Matt-J.co.uk : Ramblings

Nokia recently announced that the N95’s have a 3D acceleromiter in them, and handed out the API;
This means that ‘Iphone-like’ tilting to change the screen layout, Shaking the phone for the next music track, and using the phone like a Wiimote, are all possible.

There is a quick demo app out that show’s the accelerometer in action:

(ignore Mike and his drumkit in the background :P)

This is definalty cool news for N95 owners, can’t wait to controll my music on my PC by flicking my phone :)

Beer glorious beer

Originally uploaded by TrX07

I posted yesterday on how beer is estimated to reach £4 a pint due to bad yearly hops harvest..

Our house reacted with force today, bulk buying beers (Great deal at asda, 3 crates for £20) to ensure our survival :P

–Matt

Hi All,

Just a quick update,

Went home last weekend, via swindon and then wigan to give Sam a lift home for the weekend. (He works at intel)
Was good to be home for a couple of days,
Had a chineese and a few beers with my mate James for his birthday (lernt some cool stuff, as he works at BAE systems) and he’s gonna come up and crash for a couple of days next year so we can goto the farnborough air show. rock on!
I spent sunday chilling out with the family, my sister is now in a band, which is cool :)

Anyway, Was a short stay, got home late friday night / saturday morning, set off back for the south sunday evening.
Gave Sam a lift back, conditions were awful, Snow all the way along the M6/M6 Toll, and really heavy rain and fog the rest of the way. Journey took 2 hrs longer than it should have, got home at about 1.15am, A cold beer had never tasted so nice ;P

In other news, Im off to Sweden for work on Sunday, for 10 days to help the lab in sweeden, looking forward to that, sounds like my kindof country.. No heat, good beers, nice women ;) lol

Apart from that, not much has been happening, work in the day, chilling out in the evening, and then catching up on sleep / food shopping / washing at the weekends :P (Such a fun packed lifestyle!) But at least my housemate Mike enjoys a couple copious amounts of beer and some good music, Which is always a plus for drunken conversations!

Talking of beer; Check this out:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/20/beer_price_warning/

And how this will effect our house: (Mike’s blog)
http://mikelaming.com/blog/2007/11/20/we-drink-a-lot-of-beer-in-our-house/

It could be the start of something terrible!!

That’s enough for now, laters!
–Matt

Months ago, I put an old laptop (with a broken case) into a deep picture frame, as a picture frame PC (for video’s, pictures etc)

I went to uni soon after, and didnt really have time to do anything with it (Plus the HDD crapped out, and so I lost the OS. and as it does not have a CD Drive anymore, it was sat doing nothing)

This week, i’ve been helping some friends with a few servers that needed desperate attention (for a uni radio station, that goes on air 2nd Nov (www.shockradio.co.uk)) We ended up having to also fix (read as remake :P) a desktop machine that netbooted from the fileserver.

This got me thinking about my driveless pictureframe PC, and with 2.5Ghz P4, and 512DDR, it should run a net booted OS from a 100Mb/s network quite well.What I needed was an OS that loaded into RAM, as this would be speedier than pulling bits of a standard linux filesystem from accross the NFS share.

So I grabbed a copy of knoppix (Not my ideal choice, but it’s only a quick project, and I wasnt in the mood for gentoo fiddleage) and copied it to my solaris NAS (the boot folder under the tftp root folder, and the rest under a dir I later shared via NFS as ‘diskless’)

After some quick DHCP option bodging, The system was booting pxeboot (I also had this in the tftp dir) and then was trying to boot knoppix, but no matter what options I was passing to the kernel at boot, it would not mount an NFS root.

Turns out knoppix’s on CD kernel does not have the ability too mount an NFS path at bootup, you need the kernel that the ‘knopix-terminalserver’ app spits out when you configure it.
Booted the knoppix image in a copy of vmware server, and ran the ‘knoppix-terminalserver’ command, started the terminal server, and then pinched vmlinux and miniroot.gz from the /tftpboot folder, and copied them over the net to my tftp boot server.

Rebooted the pictureframe and voilia! The system came up.

Now im pondering having another bash with linuxMCE and using this as a viewing node. So films and music will follow me round the house.. Ahh how one thing leads to another.. It’s like wikipedia :P

If you want config details feel free to leave a comment / email me, but it’s all out there on thwe web.. google ‘Gentoo diskless howto’ for a starting point :)

–Matt

Just received an interesting E-Mail;

Now usually, anything with lots of peoples addresses in the ‘to:’ field and ‘FW:’ in the subject goes directly into the bin.

But this one caught me out, have a read.. see what you think:

—————————————————————————————–
THE  BASIC IDEA:
For the rest of this year DON’T purchase ANY petrol from the two biggest oil companies (which now are one), ESSO and BP.

If they are not selling any petrol, they will be inclined to reduce their prices. If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit. But to have an impact we need to reach literally millions of Esso and BP petrol buyers. It’s really simple to do!!

(For the full E-mail and my comments. click ‘read more’)

Read more

Ahh what a shame! 15-6.. and yet I can’t help feeling it should have been 9-10 at half time! (That try was fine!)

Anyway, moving on from the rugby defeat! Has been a while since I last posted, very very quiet month really, was ill for a few days with the manflu, and then again with a dodgey Mc D’s :P

I was also told to start whatching prison break, which I did, and it’s damn good… but for that reason, I have got nowhere with my auth project except reading through a kerberos 5 book :P

Work is going well, with some of the guys in our office returning this week from suns engineer confrence in Las Vegas.
Plenty of work still to do, and we are each suggesting and being given projects to help the department, which will give us more long term goals :) / stuff to work on when the tickets dry up.

We have also just received some of sun’s new servers for the lab, very impressive boxes by the look of it.. more about these when I have had a chance to play around with them :)

Anyway, thats all for now.
//Matt

Right,

Over the years I have had to use different sections of authentication protocols (kerberos etc) and user stores (Ldap, Active directory) to fix a features in a pre-exising system, or to add new features.

Also, with all the hype in recent years on single sign on and secure authentication systems, I have always wanted to set up my own fully integrated auth system for all my stuff from scratch, and so, since I’m at sun for a year, in a pretty quiet town, the time is now (why the hell not!)

My basic plan is this:

• LDAP back end to hold user / service info
• Kerberos auth for local Linux/solaris boxes (from LDAP back end) (will be using PKI for Kerberos not a shared long term key)
• Samba (using the LDAP backend) to provide the same LDAP users logon access to windows boxes and services (or www.pgina.org looks promising)
• To tie my RSA securID keys in (radius, somehow, somewhere) to force all external facing auth systems (read below) to require this extra security.
• WEB facing net apps to require LDAP login PLUS RSA securID info (via RADIUS i think, although no research has been done on this section at this point)
• Web Facing OPENVPN Access to also require valid LDAP user (plus hopefully RSA SecurID too)
• House access points to use WPA2 Enterprise, allowing Radius server to authenticate those too.

And that’s it, The only reason for doing so is ‘I want to’ to see if I can, and to learn the technologies.

A lot more research will be required, and I plan to make a decent effort to keep my findings written down, so by the time I have got it all working on my test system, I can re-create the system with (relative) ease on a real server (and use this time to write a semi-decent howto).

Ok, There are probably going to be a lot of updates relating to this, So instead of clogging the blog; they will all be going in a page (look at the top right of the page for the link) called ‘PROJECTS’ Will always put the newest stuff at the top.

If you want clarification of anything I have written / am doing. Or you feel you could help me with links, comments, etc etc please feel free to post a comment, you don’t have to sign up, or even use your real email / name :)

Thanks, and money for counselling after this self subjected ordeal is welcome…
//Matt

While waiting for a few things to install / copy before starting a huuge project (more laters) I thought I would take this time to have a small ramble about the new sun streaming system I was setting up last week;

It’s called the StreamStar, or the sun streaming system (depending on whether you like snazzy marketing names, or more sensible names that better describe the product you are about to buy :P) And it’s suns new solution for massively parallel simultaneous IP Video streaming.

The Jist of it is this:
“The Sun Streaming System’s revolutionary design scales up to provide personalized unicast streaming to every television set – enabling operators to offer new personalized television services faster and more economically, such as customized content per subscriber, targeted advertising, high-definition video streaming and time-shifted television and video on demand with anything, anytime, anywhere television personalized for everyone. The result – operators can increase subscriber revenue at dramatically lower technology costs” - Sun Microsystems (http://www.sun.com/servers/networking/streamingsystem/features.xml)

Roughly translated, This thing is seriously impressive;

• It has the capability to stream 160,000 2Mbit/second streams to individual users (unicast) SIMULTANEOUSLY! While providing each user the ability to stop / pause / rewind / fast forward etc.
• The smallest setup comes with 24TB of back end secondary (Hard disk) storage, Enough to store 9,400 Hours of video at 2Mbit.
• The system can scale up, allowing each component in the system to have one or more systems dedicated to each task, for more processing power if need be (and hot fail over), and allowing the connection of upto 32 x4500 (Back end storage servers) Allowing for a 768TB Content library.

The operation of the system is pretty cool too, On top, there is a web and CLI interface for the administrator to add content, provision new servers into the system etc (More regarding this side of the kit when I’ve had more of a chance to look around)

For now, I just know about the Setup.
The streaming system is made up of a number of components, the storage servers (x4500’s) which have already been discussed. Then there are a number of 1U systems (X4100’s) that manage the health of the system, as well as controlling the system and managing the establishment and control of each users video stream.(Distributed software that all loads via net boot from one of the X4100’s) Last but not least, is the Streamstar Video switch, but more on that later.

The control nodes (X4100’s as mentioned above) co-ordinate (via a seperate, private 1GB/s Switched link) each of the systems..

say a user requests a stream (Most likely through an ISP / cable providers content management system/set top box.. but anyway);
the control nodes (using open standards and protocols such as RTSCP/RTSP) will establish a session with the user, at the same time, will order the back end storage to output the requested content to the streamstar video switch (if not already cached in the switch.. More on this later), which will have been told (by the control nodes also) what to do with the stream, how to packet-ise it up into UDP packets, and the destination IP etc, and it’s doing this for up to 160,000 different streams! at the same time!
The main component that makes this possible (Apart from the impressive compute/data throughput of the other sun systems (ie the X4500)) is the streamstar switch, It is basically a large cache for media bearing UDP packets, that allows control messages from the control nodes which tell it which UDP data packets to assign which IP’s too, It will then send this data out to the operators network via one of it’s 32 (yes.. 32!) 10Gb/s XFP Fiber ports!

(the impressive thing here, is that since the actual client’s session is controlled by one or more of the x4100 control nodes, the streamstar switch only needs to fire out the relevant UDP packets (the actual video stream)..
any control packets from the client are returned to the control nodes that co-ordinate this whole process. Because of this, (apart from the 1Gb/s Copper control link) the streamstar only ever needs to receive (RX) from the x4500 storage array, and transmit (TX) to the network, without worrying about any ACK’s (UDP only remember)

This means that you only use one fiber connection for a connection to an X4500 and the network, as you hook the TX of the X4500 upto the RX of Fiber XFP1 on the streamstar switch (for example) and then the TX of XFP1 to the providers network fabric! This allows for a much better utilization of your fiber network adapters.) … Anyway, back to the streamstar switch itself!

To do this for so many streams, the streamstar switch needs a lot of quick to access memory, and it definitely has that! the system is built in a vertical blade chassis, with each blade having 64 standard Dimm slots (Plus an individual network processor per board to tag the packets etc) This allows for upto 1TB of RAM per streamstar switch! (using 2Gb Dimm’s)

This system is definitely aimed at high uptime in a busy environment too, with each system having multiple redundant PSU’s, easily replaceable (mainly hot swappable) components, and the ease at which the interface allows for failover nodes to be set up.

I have spend nearly a week with this piece of kit, helping some of the designers / engineers who worked on creating the system set it up, and im VERY impressed! sun really seems to be keeping it coming with a great lineup of products! long may it continue!

I’ll let you know more about the management of the system when I have had a peek around it’s interfaces!

//Matt

(I feel I need to say here, just to cover all bases, that this post reflects my own opinions of this product and it’s setup, and what I have written here (apart from the quote directly from the sun website) should in no way be taken as the views of Sun Microsystems inc or its affiliates)

For more reading on this product have a wander over too: http://www.sun.com/servers/networking/streamingsystem/

Had a great week at work this week! Have been helping install one of Sun’s new products into our lab (More on that in another post) and so this weekend, continuing the techy theme (and since I don’t really have enough money to go out :p) I decided to get on with a few of my projects. The first being update my solaris ZFS NAS box to the newest opensolaris build. (snv_72)

This all went fine, until I had to re-import my ZFS pool into the system, and apparnetly one of the drives was not there. This wasn’t a problem, as it’s a 3 Disk raid (and so the data was still accessible) however, I spent an hour or so trying to work out what was up (missing disks dev path looked quite strange so that lead me down a path of thinking it was a solaris/zfs issue)

But nope! Damn SATA Cables!
I don’t know who allowed the sata cable standard to be released without clips, but he/she should be shot… as now, some cables come with clips, and some without. Some motherboards have sata ports which allow cables with clips to clip into them, whereas some (Mine, don’t) Even different drives may / may not have anywhere for ‘clipped’ sata cables to clip in..

The result, VERY unreliable connections, especially if the drives have been moved around a couple of times, and the sata connections are not as tight as they were. I mean! WTF where they thinking ‘Ahh these cables are nice and small, no-one will care that they can slip out, everyone will just be happier they are faster than IDE!!’

Thats like buying a new BMW that looks better, is faster, and easier to drive… but sometimes the breaks may not work.. ahh well!
</rant>

Anyway, application of superglue to my sata cables has solved this issue, and my NAS is happy again.

My next task is getting solaris running under Xen, so I can use this server box (as it’s pretty powerful) to do other stuff, such as an OpenLDAP server, and a linuxMCE (distributed home media center) server.

Will let you know how it goes.

//Matt

20/09/2007

Originally uploaded by TrX07

Just a quick one to test Nokia N95 direct flickr uploading! And then the wordpress XMLRPC API that allows you to add photo’s to your blog direct from flickr!

I think with this i’m going to start adding more photo’s to blogs (now it requires so little effort!

So to start off, here’s a selection of beer on sale at morrisons! :P

-Enjoy
//Matt