Night walk

This weekend, taking advantage of the full moon, we were walking without any other light (despite we carried it with us) on Navacerrada. The plan was reaching at Maliciosa to see the sunrise, but we arrived much before it and, as there was people sleeping there, we decided to go back but not before taking some pictures (Spanish comments).

For example, the TV station installed up there.

Or some other beautiful views.

Canon EF 24-105mm

This week my friend and photo master brought me a new lens from the States among other things like a grip. The winner lens was a Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 USM L IS which substitutes the old entry level Canon EF 24-85 I used for learning until I found it was not enough sharp (is anybody interesting on it?). Anyway, it was good enough for its price and for the very begginer I was. Indeed those days I though it was a big one (at least compared to the other ones) but now it seems so little...

But size well worth the difference if you take a look at the so different picture results where you can appreciate the influence of the image stabilizer.

70mm 1/50 f5.0

Let's see this weekend how it works at night.

Damn GFS

Just a few hours before the public release of the portal we work on one of the cluster machines get overloaded by issues no relevant for the point. The fact is once the machine started to not answer properly so it was fenced by some other node, but the problem was once this automatic action was held, the whole 6 machines GFS cluster went down letting all the machines unusable.

This, in addition to all of the previous issues we suffered on GFS, made us really thinking about purging GFS in favor of NFS. It was no an easy decision as it was fully against all our previous decisions but we weren't confident about GFS in the production systems. So we migrated it in a time record configuring everything by night so at six o'clock service would be held properly. And we managed to fulfill this purpose. We made it!

We are now tired after about 27 continuous working hours but the overall result was quite acceptable. I'm still proud about or design (not so much about my own decissions) which allowed us to make this king of changes so quickly.

But you can be sure I don't think we will never again think about installing GFS on any system as it seems not being production suitable (as RedHat even says so). And it is not only because the buggy GFS2 (at least, at present date) but for the sensation of instability all over the time we had it installed.

So in a few hours our architecture has been changed, but it was setup for the very moment we were accepting requests.

And ADN is out

In beta, yes: http://beta.adn.es

You will need a user (maybe 'adn' will be a good choice) ... and the password?. Ok, 'adnbeta'. And that is, you can finally see our effort results and become one of our beta testers. That will allow you to register your preferred nick in advance and reserve it for your own use.

Enjoy it!

Sunday working day

We are almost out. Quite soon you will experience a lot of changes at www.adn.es from its current aspect to a new and improved one. At least that's our hope and what we have been working for. Not all expected functionality will be included in this first release and not all the errors fixed mainly for a lack of time. But we are now in that stage when you must choose between releasing soon enough and begin competition and waiting until you can show a good enough product.

Or what usually happens: that it is finally a marketing decision not related to any technical issue.

Anyway, we were working hard today. Something that is getting on their nerves to our families and beloved girlfriends. Mine, for instance, decided to take her holidays at her village near Gredos. A very quiet and calm place I would like to be at... right now!.

At least, the project is being quite interesting, we have done (what we think is) a very good work designing everything so we expect result will be rather good. Let's see.

Forgetting stress

Here goes a selection of pictures I took while trying to relax before the final release week.

"Relaxing" leaf ;-)

Water arc (at the place we are going to be married).

Crystal forest.

Oohhhhhmmmmmmm...

July, 13rd: new (final) scheduled release date

Do you need more information? :-)

Perfect!. That's our business.

Transformers (So, am I freak enough? part II)

"Many millions of years ago, on the planet Cybertron, life existed, but not life as we know it today. Intelligent robots that could think and feel inhabited the cities. They were called Autobots and Decepticons. But the brutal Decepticons were driven by a single goal: Total Domination. They set out to destroy the peace loving Autobots and the war between the forces of good and evil raged across Cybertron, devastating all in its path and draining the planet's once rich resources of energy."

And then, they moved on to planet Earth... as a TV show of my childhood!.

Now they are back as a movie whose premier was being programmed near my work place (a lot of premieres are indeed) so we started once more to talk about those shows we saw when we were "young" :-)

So finally I was told about another one freaky video related:

Yeah, that is, people disguised like Transformers... transforming!

IPMI

IPMI stands for "Intelligent Platform Management Interface", an interesting feature deployed on nowadays servers. I can't forget that question I made some months ago about an extra ethernet port on the IBM server machines we were working with on those days. The answer was quite simple: it is almost of no use at all; at most you can get some stats and diagnostics but it is mainly intended for hardware technicians.

Liars (or ignorants)! Anyway, it is quite useful. It is the IPMI port which can be used for several managements actions (even from the running system) such as power cycle the machine, get some stats, establish a watchdog interface and the like.

Uses?, are they need to be told?. As a first glance you can get reports about the machine from the operating system itself without the need of physical access to the datacenter. You can also restart a machine which is failing to reboot by itself in case you can login one more time in the system. But... even more, you can do all that (and more) from a remote system (don't exhitate, it is password protected, at least, in case you configure it so). So the next obvious uses are for cluster fencing and stonith (shot the other node in the head) without the need of power control hardware.

It is a pity we didn't knew that when we configured the SAP cluster in my previous job despite the serial cable almost did it work. Sure Mr Navas will be interested in knowing about this technology :-)

Oh, a simple example:

# ipmitool -I open chassis status
System Power : on
Power Overload : false
Power Interlock : inactive
Main Power Fault : false
Power Control Fault : false
Power Restore Policy : always-off
Last Power Event :
Chassis Intrusion : inactive
Front-Panel Lockout : inactive
Drive Fault : false
Cooling/Fan Fault : false
Sleep Button Disable : not allowed
Diag Button Disable : allowed
Reset Button Disable : not allowed
Power Button Disable : allowed
Sleep Button Disabled: false
Diag Button Disabled : true
Reset Button Disabled: false
Power Button Disabled: true

Another one:

ipmitool -I open chassis power reset

Ooooooops. Next post after crash :-)

New home

Marriage is like a "love contract". Time of your live to say to everybody you are in love (and the person you are with). So my fiancee and me decided to sign it next October to demonstrate and celebrate something we already know (and for the trip, wow :-)).

But a more obvious and true compromise is the time of your life of buying a new house together with somebody. A point of our lifes we have already reached but that we haven't planned doing so soon until we saw a new building which is being built and we thought it was perfect so "if you see something that fulfill all the requirements you asked for, why don't do it?". And that's the reason we bought that house that we will get in two years. Because it is in a place we like, with good transportation links, a price maybe expensive but in the range we can afford and dimensions and number of beedrooms we wanted to. Indeed, maybe when we get it, it will be the time to get pregnant and use those extra beedrooms we were looking for in a new house.

Despite all that, the real thruth is we are looking forward to use both swimming pools the outdoor and the indoor one we will also have on the building (just another "stupid" requirement). Great!

For those interested in, this is the plan. The only thing we have by now (in addition to some new debts).

Just a simple map on a piece of paper that makes us quite happy and we will enjoy for the rest of our lifes.