my web 0.2 website

Common Event Expression.

I am getting quite excited about some of the material I have been reading on Common Event Expression (pdf).  CEE is a desire to standardise the way that events are described.  I can see this being of significant advantage to sysadmins who need to produce large scale monitoring systems.

We already all use syslog-ng or rsyslogd or similar to aggregate our logs centrally, but it would be great to be able to aggregate logs inside our monitoring systems in such a way that when we add servers to our networks, any issues that they raise, in the application layer, or in hardware, are described to monitoring systems in a common and expected way.

If the taxonomy of error handling was equivalent on, say, routing kit as well as desktop systems, this allows sysadmins to deploy complex monitoring systems with less effort.  Understand how to handle a mistake with system-X and every single system you deploy from then on benefits from tried and tested monitoring and management.

Its early days for CEE, but I am optimistic about the benefits we could all realise if there was a desire to standardise logging.  Looking forward to what happens next.

HP Laserjet 1022n and Mac OS/X

I was trying to print from a mac to the HP Laserjet 1022n printer.  Bonjour could see the printer, but couldn’t find a driver.

All of the blogs I found when googling recommended to plug the printer into the mac directly, let it detect it as a local printer, then plug it back into the network.  Frankly, that’s pants.

Just pick the ‘HP Laserjet 5 Series’ gimp-print driver from the drop down.  It works fine then.

Internet TV Offerings.

I met some incredibly nice people from Joost last week, and met some different incredibly nice people from Network2.tv last month, so I decided I’d try both services and compare.

Drumroll please …… at the very early days, I think that Network2.tv is slightly better.

I can use my web-browser to watch network2, and start full screen video (where it exists, see the demo on the home page), which is ace – whereas with Joost I have to use their client. The Joost client is pretty funky, but shipping your own tools loses points on the ‘it just works’ front.
network2 doesn’t use p2p so I’m not using my bandwidth to send tv to people I don’t know. The full-screen video seemed less jerky on my 8Mbit DSL Max using network2 than it did on Joost (probably because it’s not using p2p!).

From a usability POV, Joost has a concept of channels which doesn’t seem right when not associated with a broadcast ‘many viewers, one stream’ system. Using RSS and web standards makes network2 make more sense when watching stuff on a computer.

I don’t actually want to watch tv that’s delivered over today’s consumer IP products. I don’t see whats wrong with broadcast being used, especially as you can tie broadcast into a PVR (like Sky+) inexpensively, and timeshift television around your life.

Wireless USB

Sometimes I get quite excited about technology when I see something which might change
my life.  I was excited about Bluetooth, and it really has made things good for me, thanks to bluetooth I have a GPS-cum-bluetooth speaker/mic in the car, my diary on the mac and phone are up to date, I can set up printers with zero effort, and until getting a USB dongle, I could connect to the internet on the move very quickly and flexibly.

I nolonger connect to the internet via bluetooth and my mobile, because bluetooth gives quite poor response compared with a usb dongle.  For the same reason, I can’t really dump photos straight from my camera to laptop (data transfer is too slow), or stream media between devices.  Being able to transfer files at high speed is really useful, and at the moment you have to reach for the LAN most of the time to do this, but yesterday I was introduced to Wireless USB.

Now I am really excited about what this might do.  480Mbps at a 3m range is an ambitious target, but I think we will get this performance in time.  A softphone and usb handset for voice would really change the way I work on the move, and something which spoke wireless USB and had a CF interface would change the way I use digital camera equipment for the better.

Shall be keeping a close eye on the spec!

The evolution of systems admin.

There has recenly been a big bruhaha on the O’reilly Sys-Admin blog started from this post by Luke Kanies.

He argues that the development of the IDE and framework has enabled the software development industry to evolve, and that a lack of similar tools for systems administrators is keeping our industry in the computational dark ages.

Now, he just so happens to be writing a systems administration framework called Puppet which will meet those aims.  Written in Ruby (uh oh), this tool will centrally manage system configuration.

Talking further, Luke offers help and advice to your employer, “If your sysadmin is using CDs to build servers, s/he should be fired. No ifs, ands or buts”.  Can we inferr from this that Luke wishes that every Unix system in the world should be homogenous?

His argument is argued from an invalid premise.  The sys-admin field evolves each time we can use a new hardware technology, new OS features, and find new ways to squeeze more and more performance from our systems.

Selecting the perfect hardware for the job, building a locked-down tight installation, and ensuring commonality via configuration management and monitoring, leads to flexible installs, security and the best performance.  I strongly encourage my competitors to only want to learn one system, and better still – only be able to deploy configuration changes through a framework – an ignorance to how the OS works will mean they forget how to debug problems when they occur!

Facilities near the London Redbus DCs

I’ve been heading to Meridian Gate and Soverign House for work, for a couple of years now, so I thought it might be handy to write up some of the facilities nearby that I have found useful for any first time visitors who might stumble upon this post.

Places to Stay

The International is really bad, but much cheaper than the Hilton. Both located really close to South Quay station. If your budget doesn’t allow you to stay at the Hilton, and you don’t want to stay away in central London and travel into E14 from somewhere else, then go to the International, but don’t leave anything in your room by day. Once, I stayed at the hotel, and although I had booked in for several days, they stripped my room of my clothes during one of the days, and I had to urgently dash to Canary Wharf to get replacements to wear the following day. I never did get back my favourite The Strokes t-shirt either.

Some of their double rooms are just two single beds, made individually, close to each other. If you can get an even-numbered room in the International, then you should be on the side of the building that faces towards the dock and Canary Wharf, hence a better view. You’ll need a good view to enjoy when you’re confined to your room after they steal all of your clothes. There’s free Wifi in some rooms and in the bar.

Eating

There are two cafes at Meridian place, the nicest coffee comes from Chicory Cafe (020 7515 2415) which is the cafe closest to the Meridian Gate data centre. This cafe is really small, but I have never seen it full or even busy, and there is an outdoor seating area that looks over the goods-in and parking area for Soverign House – handy if you are waiting for deliveries or colleagues!
My favourite place to go for lunch is Sandwich Plus, at Harbour Exchange Sq (020 7538 1808). Cross the road away from Soverign and Meridian, and head towards South Quay, under the DLR. A left turn onto a pathway leads to this sandwich bar. The hot sandwiches are really, really good. Loads of flavour. The staff are Italian, I think and very lively.

Spinnakers is a pub which does fairly bland meals, but reasonable burgers. They have Abbot and Greene King on tap for those datacentre trips that are either really easy ones, or really bad ones.

The Isle of Dogs branch of Dominos will deliver to Redbus (and the security guys in Sov have no problem dealing with the delivery guys for you!). 020 7517 9494

Cash Machines

There’s a Lloyds at Harbour Exchange Sq. near to Spinnakers, and a NatWest just beyond and across the road from the South Quay tube stop. (Walk away from the Redbuses towards the International Hotel.)

Asda at Limeharbour

Head down the road called Limeharbour, and as you get to the Crossharbour DLR station there is an Asda store. This place will become your saviour. Over the years, I have replaced screwdrivers that I have broken, bought (really good) storage units to leave in suites for people, and bought clothes so that I can stay down in London for extra, unexpected days. It’s full of useful stuff.

Asda can help with the tools you need that are household ones, but can’t help with patch leads and fancy allen keys wont be there. A new branch of RS is opening soon in Shadwell which will be convenient (close to the DLR stop).

Drinking

The Cat and Canary is good. Head down Marsh Wall away from the Redbus locations, and near South Quay, you see signs for the Canary Wharf footbridge. Cross that and head through the buildings until you hit the water-side. This will hopefully be Fisherman’s Walk – it’s on that street. Follow signs for Cabot Square and then head to the water if you get lost. It’s a Fullers pub, so the ESB is really good.

Early impressions of the Vodafone 3G USB modem.

Working for a client in London today, so for a change, I decided to grab the train, rather than drive down to E14. This was therefore the perfect chance to try out the new USB Modem I picked up from Vodafone on the move.

Many of you will know I am a mac advocate, and use a G4 Powerbook as my main computer. As this computer has no pcmcia slot, there has been no easy way to connect the laptop to mobile data, other than by using your handset as a modem device.

This isn’t very convenient; the overhead of bluetooth seems to slow your connection down, and it means you can’t take calls and use mobile data at the same time.

However, Vodafone are now marketing the perfect solution – a mobile device that supports 3G and GPRS data connectivity, and presents over USB. The device is presently free on the £45/month unlimited data package.

Firstly, installing the bundled application was a breeze, and the Vodafone tool has a neat little installer which creates a Network Location for you, and sets up the built-in apple internet dialup tools, so no need to leave third party tools on your laptop, as you must with the Orange dialup tool on a Windows platform.

In Sheffield S11, there is only GPRS service, so I could dial up and check it worked, but wasn’t amazed. If my DSL dies, then it wont be a pleasure working on that for a whole day.

On the train, passing through the city centre, it is possible to enjoy what Vodafone describe as ’3G Broadband – with speeds up to 1.3Mbps’. Latency hurts me much more than actual throughput, as most of my work is done ssh’d into a remote server .. and the latency dips to really good/low levels when in this 3G Broadband mode..

64 bytes from 195.92.195.92: icmp_seq=1073 ttl=47 time=103.000 ms

When in normal 3G mode, Vodafone claim you should be able to shift 384Kbps, latency is still not a barrier to getting work done.

64 bytes from 195.92.195.92: icmp_seq=1471 ttl=47 time=260.176 ms

When in GPRS mode, the latency is really nothing to write home about, and the performance depends a lot on where you are (is much better on the approach to big cities, although this could be down to the fact that there’s a lot of slowing down on approach).

64 bytes from 195.92.195.92: icmp_seq=729 ttl=47 time=981.672 ms

All in I’ve managed to get some work (and some chatting on irc!) done, and it is making the trip pass quickly (this article was posted at high speed in south Leicestershire).
Will try a more scientific test when I use it for mobile working at less high speeds!

The Nokia E61

Loads of telephones in the past few years have been selling with lots of Smartphone features. Early models such as the Nokia Communicator were impressively good to use with built in telnet clients and web browsers. Then, Sony livened up the scene with the introduction of the P800 – a telephone with a stylus, and lots more PDA style features.

Until very recently indeed, I have always preferred to carry a PDA and telephone, because the phone’s ‘diary’ features have been poor. The Palm TX was the tool of choice, because it had wifi (even though the mail client and browser were poor). Palm Desktop has been a consistantly good PIM for the desktop, and sync’d perfectly with the TX (although I do wish that the bundled Apple tools integrated better with the TX, without jumping through the hoops that the iSync Conduit caused you to).

The Palm/Treo 630 came close to being the single device of choice, being a phone which ran PalmOS, but the “Being a Telephone” application, and sms tools were so poor that it was a shockingly bad phone. It didn’t do wifi which meant no cheeky free wifi, or cheap connectivity to the device at home.

The Nokia E61 is the first smartphone which had made me abandon the traditional PDA. It does wifi, and will also run a day-diary really well. It integrates perfectly with iCal and the Apple Address book. It has a SIP client (which I am yet to test, but I will do so that my Devonshire IT DDI can ring my mobile when I am in range of free wifi).

The browser is neat – two features which really make it standout are the thumbnail of the entire page when you are fast-scrolling around the page on the screen which appears to aid navigation, and the ‘back’ button which brings up a rolling 3d map of thumbnails of the places you have visited recently.

The IMAP client is really good – but does tend to force you to write upside down (reply on top) emails. Still, I have found it a help at driving down response times to customers.

A world of J2ME applications will run on it, so you can quickly get access to Messenger services with Agile Messenger.

A PuTTY port exists, and I have found the QWERTY keyboard makes it easy to support servers on the move.

The Wifi does seem to be a little flaky – my laptop picks up service from the Access Point at home, at much greater ranges than the handset seems to.

It seems to be free on a Vodafone business tarriff right now.