Entropy Reducers Amalgamated

So the other week I begin to put together the materiel necessary to build that Asterisk box I've been needing to build—it doesn't seem fit for a company whose motto is “industrial-strength computing” to have no real fancy VoIP/messaging system. This is all a grand experiment and learning experience for me, so I fully expect a few missteps along the way. I'm therefore taking this as an opportunity to make a few mistakes along the way.

Being partial as I am to the *BSD series of Unices, I decide to download the 2 ISOs for FreeBSD 6.1, burn them to CD and begin to install.

I must give an aside about the hardware. I'm trying to build this machine on the cheap, but I do want to have it follow at least some notion of “best practices”. Anything that is remotely server-like gets two disk drives in a RAID1 array, disk drives being the #1 thing in my experience to up and fail on you (#2 being power supplies and #3 being—of all things—ethernet cards!). I notice that the local Best Buy has eMachines (yeah, I know, low-end consumer grade stuff? But I've had only good experiences with eMachines to date, and the cost of being wrong here is only about $400) on sale, and 160GB disk drives too, so I walk into the one in Staten Island, plunk down my credit card, and come out with a new eMachines T3418, a spare 160GB drive (to sort-of match the one in there), and another 17" monitor. (You have to buy the monitor in order to get the rebate, but the monitor on my sons' computer is about 10 years old and due to die, and it was basically free after rebate, so why not?)

I get home, and a few days later I manage to unpack the beastie, put the second drive in the machine (drive cages with thumbscrews are a wonder, second only to completely screwless drive cages), hook it up to a little 2-port KVM that I have on the second desk, and give it a whirl.

(I feel like I'm channeling the spirit of another, somewhat more famous Jerry here, at least partly in style. However, should I begin to refer to my little 12' x12' square office as “fractal manor”, feel free to slap me.)

But I digress.
So now I've got a machine that, were I to do nothing, boots up fine with Windows XP Home in it, and a spare drive that is ever so slightly smaller than the main drive. None of this for me! I'm purifying my machine by putting on something holy and good. In goes the CD-ROM.

Now FreeBSD's installer hasn't seen huge improvements since...well...since I started using it back in the 4.x days. I know the old text-mode installer pretty well, and I start to wend my way through it. I try to partition the first hard drive, find out that there's apparently no way (via the installer) to configure the second drive at boot time, so I won't be RAIDing the disks from the outset; I'll partition the drives as identically as I can and build the RAID afterwards.

I knew something was going to be a problem when the CD-ROMs—I had to make several burns of disk 1—gave persistent errors in installation. I tried installing on the master drive. I tried installing on the slave drive. (Bootloaders don't have much a problem with that, really.) In no way could I get an install that would reliably boot at all. Booting would proceed, and then hang in the same (unrecorded; hey it was about 0100 EDT at the time) place every time.

When something like this happens, of course I begin to think that maybe it's something I've done horribly wrong (because it usualyl is), so I figure maybe it's a weird hardware thing because of the second disk. One way to confirm that would be to slap in an ol' reliable Centos 4.0 distro installer disk. Lo! And behold! Installation proceeds painlessly. The disk partitioning system, as painful as it can be, works as I remember, and I partition the two disks relatively identically (one has a leftover 4 GB partition that I can use for slop space) and combine them into a RAID1. I choose not to use the LVM system, opting instead for the older md system.

Now, it's mostly installed, but the load average on the machine is over 4 while the RAID1 partition for /var (at 140GB roughly) builds “in the background”—the machine is pretty much unusable. Of course, I'm sure I'm doing a few obvious wrong things: for example, the two disks should not be on the same ATA channel, they should be on different ones, so I'm paying for my laziness. However, I'm not setting this up as a performance fileserver: the limits on this machine are going to be from my slow network, or from slow recording of voicemail messages, or something else (most likely), and if I really were interested in performance, I would not be relying on 7200 PATA drives. The machine is only about 60% of the way done mirroring that large partition (still); I'm hoping by tomorrow I can cleanly shut the machine down and not concern myself, install the digium TDM13B card and give it a try. (I also have a new Linksys SPA921 VoIP phone to go along with it.) Unfortunately, I forgot that Verizon won't put the demarc any further in my buliding that 12", so I have to run fresh cabling from the demarc to my office to carry wires for the 3 new lines I have. If this works out, my buddy Mark and I will be able to intercom and not deal with buggy Skype implementations...

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 10:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, I posted yet another ad today for a “generalist”, and therein I had, once again, a few litmus tests to help me weed out the total clowns.

I wrote, inter alia:

You must be able to think on your feet, and you must be able to read and follow directions.

and below that I wrote:

Please provide a cover letter explaining how you feel you fulfill the requirements and a résumé in plain text or HTML format only. We will not open PDFs or MS Word/OpenOffice documents.

As I've mentioned before, I use this as a zeroth-order filter to weed out the totally clueless; there's plenty of cluelessness floating around the IT industry since the dot-com-boom that I try to avoid it.
The posting went out around 2006 06 14 T 1345Z. By 1431Z I had already received the first clown: someone who sent me an email without cover letter, but with an MS word document attached.

45 minutes from posting to clown show. I think that must be some kind of record.

I also wrote, within the top two lines of the ad:

in-office, during the regular work week (please no offshore or outsourcing companies)

Guess what came next? At 1435Z, I had someone named “Lenny” hawking overseas (CL > 0.95 from FSU) programmers; clearly he can't read. I do, however, love his “it's not spam” spam:

Confidentiality Notice:
We respect your Online Privacy. This is not an unsolicited mail and
cannot be considered Spam as long as we include Contact information
and a method to be removed from our mailing list. If you are not
interested in receiving our e-mails then please reply with a "remove"
in the subject line. We sincerely regret any inconvenience.

Yeah, right. Sure thing, Lenny.

1441Z showed another clown with no cover letter and a .doc attachment. I had to wait until 1546Z until I got someone who could follow directions.

I have to give props to the guy at 1754Z sent me his résumé in .doc format, then 3 minutes later sent back an “oops! sorry” and sent it in plain text. (I give him props since I've done the same klutzy thing too.)

So far the score is 3 contenders, 5 clowns, and 1 contender-clown.

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 5:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My new printer arrived yesterday via Fedex ground, and by all appearances works fine. I packed the old one up in the box, called up UPS (it turns out for ARS packages there is no pickup fee to me — usually if I call them for a pickup, there is a pickup charge, but not for return packages! w00t) and they're coming tomorrow to cart away the carcass of my old system.

HP so far has done me right.

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 5:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So yesterday my relatively new (3 months) HP Officejet 7210 all-in-one printer -- really a nice machine, comes with an ethernet interface so I could put it far away from any machine printing to it, and close to the phone jacks so it can be a good fax, flatbed scanner/copier, etc. -- decides to up and die on me, telling me that the color printer cartridge (that came with the machine!) is, all of the sudden, the incorrect cartridge for the printer.

Um, this is kind of déjà vu for me now, since my OfficeJet 4215 died a similar death back in March, which is what prompted me to spring the extra $200 on the fancier, better-dressed printer.

(Of course, it's not the $1000 laserjet machine, but I needed to buy a printer RIGHT THEN and that's what Staples had in stock that evening)

So, I go to HP's site looking for support on it, and lo and behold they give me instructions: remove and reinsert the cartidges. If that doesn't work, then “call support”. Calling in this case is using their 24/7 web-chat-support feature with someone (most likely in a timezone 12 hours from my own).

I can't complain about that, because the chat works, and the support guy helped answer my questions.

First I had to

Follow the steps below to power cycle your all-in-one: 1. Unplug the all-in-one from power and disconnect the connection port.(USB) 2. Wait 30 seconds. 3. Plug in the power only. 4. Repeat steps 2-3 two more times. 5. On the third time after plugging the unit into power, reconnect the connection port from the all-in-one to your computer.

Two to three times I have to powercycle this beastie! Sweet fancy Mushke, would it have killed them to put in a “really hard we mean it” hard reset button?

Oh well, so I jump through these hoops. (Reminds me of the old joke: how can you tell the field-service rep changing his tires on the side of the road? He's the one swapping tires in and out to see which one is flat.)

What I did not like was that part of the debugging process involves breaking into a new package of (expensive, ’natch) cartridges to try them out. But that's just me being cheap. With two new cartridges in the machine, my printer now reads:

Insert Print Cartridges but that's neither here nor there.

After all of this, Mr. Tech Support declares:

xxxxxx: This shows the issue seems to be with the printer hardware
xxxxxx: Please let me know the serial number of the All-in-One
[my response]
xxxxxx: It appears that this device has experienced a hardware failure and I shall be glad to process the request for a printer replacement with your permission for free of cost and you will receive the unit with in 5 to 7 business days.
jerry altzman: that would be delightful

Well, raise my rent! They're going to ship me a new one. Of course, this item is a “collateral product”, and therefore

xxxxxx: However, the All-in-One is a collateral product, that is, you would be required to ship the defective All-in-One on receipt of the replacement. Therefore, you would be required to provide us the credit card information as security.

NOTE: do not provide the Credit Card information in this chat session

In cases where HP did not receive the defective part/unit within 30 calendar days of shipment of the exchange part/unit from you then you will be charged for the exchange part/unit.Return instructions and pre-paid shipping label are included.

(You can picture him cutting and pasting from his script file right into the chat window.) I get a call 20 minutes later by someone named “Archie” (surely short for Akhbar Samagutrapan or some similar indic Upper-Baluchistanian name, judging by the heavy accent on the phone) asking for my credit card number, which I provide (no, I've gone through credit card fraud once on my business card, I'm not going to provide it to you, too) and now in 5 to 7 business days they'll ship me a new machine. Of course, I'm without printer and fax machine during that time, so it's time to handwrite those paychecks.

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)