives do you use ZFS?
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Yes, I keep several rsync copies: one for the daily rdiff incremental source and one for the monthly rsync source. I don't have the bandwidth to the backup server to do a full rsync every day -- it's limited by the 768kbps on my home network, and I have 4 or 5 machines to do every day.

So far it has been working extremely well. Once I got the initial setup issues ironed out, it hasn't had any problems.
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This looks intriguing to me, but I'm curious if you are keeping the rsyncs around (so you only need to xmit the rsync diffs before taking rdiffs) and incurring a ~100% storage requirement increase, or are you removing the rsync copy every time?

Thanks
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The recipe looks good. except I could never get the cdrom drive to work off the bat. Would have been nice to see how you did that in more detail
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I took a look at rdiff-backup and made the Move to it. This makes a lot more sense then rsync with Hardlinks.

Thanx for turning me on to rdiff-backup.
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This was very useful, thank you.
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