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I ran in the the Hershey Company’s 4th Annual Chocolate Miracle 5K Race this morning, which raises money to support the Children’s Miracle Network. The race was held on the roads of the absolutely beautiful campus of the Milton Hershey School. The weather was close to perfect, about 60 degrees and a very slight breeze.

My training had been sort of a mixed bag in the weeks leading up to the race. I’ve had a few workouts that were great, but also missed a bunch of sessions, or had to make them much shorter than desired due to travel or work issues. I’m hoping to start attending the Tuesday speed-work sessions held at the track in Camp Hill once I can reign in my work related travel a bit.

My main goal for the race was to break 20 minutes, so I was shooting for a pace of just under 6:26 per mile.

The start was a bit chaotic (a big mix of people of varying speeds near the front, including a guy with a jogging stroller(who ended up being pretty fast and very courteous, but the stroller did seem out of place at the front of the starting line)), but within about two minutes people started spreading out. The first half mile or so was flat, and then a very slight incline for a bit over a quarter mile. My GPS based mile split was 6:21 and I was feeling very comfortable. The second mile started with a nice gradual downhill and then flattend out taking us back near the starting line. I hit the GPS based two mile mark at 12:45 (6:24 split) and while I could definitely feel the effort increasing, I still felt it was a pace I could hold pretty steady.

Just past the two mile point, I noticed some crumpled money on the road as I passed by it. Right before the race started, I had seen some money slightly sticking out of the back pocket of one of the runners who I had noticed at a bunch of HARRC events. It seemed like the money was still in his pocket far enough it would stay put, but when I saw the money on the ground during the race I thought it was very likely his. I did a quick u-turn of about 5 feet and picked it up. I don’t think this cost more than a second or two.

The third mile included some slight hills, but they were pretty short. I was planning on trying to kick as hard as as I could for the final quarter mile or so (thinking this would start at about 18:25 into the race), so I was really surprised when I noticed the finish line coming up much sooner than anticipated. My final time was 19:07, good enough for 15th place out of 187 runners. It turned out the course was a bit short, almost exactly 3 miles (probably 3.01 – 3.02 based off my GPS and talking to some of the other finishes based off their times or GPSs).

While I do wish the course had been more accurate, I’m definitely happy with my effort. The pace that I averaged was 6:22 per mile, which equates to a roughly 19:50 “true” 3.1 mile race and I was really pleased that I had very even splits (and I was able to return the money to the guy who lost it).

Update: Thanks for Nate Powell for emailing me two pictures he took during the race.

Update2: It has been a week since the race and I still can’t find the race results posted online, I just emailed the race director via the active.com link. I’ll let people know if I hear back or find the results somewhere.

Update3: Received an email that the results are now online: http://www.hmc.psu.edu/cmn/events/pdfs/RaceResults.xls 

I’ve been involved with a project that uses about 60 Sun X4200 M2 Opteron servers running Solaris 10. I was initially a bit nervous about jumpstarting using the nge0 interface after reading Ben Rockwood’s blog post, but in general everything went very smoothly (we did have a problem with a single machine, but it may have been cable related). I love working with the X4200 hardware, the machines are very well built.

Here are a few tips we’ve picked up in working with a bunch of X4200s:

To make sure the x4200 boots after a power failure:

In the BIOS setup screen, select Chipset -> Southbridge Configuration

Set “Restore on AC/Power Loss” to “Power On”

To configure HW RAID during jumpstart

Use a begin script that does something like the following (assuming your disks are c3t0d0 and c3t1d0)

raidctl -f -c c3t0d0 c3t1d0
echo “Using cfgadm to reprobe geometry…”
cfgadm -c unconfigure c3
echo “Sleeping to ensure changes took…”
sleep 10
echo “Wiping out any existing fdisk parition…”
fdisk -F /dev/null /dev/rdsk/c3t0d0p0
echo “Creating a single Solaris fdisk partition…”
fdisk -B /dev/rdsk/c3t0d0p0

Getting Host WWN Information (For Solaris 10 in general, not X4200 specific)

fcinfo hba-port (look for the Port WWN line)

NOTE: fcinfo hba-port doesn’t return the ports in the same order necessarily across machines, so you need to look at the device path in the output.  Out of the 50 some machines we had that were SAN attached (with same HBAs in the same PCI-E slots), 10 printed the slots in reverse order.

Configuring the ILOM to use a static IP address

(assuming you are logged in as root on the ILOM)

cd /SP/network
set pendingipdiscovery=static pendingipgateway=1.2.3.4 pendingipnetmask=255
.255.255.0 pendingipaddress=1.2.3.100
set commitpending=true

Using expect to change the root password of the ILOM

(This works fine using expect 5.42.0 on my MacBook under OSX 10.4)

#!/usr/bin/expect –
if { $argc != 3 } {
send_user “Usage: $argv0 <server> <oldpass> <newpass>\n”
exit
}
set server [lindex $argv 0]
set oldpass [lindex $argv 1]
set newpass [lindex $argv 2]
spawn ssh -l root $server-ilo
expect “Password:”
send “$oldpass\n”
expect “.*->”
send “cd /SP/users/root\n”
send “set password=$newpass\n”
expect “Enter new password again:”
send “$newpass\n”
interact

I ran in the Harrisburg Road Runner’s “Camp Hill Triple-Threat” informal race on Sunday morning which consists of a 400m, 1600m , and a 4 mile segment. I had ran this event twice last year, but those were before I was running on a regular basis and I’ve also lost a good chunk of weight since those races.

My 400m times have gone from 83.0 -> 79.5 -> 70.1

My 1600m times have gone from DNF -> 7:04.7 -> 5:59.6

I was really happy to break 6 minutes for the 1600 (even if just by a hair) , it is definitely a nice psychological barrier to pass.

My 4 mile times aren’t indicative of a hard effort, I’ve been taking those easy: 49:47 -> 41:54 -> 35:48

I haven’t been running any speed work, there are some sessions held in Camp Hill on Tuesdays that I’m hoping to start making as soon as my work travel schedule calms down a bit. My next goal is to try and break the 20 minute barrier for a 5k race.

I’ve been going bowling most Friday nights with a group of friends from work for the last year and a half or so.  I’ve traditionally been a pretty mediocre bowler (averaging about 120) and never really got into the competitive side of the sport, I’ve mostly just been enjoying hanging out with my friends.  About a month ago, I bowled a 202, which was by far my highest score ever (and the next game was a 102, doh!).  I thought the 202 was a fluke, until I bowled another 202 the next week.  Last week, I bowled about average, and then this past Friday, I bowled a 614 series (227 + 199 + 188), breaking my previous high series by about 150 points!