aidanfindlater.com

DroboShare + Netatalk + Time Machine

aidan — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 20:17:20 +0000

At work, we’re mostly a Mac shop. To ease our backup procedure (currently, passing around an external HD), we recently got a Drobo (external RAID-like HD enclosure) and a DroboShare (a NAS). The intention was to use it as a Time Capsule replacement, so that those of us running Mac OS X 10.5 would have our files backed up automatically through Time Machine. Unfortunately, there was some confusion: the Drobo supports Time Machine (since it’s just an external drive); the DroboShare does not. This revelation came only after we opened the boxes, and meant that the system was far less of an upgrade than we had thought.

That is, until one of my coworkers ran across this blog post: TimeMachine via AFP (netatalk) to a DroboShare. The author managed to compile netatalk for the DroboShare so that it can be used for Time Machine backups. The directions are pretty good. The only issue I ran into is that the directory structure is hard-coded into the startup script, which was easily fixed by logging in using Dropbear SSH and creating a symbolic link from /mnt/DroboShares/Drobo to my actual share name:

ln -s /mnt/DroboShares/MyDroboShare /mnt/DroboShares/Drobo

Following the rest of the directions worked perfectly.

w00t.

Drupal’s Organic Groups messing with my breadcrumbs

aidan — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 20:11:24 +0000

Problem: In my Drupal setup, I’m using Organic Groups (OG) and Menu Breadcrumb (MB). OG replaces Drupal’s breadcrumbs with its own which have no relevance to the structure of my site.

Solution: To “fix” this, I’ve changed the offending function,

og_get_breadcrumb

og.module

(line 1508 in 6.x-1.0-rc7), to simply return

drupal_get_breadcrumb()

Discussion: This is far from an ideal solution, and will break with every OG update. A better solution would be to have the MB

init

function (which sets the breadcrumbs) called after OG does its magic, so that MB’s breadcrumbs overwrite OG’s instead of vice versa. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to make that happen.

The difficulties I’ve encountered here may reflect the poor state of Drupal’s breadcrumb system rather than issues with OG and MB themselves.

PHP SOAP client giving “Error Fetching http headers”

aidan — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:40:33 +0000

Summary: PHP’s SOAP client was throwing an extremely unhelpful error: Error Fetching http headers. It turns out that it was a simple case of a slow SOAP server, and increasing the default_socket_timeout in php.ini to 120 fixed it.

Problem: My very first experience with SOAP was failing. I couldn’t figure out why one request (getVersion) worked while another (getUserList) gave the above cryptic error.

Solution: After trying in vain to get useful information out of Apache and PHP, I installed Wireshark to sniff my network traffic. I could see the response coming in just fine, but it was only when I realized that it was coming in almost 100 seconds after the request that I became suspicious. Checking my php.ini, I found that the default_socket_timeout was set to 60 seconds. I upped it to 120 and the problem was resolved.

Discussion: I probably should have thought of a timeout earlier. It felt like a timeout, but the strange message about headers caused me to bash my head against a wall for the better part of a workday.

Using the SOAP client’s connection_timeout option in this case would most likely not work because this is not a connection timeout—the TCP connection is made just fine—but rather that the server takes too long to form its HTTP/SOAP response. This is why the call to getVersion ran without trouble while getUserList did not; getUserList had a much longer execution time on the server.

My first half-marathon

aidan — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 03:47:22 +0000

Toronto Marathon was this morning, which I ran the half-marathon part of. It was a long day, and my knees no longer work.

Election season in North America

aidan — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 18:05:16 +0000

Two sites that might help you decide how to vote in the upcoming Canadian election:

How’d They Vote?: Want to know what your incumbent MP has been doing in Ottawa? This site will tell you what bills they have proposed, how they’ve voted, and what they’ve said in Parliament. Find out what your MP actually does.
Vote for Environment: This site lets you know how you should vote in your riding so that the most enviromentally-friendly candidate (who has a chance in your riding) wins. To put it bluntly, if you like the environment then you probably don’t like the Conservatives, and this site will help you figure out how to make sure that a split vote doesn’t let them slip in (again).

You should try to figure out what your priorities are, and vote based on those. Myself, I’ve narrowed it to two: the environment and Darfur. It’s too bad that the media hasn’t made either of them more of an issue.

As for American politics, what a freak show. Palin? Really

Toronto-bound (and -arrived)

aidan — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 17:48:46 +0000

After spending a few days sea kayaking with my family and a few more climbing mountains with my friends, I’ve made it safely to Toronto to begin my Great Toronto Adventure (or GTA, if you will). I’ve already completed a few items on my GTA to-do list, including cleaning the carpets and getting an Ontario driver’s license. Next up: internet. I should have connectivity by next Wednesday, I hope. This, coupled with the finally-clean carpets, will make me immeasurably happier.

Unfortunately, the list is much longer than just those few items. Probably the most important to-do is to get a job; I need money for rent, food and, maybe, furniture. And internet, too, of course. I had an interview yesterday (making 1 for 3 applications) but need to keep burning through the cover letters. Wish me luck.

That’s it for now. Stay tuned for more.

My philosophy of writing

aidan — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 18:28:13 +0000

Utilizing grandiloquent phraseology when composing documents serves to obfuscate rather than illuminate for the addressee one’s postulations and conclusions. Instead, try using simple sentences and simple words. Writing is about communicating; the most straightforward sentence is usually the best.

ICC goes after Sudanese President for genocide

aidan — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 03:25:44 +0000

In what may become a turning point for Darfur, the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court will seek an arrest warrant for the President of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, on charges of genocide. This is a risky move that I support wholeheartedly. Although it may jeopardize the political peace process in Sudan, the truth is that Bashir is using the peace process to keep the international community busy while he plans his “final solution” to the problems in both Darfur and South Sudan. It’s about time that somebody took definitive action in Darfur, even if that the action is punishment and not intervention.

[News story]

Running

aidan — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 01:08:45 +0000

I recently purchased an iPod nano with the Nike + iPod kit. My Nike+ screenname is “Aidan F”, for anyone who wants to challenge me.

My own personal cluster

aidan — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 02:00:19 +0000

I am now the proud operator of a three-node Hadoop cluster. Hadoop is a Java-based MapReduce implementation, an open-source version of the technology that allows Google to perform massive parallel computing on cheap, commodity hardware. I set it up with my OS X laptop running the NameNode (the distributed filesystem coordinator) and JobTracker (the distributed computing coordinator) and two Debian servers as the slaves.

The first problem I ran into was the requirement for the Hadoop directory to be in the exact same location on all machines. Since OS X and Debian have very different directory structures, I ended up creating extra directories on the Linux nodes to match my OS X setup—very sketchy, but I couldn’t find a better solution. Once I got that figured out, the cluster started humming along nicely.

The next problem was an error message: java.io.IOException: Incompatible namespaceIDs. This is a known issue and was quickly resolved by following some simple directions.

I installed the brilliant Dumbo module (more info on Dumbo) to help me deal with the Python side of things. Now I can write Python MapReduce programs and run them on my mini-cluster. Why would I ever want to do this? I’m not really sure, but darn do I ever feel cool.