It sounds great in theory; the problem of course, is that it has not yet hit critical mass for it to work on a large scale. Most of the users are crazy open source people from Germany and Sweden. Most of the projects posted are not from English speakers and not a lot of people know about Flattr yet.

HOWEVER, right now for me I’ve actually just hit break-even. So, enough people are paying me money because they think I’m awesome for me to pay other people because I think they are awesome. I mean, I know I’m sort of a minor Internet Folk Hero, but hey. It actually works.

So anyway, it’s currently in an invite-only beta, but if you’d like to try it out, I’ve got 3 invites remaining. The first three comments get an invite. Comment, email me at gabe at signalnine dot net if I don’t have your email address already and I’ll hook you up.

The model of interaction with the iPad is to be a “consumer,” what William Gibson memorably described as “something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth… no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote.”

The way you improve your iPad isn’t to figure out how it works and making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps. Buying an iPad for your kids isn’t a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it’s a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.

Cory Doctorow and I do not agree 100% on many occasions, but he really hits the nail on the head with this piece. The iPad is very bad for the future of computing. I believe that I have a moral obligation not to support that kind of content model, no matter how shiny its packaging is.

Source – BoingBoing

Install process

Initial install was pretty smooth. I made sure my homedir backup was current, downloaded the 2009.08 ISO, booted up into a live CD environment and ran through the (console mode, so you know we’re serious) installer pretty quickly. I should note that right away that the impression I got was, “Hey, we’ll let you install in a nice ncurses installer app, but after that you’re on your own.” However, even running the installer was not something I’d be comfortable recommending to a inexperienced user.

First boot

Okay, so install was relatively fast and easy, at least for a highly experienced sysadmin. I logged in, ran df and noticed I was only at around half a gig usage for the root filesystem. Hmm. They weren’t kidding when they said it was minimalistic. In fact, upon boot I’m not getting to init 5. All I’ve got is console mode. Right, no problem. I know the package manager is called pacman, and man pacman yields predictably useful results. Good job, Arch nerds!

Configuration

So, I’ve got a console and I know how the package manager works. Well, theoretically. It takes me about a minute to figure out that I need to uncomment some repositories in/etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist and run pacman -Sy to sync package databases. So, first order of business is to install X. Obviously, I need xorg-server, some fonts and my video driver. They install, bring in all my dependencies and I’m really starting to warm up to pacman at this point. Some fiddling with xmonad, dmenu, xmobar and related window manager packages later, I’m theoretically up and running.  Oh wait, xorg keeps crashing when I try to launch it. Time to install elinks and hit the forums. No really, that’s what I did.

Troubleshooting

After a little googling, I find that I need a graphical login manger and some tweaks to my inittab. However, I’m in luck. There’s a lovely graphical login manager called slim that’s lightweight and crazy configurable and some wisdom on Arch’s gotta-configure-it-yourself init process. Arch uses a BSD style init, so 99% of the relevant bits are in /etc/inittab and /etc/rc.conf. The last line in /etc/rc.conf looks like this:

DAEMONS=(syslog-ng hal alsa !network netfs wicd crond slim)

Window Managers

I run xmonad because it is awesome. I needed xmonad-contrib and the related dependencies, and my existing configuration Just Worked, which was nice. .xinitrc works as it should. I did need to add eval `ssh-agent` to it in order to get ssh-agent going.

Conclusions

So far, so good. I’m now running current but very stable versions of everything (Hello, kernel 2.6.32!) and performance is great. My intel video driver finally is performing like it should, and overall I’m quite happy. Rolling releases are great and I’m way impressed with the package manager. So, give Arch a shot. You won’t be disappointed.

Now we need your help.

Visit us at Googlequerque.com and fill out the survey. Then, nominate Albuquerque at Google’s website. It’ll take you maybe a couple minutes and it could potentially make Albuquerque a much cooler place to live.

Thanks!

10:45am Train departs Albuquerque, solid 5 bars of EVDO Rev. A signal. Speed tests drop a little bit once the train is in motion. Average downstream, 1.1Mbps. Average upstream, 300kbps. Latency, 250ms.

11:00am Still totally solid departing Bernallio. Speed remains constant, latency now at 300ms.

11:20am First network drop. We’re about here, just south of Santo Domingo pueblo. No signal for about a mile, then RTTx1 picks up.

11:21am Good signal, but 1xRTT speeds, so about 100kbps down and 30kbps up. Latency improves for some reason, now at 100ms.

11:32am About ten miles of 1xRTT later, we’re back in EVDO Rev. A territory. 5 bars of signal. Speed tests at 1.93Mbps down, 320kbps up. Latency drops to 190ms.

11:39am NM 599 Station. Rev. A still solid.

12:00pm We’re in Santa Fe now, South Capitol station. Rev A, 5 bars. Speed and latency remain good.

In conclusion, apart from the ten minutes around Santo Domingo, coverage looks like it’s almost all Rev. A. Color me impressed! Network speeds varied a little, but it was totally usable the whole time minus the one minute or so that it dropped. Looks like this is a viable alternative to AT&T’s non-existent 3G service and shoddy EDGE coverage along this route. Maybe someday they’ll actually get the promised WiFi up and running on the Rail Runner, but I’m not holding my breath.

Edited to add: On the way back to Albuquerque I was disappointed slight by the fact that I got only 1xRTT speeds for about a quarter of the trip, again centered around Santo Domingo pueblo. I’m not sure why it was different, but this time I wasn’t seated in the uppermost part of the train, so that might explain it. It might be worth getting a little suction cup or something to adhere the MiFi to the window or ceiling. That might solve it.

curl -s -u Frank__Booth:password -d "track=heineken" http://stream.twitter.com/track.xml | grep "/screen_name" | grep -v Frank__Booth | sed -e 's/[^0-9a-zA-Z]//g' | sed -e 's/screenname//g' | xargs -I '{}' curl --basic --user Frank__Booth:password --data status="@{} Heineken? Fuck that shit! PABST BLUE RIBBON" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

curl -s --basic --user username:password http://stream.twitter.com/spritzer.json | while read line; do echo "${line}" > temp_tweet ; cat temp_tweet | sed -e 's/=\"/\=\\"/g' | sed -e 's/\">/\\">/g' | ./twitterparse.pl; done

This parses the JSON steam and passes each tweet to a perl script which does the actual parsing.

Hey kids: Don’t do this. It’s bad. If you must, use a tool like jsawk.

This guide will walk you through the diskless cluster install and setup process. The cluster has a head node that serves boot images to the compute nodes and the database node. We’re attempting to present a unified system image across the cluster. For this reason, all nodes are looking at the same root filesystem, served via NFS.

DHCP

I started from a bare-bones netinstall of Debian Squeeze (testing) on the head node. This should work about equally well on any Debian-derived distribution.

First, we need to install some packages we’ll need in a minute.

sudo apt-get install dnsmasq syslinux nfs-kernel-server nfs-common debootstrap tftpd-hpa xinetd

Now, we need to configure dnsmasq, which will serve as our DHCP server for diskless booting.

You replace your existing /etc/dnsmasq.conf with something like this:

dhcp-range=192.168.1.50,192.168.1.150,255.255.255.0,12h
dhcp-boot=pxelinux.0,headnode,192.168.1.1

Replace 192.168.1.x with your preferred IP subnet and “headnode” with the hostname of your head node.

tftp

Our tftp server needs to be configured to launch on command from xinetd. The binary is already installed from our previous apt-get command.

create a file, /etc/xinetd/tftp-hpa that looks like this:

service tftp
{
        disable         = no
        id              = chargen-dgram
        socket_type     = dgram
        protocol        = udp
        user            = root
        wait            = yes
        server          = /usr/sbin/in.tftpd
        server_args     = -s /var/lib/tftpboot/
}

PXE

Now we need to tell the PXE server what to serve our clients.

Let’s set up our pxelinux configuration directory.

sudo cp -r /usr/lib/syslinux/pxelinux.0 /var/lib/tftpboot/
sudo mkdir /var/lib/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg

We’ll need a kernel and a initial ramdisk to give to your diskless clients. Assuming you’re going to be running the same kernel on the head node as your diskless clients (recommended), you can just copy the kernel from /boot.

sudo cp /boot/vmlinuz-`uname -r` /var/lib/tftpboot/

You’re going to need to create a NFS-root-enabled ramdisk. This accomplished with the tool mkinitramfs. You should have a configuration directory, /etc/initramfs-tools/. Make a copy of it:

sudo cp -r /etc/initramfs-tools /etc/initramfs-pxe

Note: On Debian Squeeze, the installed /etc/initramfs-tools did not work for unknown reasons, it seems to be missing module configurations. I ended up copying a /etc/initramfs-tools from an Ubuntu 8.04 install. It worked fine.

Edit /etc/initramfs-pxe/initramfs.conf. Change BOOT=local to BOOT=nfs.
Now we can create the ramdisk.

sudo mkinitramfs -d /etc/initramfs-pxe -o /var/lib/tftpboot/initrd.img-`uname -r` `uname -r`

We should be ready to create a default boot configuration now. We’ll need to create /var/lib/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default

LABEL linux
KERNEL vmlinuz-2.6.29
APPEND root=/dev/nfs initrd=initrd.img-2.6.29 nfsroot=192.168.1.1:/home/nfsroot ip=dhcp rw

Change 2.6.29 to match your kernel, obviously.

If you want to pass different parameters to different machines, you can create individual configuration files in /var/lib/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/ based on their MAC addresses. For example, if I create a file, /var/lib/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/01-00-21-97-7a-24-0f, then my node with a MAC of 00:21:97:7a:24:0f will load that instead of the default. I like to create softlinks in the configuration directory corresponding to the hostnames of my nodes because if you can remember MAC addresses of individual machines then you’re a better man than I am.

NFS

NFS time! Create a directory to store your NFS root you’ll be serving clients.

sudo mkdir /home/nfsroot

Edit /etc/exports. It should look something like this:

/home/nfsroot 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0(rw,no_subtree_check,async,no_root_squash)

Now we just have to bootstrap a basic Debian install into /home/nfsroot. Luckily for us, there’s a nifty little tool called debootstrap that does just that. For a 64-bit Debian Squeeze environment, I do this:

debootstrap --arch amd64 squeeze /home/nfsroot/

A few minutes later, it’s installed. Now you need to make some modifications to that system you just installed.
Edit /home/nfsroot/etc/fstab to look something like this:

#   
 

proc            /proc         proc   defaults       0      0
/dev/nfs        /             nfs    defaults       0      0
none            /tmp            tmpfs   defaults 0 0
none            /var/run        tmpfs   defaults 0 0
none            /var/lock       tmpfs   defaults 0 0
none            /var/tmp        tmpfs   defaults 0 0
none            /media          tmpfs   defaults 0 0
none		/var/log	tmpfs	defaults 0 0

/home/nfsroot/etc/network/interfaces should be:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
iface eth0 inet dhcp

Note that auto eth0 isn’t there anymore. That’s because your primary ethernet interface is already up. If you try to initialize it again, it might drop your existing connection and it’ll dump you out of the boot process.

Testing

At this point you’re ready to test. Make sure to restart xinetd, dnsmasq and nfs-kernel-server to make sure your new settings take effect. Then, check your node’s BIOS to verify that network boot is enabled and give it a shot.

Congratulations! You now have a diskless cluster. Next we’ll make some special modifications to the configuration of the nodes to make them play nicely together and make maintenance easier.

Networking

Each node will receive an IP address from dnsmasq on the head node. We can either just note which IP each node gets, as it should give each node a unique IP by default and these are persistent as long as the node’s MAC address remains the same, or you can force each node to a specified IP with a configuration similar to this in /etc/dnsmasq.conf on the head node:

dhcp-host=id:00:21:97:7d:ad:bf,192.168.1.10
dhcp-host=id:00:21:97:7a:24:0f,192.168.1.11
dhcp-host=id:00:21:97:7d:b3:26,192.168.1.12

Either way, you’ll need /etc/hosts on your head node to reflect the IP addresses of your nodes. Mine looks like this:

127.0.0.1	localhost
10.13.99.1	scoop head
192.168.1.10	dizzy db
192.168.1.11	tumbler
192.168.1.12	scrambler

You’ll want to copy that hosts file over to /home/nfsroot/etc/hosts as well.

Init Tricks

Sometimes you want the nodes to behave just a little bit differently from each other. I wanted my nodes to have different hostnames, fancy that. So, I wrote this bash script to figure out what their hostname should be:

#!/bin/bash
#finds node's hostname based on matching ip in /etc/hosts

grep `ifconfig  | grep 'inet addr:'| grep -v '127.0.0.1' | /usr/bin/cut -d: -f2 \
| /usr/bin/awk '{ print $1}'` /etc/hosts | /usr/bin/awk '{print $2}'

Save the script in /home/nfsroot/bin/whereami. You’ll need awk in order for it to work. Boot up a node and just apt-get it from the node itself before running the script. Package installation is best accomplished from a booted diskless node, just try not to install multiple packages from multiple nodes simultaneously. You might corrupt your apt database.

Now that we have that taken care of, we can modify /etc/init.d/hostname.sh to set our hostname on boot based on the IP we’ve received. This is as simple as changing this:

	[ -f /etc/hostname ] && HOSTNAME="$(cat /etc/hostname)"

To this:

	[ -f /etc/hostname ] && HOSTNAME="$(/bin/whereami)"

This also allows us to modify other init scripts so they’ll only run on particular nodes. For example, I wanted MySQL to start only on the database node, dizzy. So I added this to the top of /etc/init.d/mysql:

hostname=$(hostname)
if [ $hostname != "dizzy" ];
then exit 0
fi

Logging

Since we’re not saving local log files on the diskless nodes, it makes sense to centralize our logging on the head node. We’ll need a better logging daemon to accomplish this.

On both the head node and a diskless node (only do this on one of your nodes, changes populate to the others, remember?)

sudo apt-get install syslog-ng

Edit /etc/syslog-ng/syslog-ng.conf on the head node.

## add this to the options section
create_dirs(yes);
long_hostnames(off);
keep_hostname(yes);

## add this to the source section
source s_udp {
	udp ( ip(192.168.1.1) ); # replace with your system's IP address
};

## add this to the destination section
destination df_udp {
        file ("/var/log/$HOST/$FACILITY");
};

## add this to the log section
log {
        source(s_udp);
        destination (df_udp);
};

Now edit /etc/syslog-ng/syslog-ng.conf on one of the diskless nodes.

## add this to the destination section
destination remote_udp { udp("192.168.1.1"); }; # replace with your log server's IP address

## add this to the log section
log { source(src); destination(remote_udp); };

Restart syslog-ng on both head and diskless nodes.

That’s It

I hope this was helpful. Feel free to ask questions or leave comments.