Author Archives: Jethro Carr

Week in Auckland

Been a busy week – I flew up to Auckland first thing on Monday morning and just arrived back tonight on Sunday. There’s a bigger update here on how things are going with the move and plans, this post is mostly just a dump of a few pictures from my future home-to-be.

Auckland skytower in the distance obscured by rain

Standing on the Northcote Rd motorway bridge, looking out towards the Smales Farm busway (where the very excellent North Express (NEX) runs to/from)

Driving along the Auckland Harbour Bridge

Donuts. One of the delicious perks of being in Auckland. (there is essentially no donut shops in Wellington. TBH, that's probably a good thing for my waistline)

Noooo.... broke my only bag halfway during the week... was a real PITA finding alternative ways to carry stuff :-( Vinyl just isn't that great for hard wearing joins like that.

Maybe I should carry around less things.....

Sal's Pizza, part of the staple Aucklander diet. Some chick I managed to pickup with my studly ways in the background.

Lake Pupuke in Takapuna, North Shore, Auckland at night. (see wikipedia)

It's the moon! Either clouds or smog :-P (ok prob not, but let's all mock Aucklander's addiction to cars some more)

Slowly morphing into an Aucklander

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October is shaping up to be a pretty insanely busy month, I haven’t even had the time to update my blog for a while or finish some of the project I’ve been hacking away at. :-(

This month is pretty much non-stop travel around both NZ and AU – I have 5 days over in AU in Melbourne and Brisbane, as well as a number of flights to and from Auckland for work projects as well as the impending move up to be with Lisa.

Infact, based on hours spent in different cities this month, I’m going to be around 30% Wellingtonian, 20% Australian and 50% Aucklander…. before becoming an official Aucklander from the 30th of October.

Whilst it’s pretty hectic, it is somewhat good timing. Work is flying me to Auckland a bit for an important project that’s underway, so far I’ve already spent an entire week in Auckland, and likely to spend another week or maybe more up there whilst Lisa and I hunt for a flat – plus it means Lisa and I don’t have too many huge gaps without seeing each other.

(I’ve literally just landed in Wellington and expect to spend (at most) two nights in my own bed before flying back out).

We haven’t confirmed a flat yet – really not a fan of flat hunting, always so many different flats to sort through until you find something that isn’t entirely disappointing, and then there’s all the fun of working with agents and owners to actually get an application in and approved.

The fact that NZ rental stock is utterly crap also doesn’t help towards this goal – far too many hours lack any insulation, have kitchens or bathrooms last renovated in the 70s, are way over priced and have horrendous terms like 12 months fixed term, renewing in blocks of 12 only.

We’ve submitted an application for one place, which the agents appear happy with, but haven’t had final confirmation yet, so there’s a bit of limbo currently – hopefully we get it, as it does look like an ideal place for us and they can do an 8month contract with flexible renewal.

I think Lisa and I have pretty much settled on the shore now, looking at places around Takapuna – there’s a good selection of food and other shops, good transport to town if needed, and we can actually afford enough space to live out there, unlike in the city with tiny apartments.

I’ll be back up next week, so I’m sure further updates will follow by the end of that week. :-)

Auckland, here I come!

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As per my recent post, @splatdevil has now obtained a job in Auckland! And because I can’t resist her snuggles, I’ve decided to move up there with her!

We’ve been dating since Janurary and most of this so far has been spent with Lisa down in Wellington with me, so it’s been pretty intense, going from single life to living with someone almost full time in a relatively small place.

There have been ups and downs, some fights, growing pains as we settle into a different sort of lifestyle, but it’s been totally worth it – we both feel a great connection and can see a long term future, so we’re giving it a go.

And I’m pretty smitten TBH, I love her, maybe even more than my awesome KVM server. ;-)

Lisa will be starting work on 10th October, so we’re in a bit of a hurry to organise a place to live and get setup so she can be comfortable – I’m a bit more flexible and aiming to be moving there around early November as I have a few commitments in Wellington and conferences to attend. Hopefully with the work I have on ATM, I can spend most of October up there with her.

We will need to organise a leaving Wellington party and welcome to Auckland party, but just waiting to see what the plans for travel will be before doing so. :-)

Will keep you all posted.

Job for snugglier half!

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Short post – some great news on the job front – Lisa/@splatdevil has accepted a job offer from an Auckland-based magazine and will be moving up there to write for them. :-D

We’re not totally sure what I’ll be doing – currently just going to long distance for a bit and probably aim to make a move to either Auckland or maybe AU by myself next year and long distance for some time longer… hard decisions to make.

On the plus side, I’ll have more space for more servers in my flat once Lisa takes all her ~~junk~~ stuff to Auckland. :-P

http://lisarapley.wordpress.com/2011/09/23/the-one-where-i-get-a-job/

October AU Travels Plans

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I’ve been in a bit of a travelling mood lately – first a North Island roadtrip then snowboarding, next I’m off to visit Melbourne and Brisbane, two of my favourite cities .

I’ve visited both places a few times now, but keep getting drawn back, particularly to Melbourne it seems – going there again for the food and going back to Brisbane because I love the river and city so much.

I was tempted to visit Sydney again as well, but I couldn’t really fit it into the schedule – not sure about Sydney, I enjoyed my visit there, but not sure what living there long term would be like, especially compared to cities like Melbourne….

Unlike past trips, this time I’m taking @splatdevil – it’s going to be our first international holiday together and I get to introduce her to the awesomeness of both places. :-)

To help organise meetups with internationally located friends/readers/stalkers, here is the travel plan:

Oct 20 – 08:00 – arrival in Melbourne
Oct 22 – 13:00 – depart Melbourne for Brisbane, arrive around 14:00
Oct 24 – 16:00 – depart Brisbane for Wellington

That gives us around 2.5 days in each city – so if you’re around and want to catch up with Lisa and/or myself, please let me know when you’re available and I’ll schedule stuff in. :-)

We haven’t planned any specific activities yet, so please feel free to make suggestions/recommendations on things to see and do. :-)

Snowboarding with the geeks

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A few weeks ago[1] I went up to Mt Ruapheu with a few friends (@splatdevil, @dothedeerdance, @xarius) to take part in a bit of snowboarding. Whilst I’m sure many of my readers are laughing, this did actually take place, and yes, I do have pics to prove it. :-)

[1] yes I’m slack and blogging late about it. :-P

This is actually my second attempt at being on the snow – I tried skiing once a few years ago whilst in intermediate school with little success – not being able to handle crowds particularly well then, combined with the fact that I have the co-ordination of a drunkard, meant that I spent most my time digging poles into the snow and not moving before giving up on it.

After being invited up the mountain this time, I decided that a far better approach would be to learn snowboarding instead – whilst people keep telling me that it’s “harder than skis”, I find the *concept* to be simpler – it’s a matter of balance, which I can handle, rather than coordinating various limbs, which I can’t so much.

Heading up the road towards Mt Ruapheu (pic by @dothedeerdance)

Mt Ruapheu offer a “Discovery Pass ” which is ideal for newbies like me -it offers an almost 2 hour lesson, hire of the snowboard + boots, access to the beginner slopes and ski lift sightseeing pass.

It’s pretty good value at $108, but you will get stung for some additional costs if you’re new – we needed to hire ski jackets & pants not having our own, but found that because we had made the mistake of going up the mountain with a number of layers, we ended up needing to remove almost all but one or two after getting the ski wear and had to store it at $5 per bag which was quite irrating.

The other major issue is that the rental stage is quite confusing for a new skier and certainly not ideal for those who are OCD or have social anxieties, there’s little in way of changing spaces and people everywhere, it’s quite intense.

For future visits, I intend to purchase my own jacket/pants/gloves but continue to lease the boards/boots which will make the whole process a lot smoother and more pleasant.

Spent a lot of the day in this position whilst learning to get the balance right...

Bunch of badass looking newbies ;-) (pic by @dothedeerdance)

Snowboarding is the sort of activity that takes a lot of practice and falling over on your face, hands, bum, until you finally get the hang of it.

It took the best part of the day for @xarcius and myself, but towards the end we were boarding down the hill quite successfully.

We found the lessons quite valuable, the instructors we had were certainly able to give us some good advice and feedback and there were a number of techniques I would not have considered without being shown by them, particularly around the balance.

Overall it was a great trip and I plan to do more in future time/budget permitting – hopefully all the learning from this time carries across to next season when I go again. :-)

In particular, I hope I’ve learnt to wear sunblock when on the mountain after the outcome of the subsequent days….

Arhghghghgh my face!

Impatient Linux geek’s review of Win8 preview

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As you undoubtedly know, I’m one of Microsoft’s biggest fans [1], so I eagerly downloaded the newly released Windows 8 Developer Preview to take a look at what they’re aiming to with Windows 8.

This post is just based on a quick look as someone who runs Linux 24×7 for everything, has a lot of familiarity with Windows XP as a user and admin, some Windows 7 user-level experience and without looking through the online resources or keynotes about new capabilities – a pure “fire it up and see what happens” test and figuring out things as I go along.

[1] OK, maybe not really. [2]
[2] OK, so maybe I hate the company, their proprietary products and culture of lock-in. [3]
[3] Fuck Em

Environment

To begin with, I downloaded the 32bit OS ISO – mainly because the memory requirements and download sizes are less than the 64bit release and I wanted to see how it would go with 1GB RAM – an amount not unreasonable to expect on lower power tablet computers currently on the market.

I installed it onto my RHEL 6-based Linux KVM server (Kernel-based Virtual Machine, a fantastic virtualisation platform shipped with the Linux kernel and packaged into a number of distributions such as RHEL 6).

I didn’t bother looking for any paravirtualised I/O or networking drivers for Windows 8, so the guest was running on emulated IDE hardware, thus ensuring that I/O would not have anything resembling performance, so I haven’t critiqued Windows 8 for performance at all in this review. :-)

Apparently a lot of people have had problems trying to run Windows 8 on VMWare, but Linux comes through again as an impressively capable platform for virtualisation. [4] :-)

[4] To date, KVM has virtualised for me: Linux, Windows, BSDs, Minix, HaikuOS, several large routing companies OSes and more. :-)

Installation

Installation was typical as per any OS installation from ISO media – virt-install read the ISO fine, launched the windows installer and proceeded to install with a very Windows 7 like installer.

It did “feel” faster than a Windows 7 installation onto the same platform I did recently, however that is purely anecdotal and may be impacted by 32bit vs 64bit install size differences.

After the base installation, typical reboot happened, although it appeared to cause my VM to shutdown rather than reboot – after powering back on, Windows 8 proceeded to take me through the re-done setup screens.

Did you hear? Green is in this year!

It’s a big change from previous install screens – looks like Microsoft pretty much tossed out the UI and started again, basing everything around the colour green.

However it does appear they’ve lost some UI concepts in the process – for example, in the above screen I needed to set a computer name – but clicking in the name field didn’t display me a cursor, nor did the example text vanish, typical responses of most current OSes.

I also found that Windows 8 would refuse to take “devel-win8-pre32” as a hostname, considering it too long – this isn’t really a problem for your average home user, but drives a power user like me up the wall – I want hostnames that suit *my* desires damnit!

Taking a leaf from Apple, or even Google's Android, Microsoft is tying the OS to their online services - although the paranoid can bypass - for an average users, the synchronization features sound like a nice touch.

Not being a Windows Live user (I have an account lying about for occasional use, but not for anything important) I originally tried to bypass the Windows Live registration step, but found that the installer crashed out with an error later on when I did.

After retrying with an “advanced/custom” configuration behaviour and using Windows Live it worked successfully – or at least it didn’t complain about anything I entered, I’m still a little unsure as to whether it logged into an existing account or just created me a new one.

Some UI confusion there - Windows tells me it's creating my Windows live account, but that account already existed....

Being impatient with a GUI OS not giving me any nice console messages to read (like any nix geek really – everyone wants to know what the OS is busy doing!!) I started clicking impatiently and was rewarded with a nice placeholder screen:

Well at least it's not blue?

(It’s actually a major improvement – impatient clicking is the leading way I cause Windows desktops to fall into performance hell, many a time I have attempted to do too many tasks on a Windows XP system to have everything in the OS crawl to a halt, because it can’t handle the usage patterns I’ve picked up from my Linux environment.)

The Windows 8 UI did feel quite sluggish under the VM, but this is something I’ve noticed with Windows 7 as well – suspect it’s due to the newer UI/rendering in their GUIs which doesn’t play nicely with the un-accelerated 2D VM viewer sessions, rather than any actual fault with Windows.

Despite my best efforts to break it, it eventually completed and I ended up at the shiny new Windows 8 “Metro Style” home screen. :-)

Operation

Oh Hai Metro!

First impressions of Windows 8 is the new Metro style interface – it’s essentially a number of large clickable buttons in a minimalistic style UI – upon clicking a button, it’s application is launched in full screen mode – with a roll over application-specific popup below.

Metro-aware applications launching in fullscreen - in this case, IE accessing my site - note the minor scrollbar and the popup black bottom OS menubar.

The first thing you’ll notice is the very tablet inspired UI – whilst navigable with a mouse, more conventional UI designs are probably still faster/easier to work with – although this is something that may change after a lot of use.

However with touch, this must change a lot – it will be interesting to hear about detailed reviews from users of touch devices with Windows 8.

I did note the non transparent IE icon on the black bar sticking out awkwardly – maybe MS is still having trouble with image transparency in browsers…. :-P

The biggest issue I have with the UI is actually how to get out of it – I found that by moving my mouse to the bottom left corner, the windows start menu – or at least, what remains of it – pops up in a very web-like fashion and you can click to return to the main home page or perform a number of other tasks.

But not always – I managed to get myself trapped inside a paint program that kept blocking the mouse action to get the start menu – and without any windows keys, I was left only with CTL+ALT+DEL to rescue myself.

I'm the new start menu! Don't expect to find anything on me!

The other main issue for me with Metro, was that I *couldn’t* figure out initially how to actually launch conventional programs – since only new metro applications appear on the home screen.

Turns out you now “search” for the programs that you want, or be presented with an alphabetically sorted list – it will be interesting to see how it looks after a user installs 50 conventional applications with half a dozen menu items each, but search does seem to be the way that a number of user interfaces are pushing people towards.

I guess I’m a somewhat old school user who likes my hierarchical menus rather than search – for that reason even some of the newer Linux GUIs cause me pain – but I can respect that the design of these UIs probably aren’t aimed towards people like me.

This is your punishment for loving Google too much, all your UIs will be replaced by search boxes! Mwhahah, search everything! Eventually you'll be searching for search tools to do your searching!

Oh and BTW – don’t rely on the search box – I tried to search for “shell” but didn’t get either traditional command line nor Powershell – not sure what’s happening there….

What is interesting is what happens when you launch a conventional application – I found myself suddenly watching some page flipping graphic animation and being taken to a familiar friend:

I'm a geek, let me tweak something dangerous! >:-D

This probably highlights my single biggest complaint with Windows 8 – it’s not that they changed things, it’s that they didn’t change things _enough_.

IMHO, Microsoft should have thrown out the 1995 derived user interface and gone full on into this new Metro design – with a bit more work, I’m sure it could handle all the same needs just as well.

It’s like Microsoft was split into two teams – one wanting a design for 2011 and one wanting to retain the good old tried and tested design, but instead of either side winning, ended up with this weird dual mode operation.

Of course I’ve always argued that Microsoft should have moved to a BSD based backend like Apple did with MacOS – take the best from the open source world and then build their Windows libraries and APIs ontop of that platform – increase stability, reduced development in the low lever space and ability to move on from win32.

In terms of classic application UIs, a few old friends have had some UI changes, although maybe not so much for command line which has managed to survive a remarkable number of Windows releases whilst looking ugly as fuck.

More graphical wiz in task manager to make sure it runs even slower when your system is crashing.

And of course, the controversial file manager UI changes feature:

Sadly the send to box still lacks "send to pirate bay" or "scp to a real computer" :-(

Whilst I’m sure many readers will lynch me for this, I actually find the new ribbon style interfaces great – I suspect this is because I only really started using MS Office heavily with 2007+ and I found learning with the ribbon easier than with the traditional menu style layout.

Users having to learn new habits will probably hate it though and consider me mad for liking it. They should just harden up and use a CLI, always faster for a power user anyway.

Speaking of which….

Command Line, Fuck Yeah

Apparantly Microsoft has had an improved shell around for a while to replace CommandLine, called Powershell – I won’t go into too much detail about it as it’s not really new to Windows 8, but do want to make some comments because it’s the first time I’ve had an actual play with it:

It essentially looks like they took some of the UNIX concepts and built a new shell for Windows that doesn’t entirely suck like the older one – hey, it even has a “ps” command and has other nix-isms like ls and pwd.

Sadly they didn’t implement the “uptime” command so you can’t compare days online without blue screens nor is there a “uname -r” for kernel version boasting contests. And as a helpful addition, I found a remarkable lack of –help parameter understanding.

Hi, I'm windows! I've finally evolved to where UNIX was in 1980 :-P

Over all, it’s actually pretty nice – doesn’t stack up next to a modern Linux CLI, but miles better than the horror know as cmd.exe :-/

TBH, with Windows 8 they should dump the bloody command shell already and make people get with the program and adopt powershell – at worst it might break a couple batch files or some legacy launchers, but with the massive advantage that Linux geeks like me won’t be able to mock the crappy primary CLI so much. [5]

[5] I’m sure I’ll still find a way to mock Windows. :-)

Conclusion

Over all I found it an interesting system – it feels like they’re halfway between building a new style of desktop OS yet still have that legacy windows feel stuck behind it they just can’t shake.

I would often find myself dumped back to a somewhat Windows 7-like environment but with a funny acting start menu.

I did find the newer UI a bit more mouse intensive – having to cursor down and pause to get the start menu popup – however I suspect people with bad keyboards [6] will find that the Windows keys might make life easier to launch it.

[6] anything not an IBM Model M

We don't need no frigging Windows key! This household only has real keyboards boy!

I have yet to get into the real guts of the OS to see how it’s networking performs, how much memory it eats and how well legacy applications run – this might be tricky without paravirtualised drivers, since the emulated drivers do make an impact on performance.

In terms of quick checks at memory and CPU usage – with only a couple basic OS applications running, the VM was using about 400-500MB out of 1GB assigned and minimal CPU – probably around the same as a Windows 7 install, although maybe a bit less CPU wastage.

And in the hour I spent playing with it, I didn’t cause any nasty crashes – of course, once given real workloads and a variation of different applications and drivers, stuff will get more interesting. :-)

I’m genuinely optimistic about where MS is heading with Windows and their development in general – this is the first Windows release that I believe is accessible for the general public to download and play with, a more public development model will certainly pay off for them with community feedback, bug finding and also just general awareness and free marketing about Microsoft’s new capabilities.

Having said that, for a power user, there’s no way I’d move off Linux to Windows 8, even ignoring the philosophical differences, I still find the Windows architecture too restricting for my liking.

And developing for the new metro interface sounds like a trap for the unwary with restrictions similar to mobile application stores – not everyone shares my concern, but I’m extremely worried about heading into a future where the majority of commercial operating system vendors can control what applications are allowed to be released for their platforms.

In terms of the tablet audience, it will be interesting to see how it fares – whilst the iPad and Android tablets are going to pull off the tablet experience slicker/better (IMHO) the ability to run regular windows programs as the line between PC and tablet converges will certainly be attractive to some – and unlike Microsoft’s past forays into tablet computing, they’ve actually done more work than just slapping a touch screen onto a laptop and calling it done.

And that’s me for now – I may come back with some more on Windows 8 in the next few days, but I’ll prob be moving on to doing some reviews of weird *nix style operating systems I’ve been playing with.

Adventures in the lands of the north

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As a loyal and frequent visitor to my blog (ha!) you will have noted that I went up North for a 4 day roadtrip – firstly to Auckland, then Rotorua and back to Wellington via Hawke’s Bay.

I didn’t take a whole heaps of pictures, since I was driving, but here’s a few for those interested in a bit of NZ. :-)

We stopped off briefly on the desert road to look at all the snow on Mt Ruapehu in the distance, as well as splatterings around near the roadside.

View of Mt Ruapehu from the Desert Road on the way to Taupo.

@splatdevil is excited by the presence of snow

@chrisjrn stops to stretch his legs - in the background, a mighty Toyota Starlet, the powerful high speed beast that took us for around 1,400+KM trip in cost effective style. ;-)

After reaching Auckland, had evening catchups with friends, before spending the following day tripping about a bit and visiting a few places.

Stayed at the Quest on Nelson serviced apartments – a little worn, but good price, cheap car parking and spacious rooms with a lounge and clean and functional. :-)

Looking out over Auckland from our hotel room - note the Auckland Harbor Bridge in the distance. The presence of a large carpark is a good summary of Auckland really.

I don't have any pictures of me in Auckland, other than random camwhoring in the hotel room. Sorry ladies, this is the non-topless version. :-P

Lunching at Mission Bay, looking out at Rangitoto Island

OMG they get this big?!?! (at Kelly Tarlton's)

TBH, I wasn’t particularly impressed with Kelly Tarlton’s, I found it quite short and whilst the penguin area was good, the rest didn’t really impress.

Although I admit, I am spoilt by having gone to Melbourne’s Aquarium earlier this year which features a far more impressive selection of sea life, so maybe Kelly Tarlton’s is good if you haven’t been to one of the larger international aquariums before.

After Auckland, we headed down to Rotorua for one night – I had intended to detour via Tauranga, as I’ve never been there before, but missed the non-signposted turnoff (for reference, you need to take SH2 via Ponoko – but it’s not labeled as SH2, instead you actually need to turn off at Ponoko).

Stayed overnight at Rydges Rotorua – whilst it was a bit full of kids during our stay (kids hockey tournament on apparently), it was otherwise enjoyable and we got upgraded to a suite which was larger than all the rooms in my flat combined…

Started the morning off with a big hotel feed, then hit the road for a short drive to Wai-o-Tapu, one of the major thermal areas.

Started off the trip with the 10am eruption of the Lady Knox Geyser – it’s a naturalish eruption – essentially there’s a large pool of hot water and steam underneath, but the eruption isn’t controlled due to buildup of mineral deposits – so they add a chemical once a day that breaks down the deposits and allows the geyser to erupt.

Lady Knox Geiser

The rest of the thermal area is good too – we probably spent 2-3 hours wandering all the tracks and taking a look at the weird smelling steaming ground. ;-)

Imagine walking through the NZ bush as a settler and coming across that....

Large network of connected thermal pools - the tracks take you right around and through some of them.

Incase the steaming ground and bubbling water wasn't obvious enough, there's plenty of signs warning about unstable or boiling hot ground.....

oh hai! (pic by @splatdevil)

It's a cutie twitter twupple! :-P (pic by @splatdevil)

One of the most impressive pools, with clouds of billowing steam wafting off the water.

Bright green natural colouring

There are some more pictures taken by @splatdevil on her flicker page.

Apart from the catching up with friends, the thermal walk was one of the best features of the trip – next time I want to check out Waimangu Volcanic Valley too, which looked quite interesting.

There are also various natural hotpools around, would be quite neat to spend a bit of time finding a few and going to them, without the piles of tourists around as with the commercial areas.

Overall, was a great 4 days and an enjoyable drive, giving me a chance to see parts of NZ I’ve never seen before. :-)

Cooling Upgrades

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Since building my new KVM server in January, I’ve been experiencing random occasional system crashes – sometimes months apart, other times a couple in a week.

I’ve been trying to trace the cause, but this fault is hard to diagnose – there’s never been anything output to display, nor anything in system or even BIOS logs.

Unlikely to be a kernel panic, no output to console, nor syslog, plus running CentOS 6 kernels which are usually pretty damn stable being rebuilt RHEL kernels…
Unlikely to be some weird disk fault, I replaced all the disks recently but still experiencing the same issue – and when the fault occurs, all the RAID arrays get upset, even independent arrays on different controllers.
Possibly a motherboard firmware issue, however upgraded to latest BIOS version and unable to find any similar problems online.
Possibly CPU/Memory/Motherboard hardware faults.

However with the recent addition of a properly configured Munin server to my network, I’ve started graphing all the temperature sensors from my server – what I found, is that the AMD Phenom II 810 CPU is running hot – very hot infact, at around 60-70c, and the crashes were occuring once the CPU peaked at 70c.

I had initially discounted thermal problems, since the case has great cooling and I’ve never historically had calling problems with the stock cooler on AMD CPUs, especially since the CPU is not being overclocked.

However unlike many other systems I’ve built, this particular host is always heavily loaded – I’m running about 20-30 KVM virtual machines on it and there’s always a whole bunch of active processes, plus disk encryption CPU overhead.

And looking at the stock cooler, it’s not surprising that it’s been overheating – it’s basically a block of plain aluminium – there aren’t even any heat pipes, unlike the stock cooler that ships with the black edition model.

My stock AMD heatsink - dusty, boring, poor thermal conductivity and no sexy heatpipes.

So I’ve replaced the heatsink with a nice new Zalman CNPS9700LED copper cooler – it’s a big beast, 790g and certainly wouldn’t fit in a lot of cases – but once installed, you can feel how the large fan blows air out over all the copper fins – there’s a really good airflow with the design to ensure heat gets radiated off quickly.

Pretty new cooler, all installed - without a case window, this pretty LED lighting is lost on me though.

Here’s the pretty graphs showing the difference that this cooler made to my server – please excuse some of the gaps, Munin has been having a bit of fun with virtualised workloads and timeouts….

It’s well worth the ~ $100 NZD based on the thermal difference it made – my CPU has gone from 60-70c down to 30-40c and so far, the server is running solid without fault.

From the graph, the CPU (green) is running a good 20+ degrees cooler than it previously did, but in addition, the motherboard chipset (blue) is also running cooler – most likely caused by the CPU cooler fan pulling in air right over the heatsink on the motherboard, assisting it with cooling.

(I’m running the cooler at low speed with the stock Zalman thermal paste too – if you turned the fan speed up higher or used fancier thermal pastes, lower temperatures or more thermal conductivity might be possible.)

In terms of the hardware supplied by Zalman, it’s a pretty good package – the cooler comes with some decent thermal paste, application brush, cooler, and connectors for various model CPUs.

My only complaint was that the design with the AM3 socket, means that the cooler outtake doesn’t line up with the rear case fan – however this is a lesser problem, since the hot air radiates out all over the cooler and is quickly removed by the fan anyway.

In terms of whether it’s fixed my issue, it remains to be seen – the crashes were not always consistent and I won’t call it as “fixed” until I get 4 months solid run time without occurrences, but I’m optimistic.

IPv6 Enabled :-)

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A while ago I deployed IPv6 to my flat and have been having fun learning and experimenting with the new addressing methods – at some stage I’m sure I’ll write a few bits up, but there’s mountains of information about IPv6 around already – sometimes the problem is that there is *too* much information.

Thanks to the efforts of my employer and colocation provider, my publicly reachable server now has a /56 IPv6 range which I have just started assigning to various VMs and services. :-D

My first step has been to enable the webserver hosting jethrocarr.com with IPv6 – and as of today, you can now reach this site via IPv4 or IPv6. :-)

[jethro@snagglepuff ~]$ host www.jethrocarr.com
www.jethrocarr.com has address 202.170.163.203
www.jethrocarr.com has IPv6 address 2407:1000:1003:1:216:3eff:fe49:df4e
[jethro@snagglepuff ~]$

If you’re unsure whether you’re reaching via IPv6, try accessing ipv6.jethrocarr.com to check – if it works, you are :-D

[jethro@snagglepuff ~]$ host ipv6.jethrocarr.com
ipv6.jethrocarr.com has IPv6 address 2407:1000:1003:1:216:3eff:fe49:df4e
[jethro@snagglepuff ~]$

Next steps will be to setup mail, XMPP and all other sites and services with dual stack IPv4 and IPv6 for my production servers, I’m sure I’ll post again once complete so that you can all start hammering my services and breaking things. ;-)

Once production is sorted, my following tasks will be replacing the Hurricane Electric tunnel at my flat, with another tunnel to my colocation server, since it means reduced latency for all my IPv6 browsing.

I started off my IPv6 learning with the services provided by Hurricane Electric who provide not only a free IPv4 to IPv6 tunnel service, but also an automated online test platform to check your configuration and test access to your systems.

This has enabled my flat to connect to any IPv6 only resources and the few sites that have IP6 available in production services, but isn’t the greatest since it means all my traffic goes out to the US, adding considerable latency.

(I understand there is now a more local gateway in NZ, provided by SixXS which is also an option, but I figure setting up a 6to4 tunnel at both ends to be an interesting learning curve).