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I just saw that the 2nd edition of  “The Practice of System and Network Administration” was released earlier this month.  I read the first edition cover to cover and highly recommend it to anyone in the IT field (beginners to seasoned pros) who works as a system administrator or architect.  While the book doesn’t tend to go deep into specific technologies, it does provide a great foundation on the concepts and methods of  building and maintaining a reliable computing environment.   One of the Amazon review quotes that I found very true was that this can be considered a “mentor in a book”.

For the 2nd or 3rd time in the last 6 months, I received a hand addressed envelope with no return address that was postmarked from Lancaster PA (within an hour from where I live).  Inside the envelope was what appeared to be a newspaper article clipping and a post-it note.  The post-it note was hand written and said:

William,

Try this – It workes! I just got two months no bills!

J

I guess I’m supposed to think I have a friend “J something” that I can’t remember who really likes this service and thought I needed it.

Then newspaper “article” turns out to be a clipping of a 1/2 page advertisement for a Eric’s debt management service cut out of a fake newspaper (it has a copy write notice 2006, TMS Inc. on the advertisement’s margin which is also on his website).  If I was having financial difficulties, it would seem odd that I’d trust someone who is trying to market using deceptive advertising techniques.

I found a web site called slideshare that is focused around sharing presentations.  One of the interesting collections for me was a  bunch of presos from people who discuss various scaling issues involved with building large web sites.

I stumbled across OpenSolaris bug 6457375 while setting up link-state based IPMP on some servers that have zones . The problem boils down to if you have a physical interface without an IP with a zone on it fail and then recover, you have problems trying to halt the zone later. While researching the problem, I came across an opensolaris.org post from Mike Gerdts which discussed his workaround, which is configuring the same address in a ‘down’ state across all the machines. Hopefully once 6457375 is fixed we can remove the workaround address.

Example error messages when you hit this problem:

zoneadm: zone 'zone2': ce1: could not remove interface: Address family not

supported by protocol family

zoneadm: zone 'zone2': unable to unconfigure network interfaces in zone

zoneadm: zone 'zone2': unable to destroy zone

Also, a handy tool for testing IPMP configurations is if_mpadm.

Examples:
# if_mpadm -d nge1 (disable nge1 in IPMP)
# if_mpadm -r nge1 (re-activate nge1 in IPMP)

I ran in the 26th annual Harrisburg Mile this evening.

I arrived around 5:30 at the East Shore YMCA to register for the race (I was going to pre-register last week, but wasn’t sure that my travel schedule would permit me to race). The registration process was pretty smooth, I was in and out within 2 minutes. They were out of t-shirts at the time, but that is certainly my fault for waiting until the last 30 minutes for a race as popular as this.

The weather had me a bit concerned earlier in the day. It was fairly muggy around lunch time, but we got a brief shower in the early afternoon and it seemed to clear up a bit. It was still a little warmer than I’d like when I got to Harrisburg, but it was definitely bearable for a short event like the mile.

The course is a fairly flat (some small dips and rises, nothing over 25 feet) USATF certified course, so it was nice to know that whatever time you ran here was legit. I watched the kids 1/2 mile race and the fun run, and then the competitive heats started. The 15 and under heat had a couple of kids go under 5 minutes. The 16-19 heat had some impressive talent with the winner coming in at about 4:25. At this point I had about 30 mins until my heat started so I jogged over to my car to ditch my gear and put on my racing flats.

I did a pretty light warm up since I didn’t want to overheat and ran into my friends Jon and James near the starting line (they were just coming to watch and stopped by as part of their workout). About two minutes before the start I walked over to the starting line and got in line. There were already people about 4 rows deep and it seemed like it was more of a “first-come first-serve” type of start versus people lining up by speed. Next year I’ll have to make sure I’m at the starting line sooner. I’d rather lose a second during the start than be known as the jerk who shows up late and tries to muscle his way closer to the front.
The first 70-100 yards or so was mostly trying to balance between passing people that were going slower while making sure that I didn’t go out too hard myself. I started feeling pretty comfortable and I heard a 1:24 split as I hit the quarter mile mark. This was almost perfect since I was hoping for a 5:45 +/- 5 seconds final time.

The second quarter mile I started concentrating on trying to keep a relatively even pace as I could feel my concentration drifting a bit. I saw my friends on the side yelling out to me and taking pictures which was pretty cool, it helped give me a bit of extra energy. The half-mile split was 2:51 (2nd quarter in 1:27), which still put me on target for my goal pace.

For the 3rd quarter mile I tried to lock on to two guys that were a few yards ahead of me and focused on trying to pull them in. I was able to catch up to them, but it was definitely a tough effort. The 3/4 mile split was about 3:16 (3rd quarter in 1:25), which was also on target for goal pace.

During the 4th quarter, one of the two guys I had passed about 30 seconds ago started pouring on his kick and passed me. I tried to counter as much as I could, but my legs were feeling pretty drained. I could see the clock and the finishing line as we were approaching and I was just hoping that my legs wouldn’t tighten up completely. I wasn’t able to catch up to the guy, but the effort in trying to catch him definitely helped my overall time. Thanks guy with the better kick! My last split was a 1:19.77

Official time: 5:37

I was really ecstatic with my time, even better than my goal! I think the speed workouts have really been improving my comfort level with running quicker.

Next goal: sub 19:30 5k and building mileage for the Harrisburg Half-Marathon which is in about 7 weeks.

I just ran into the case where I had configured the Solaris 10 IPFilter subsystem on a machine that was using IPMP and was having some sporadic difficulties. It turns out that the stateful inspection feature (typically the “keep state” stanza) isn’t supported on machines where the inbound and outbound packets might be going through different interfaces. I believe this is only a major problem on active/active configurations, but it will also get you in the active/passive scenario when an address fails over to an alternate link. This is another reason to consider using dladm based link aggregations if your network topology supports it.

I’ve stayed at a few different hotels in center city, here are my impressions of their treadmills:

Loews: 6 Cybex treadmills – I’m not a big fan, hard decks, really lame displays, often one was broken, gym opens at 6 am

Marriott Courtyard: 6 high-end Life Fitness treadmills w/ individual TV screens, gym is open 24 hours, very nice

Marriott (deluxe tower fitness room, not sure about main fitness room): 4 StarTrac treadmills, gym is open 24 hours

Update: I’m staying at the Marriot again, but in the main building this time. The main fitness room on the 7th floor is pretty nice. They have 8 or so high-end Life Fitness treadmills w/ individual TV screens, and a couple nice elliptical machines as well. Gym is open 24 hours , has free small bottles of water, and photocopies of a 1.5 walk/run loop. This is the nicest gym from an aerobic standpoint I’ve seen.

Update2: The Philadelphia Airport Marriott Fairfield Inn (on 8800 Bartram) has a very wimpy gym.  There is a single consumer-grade Precor treadmill (which was very uncomfortable) and two recumbent bikes.  There is also a small set of dumbells.