So I have to give kudos to the guy running packetlife.net. Its a great site for networking nerds like me, and he’s got some really awesome cheatsheets available. But he had a post this week that really struck a cord: Why network neutrality is a big deal. I dumped a less-edited version of this into the comments, but I wanted to flesh out the thought and post it here as well.

Internet connectivity isn’t like the highway system. The government doesn’t provide high speed links; private companies and giant corporations do. Ask Verizon how many million they invested in FIOS. It costs money to bury fiber or copper, buy or lease right-of-way, add capacity via routers, switches, DSLAMs, FTTx’s, Optical MUXs, servers etc., and once the line is in your neighborhood or house, the likelihood of a competing service coming in drops to almost zero.

As it stands, public opinion and the fear of government oversight has been the only thing stopping them from completely monopolizing their lines so far. But if they encroach slowly like they have been: capping transfers, “shaping” traffic, etc., ultimately convincing people that its really OK, and there’s nothing wrong with it, we’re screwed. Lets not forget all the lubing of the gears in Congress (telecom lobbying is a rather big business, on either side of this issue).

How about if you live someplace where there isn’t a BigName LEC? What if VZ or AT&T isn’t your ISP? How long before this type of tiered pricing is applied to the Qwests and the Level3 carriers? You get a discount or a kickback for every 10000 subscribers you have on a limited plan?

The biggest problem is much of our copper infrastructure is reaching its limits. Providers don’t want to bury new cable. They don’t want to install new DSLAMs, or cable nodes, etc. They want to keep riding the money train, soaking people for more money, for the same or less service. And they can, they own the line all the way to your house, and they no doubt own or lease the right-of-way for that service in your area. With your electric bill and water bill, there are government regulations and restrictions in place on those service provisions; there won’t be more than one electric service provider in your area, nor will there be multiple water providers, its just not feasible and makes no sense. Telecomm and data providers (ISPs) are in that same category, but are much more loosely controlled.

That’s not stopping the demand though. The Netflix On Demand, YouTube, Hulu, etc. In 5 years the amount of content distributed online will make today’s current usage look miniscule (just like the usage of 5 years ago looks so tiny compared to today’s). That’s banking on the hope that the entire system doesn’t collapse on itself in another year or two. The providers could have been spending some of those profits over the last 20 years to keep things up to date and rocking, and we could have a policy like Finland, where every citizen is guaranteed 1Mbps broadband.

As we proceed through our deployment of Windows 7 at work, I want to detail some of the issues I have with “features” Microsoft graced us with in their latest attempt at making an OS not suck.

For starters, some background: We skipped Vista. Our infrastructure was heavily entrenched from many years ago, dating back into Windows 3.1 for some things. In the spring of 2008, the infrastructure was shifted to SCCM and App-V (Application Virtualization). For better or worse, those are the components we’re using. In the future I may write a post giving more detail on our upgrade path and process for the infrastructure changes we’re making, but we have to get it fully ironed out first.

I’ll also point out that I am a huge Apple geek. I’m not a fanboy, I get pissed off about OS X and Apple’s methodologies, perhaps not as much as Microsoft’s, but I’m far from thinking my chosen OS is a picture of operating system perfection. Without further ado…

User Access Control

Beefs with UAC aren’t new. However, my problem isn’t with the implementation. My problem is with the concept and the thought process behind it. Instead of Microsoft trying to fix the many things wrong in the OS, they shoved the burden of security off to the user. That’s bad enough, but compounding the issue, they did this in a very invasive and scary way. Opening a start menu item, or a shortcut, or a file, should *not* trigger a Machiavellian prompt, greying out the entire screen save for one relatively tiny ass prompt, in the corner of the screen instead of the middle (or god forbid, over top of the application or action that caused it to be called in the first place), and that at best gives a cursory reason for WHY its there.

In fucking this up so badly, Microsoft instilled a terrible behavior that is now part of many users’ psyche, of “oh there’s a pop up, I have to click OK”. Many people can’t tell the difference between a Windows dialog box and a popup Window in Internet Explorer. Many people don’t always make the connection when a UAC-like dialog box comes up, but its slightly different and the screen didn’t dim, and its got internet explorer’s icon in the corner. Many don’t realize that clicking links in a web browser shouldn’t cause UAC prompts!

What was Microsoft’s solution here? Did the simplify the system? Change how they handle the notifications? Actually make their software use the 2, 4, or more CPU cores every computer has nowadays and some intelligent design to work out what the user’s doing? More intelligently design Control Panels and applications so that THEY better integrated into UAC? Perhaps some of this was done, at some level. But thus far, the only thing I have seen is they added complexity by creating multiple levels of UAC notification. My Mother, Father, Aunt, Uncle, Sister, Brother, etc doesn’t know what UAC is, why it exists, what each of those levels means for them, and for fuck’s sake, they shouldn’t have to.

Much of my grief was put into very elegant prose by Alex St. John in the November 2009 issue of CPU magazine (http://tr.im/C3kN) Alex points out that Microsoft has 60,000 software engineers, none of which apparently, can write an algorithm to figure out if a file with a .jpg extension, is in fact a jpg image or something nefarious. He also points out that the number one question in Microsoft’s FAQ on downloading files is “What does it mean to download a file?” Holy Hell. I don’t agree with Alex’s 3-part solution that follows that, I think its still conceding defeat to the flaws that Microsoft is too bureaucratic to fix.

The point has been made many times that its not in Microsoft’s or the tech industry’s interest for the OS to be flawless. There is BIG money in supporting the Swiss Cheese Operating System, and bigger money still in claiming to provide security for it. I guarantee you the great-great-grandkids of Symantec and McAfee executives won’t have to worry about money.

Next Up…Software Distribution…its almost 2010… this is still a disparate, scary, and ridiculous process that should be standard, uniform and recognizable…WTF…

It’s been said before, but the Windows Registry is the Mos Eisley cantina of a Windows computer.

You’ll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

As somebody who has made their fair share of registry hacks before, I have been to places most people don’t dare to tread, changed and added keys with impunity, and…*gasp*…deleted things without backing them up first! This isn’t some average joe we’re talking about; I had a documented series of registry hacks that I had to do to every time i reinstalled Windows, and it got to the point where I was needing to use nLite to integrate them all for time’s sake (at one time I was on a 2-3 month reinstall cycle for my main workstation).

This kind of relationship usually is fruitful, a geek and his operating system. So intimately entwined in each other they are; the geek knowing the deepest secrets of his system, the system knowing precisely how to piss off the geek in as few CPU cycles as possible. But my relationship with Windows grew bitter in its waning years. I started to detest the behavior of the Alt key, with its toggling on/off state rather than being a simple momentary key like Shift or Control. The sheer and utter abuse of having a dedicated Windows key, and only being able to use it with 3-5 of the other 90+ keys. The systemwide penchant for inconsistency and bad program design. But none of this compared to the hatred of the registry.

The amount of bloat, the difficulty of manipulation, a single source of failure for the entire system, the abuse of putting things in registry keys that should have been in files, the use of GUIDs and SIDs for key names with nary a DWORD inside hinting as what it actually exists for and why. How about the ability to hide data? Yep, the registry, in all of its girth, is the perfect place to bury things, since so many legitimate programs do just that, why not illegitimate ones too?

As somebody who regularly supports other users, particularly those who, shall we say, are not as technically inclined, the registry posed a huge problem for remote troubleshooting. Here are some scenarios:

Think there’s a virus? want to disable any startup items?

Well is it in HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run, or RunOnce, or RunForFrakingEver or is it a *system* preference, so it’ll be under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run or RunOnce? This is assuming you can get the user to open RegEdit, since its buried in some scary system directory that Windows warns you never to touch (because THAT is security…a clickthrough warning barrier…to hell with intelligent permission levels and on-demand privilege escalation).

Trying to troubleshoot wireless problems?

We should just blow away the wireless settings in your registry and see if it recreating them fixes it. Are you using a 3rd party wireless configuration program or the Windows one? At that point i’d hear an unspoken “WTF?!” in the silence, or maybe it was static from my cell phone, either way, I got the point.

I highly doubt I will return to any Windows platform as long as the Registry exists. The Mac’s primarily file-based approach for configuration data is vastly superior in terms of supportability, stability, and security. Throw in an amazing user interface that is both simple and powerful, not to mention customizable, and a growing number of applications that, unlikely their Windows counterparts, do not make me want to put a gun to the head of the people coding them, and you start to get a picture of why I have moved my entire family to Macs.

Finally! 2008 is about over…what a hellacious year it has been. There have definitely been several high points, including getting engaged, getting a kitten, getting a Mac Pro, and getting a job!

Yes, you read correctly, I am now employed! On Monday I received an offer at ITaP (Purdue’s IT Conglomerate) for a full-time position within Teaching and Learning Technologies, who I worked with as an undergrad. I will be helping maintain ~2500 Lab Machines, TIC sites, and some of the infrastructure behind them, among other things. I start January 5th and am about as excited as I can be. I’ll have an office, healthcare, sane hours, the whole nine yards; why didn’t I think of doing this 11 months ago?!

Lets go over 2008′s employment history for me:

• January – December: Independent Technical Consultant — Small Consulting Jobs
• January – April: Lab Coordinator — Cyber Forensics Lab (Purdue)
• January – May: Web Application Dev — AgCommunications (Purdue)
• May – June: Web Application Dev — (ETC)
• June – December: Technical Consultant — (FindRefs)
• June – July: Technical Consultant — (InfoComm)
• June – August: Network Software Tech — (Purdue)
• August – December: Teaching Assistant — (Purdue)

Now lets look at 2009′s tentative schedule:

• January – December: Lab/Sys Administrator — ITaP/TLT
• January – December: Ind. Technical Consultant — As Needed

I, personally, can definitely see the upside to this…

So to tie in the post’s title, 2009 should be the revolution I was looking for in that last post. With a stable, long-term, and somewhat generous income, and a plan-able schedule, I’ll hopefully have time to turn my attention to things I’ve been forced to neglect: my fiancé, my Home Theater (I need a new couch, receiver and Mac Mini, the former is dying and the latter has been dead over a month now), my servers (possibly either doing away with VMWare and going back to an all-in-wonder box or getting a decent Dell PowerEdge and running ESXi (or some combination of the two)), and with any luck several other yet-to-be-defined projects.

And Lastly, a quick announcement:

• I’m now a Twitterfiend. You can catch my feed at http://www.twitter.com/peelman

So this summer when energy started to go through the roof I decided it was time to “green up” a little more and get more energy efficient about things, not to mention lower my electric bill as much as possible. So shortly after classes started this semester I picked up a Kill-A-Watt and did some measurements.

First, some background: My two servers (Altair and Polaris) are both cobble boxes, computers i have built from old or retired parts, at least to date. Polaris was my primary desktop until I got my Mac Pro, Altair was truly a cobble box and was filled with a hodgepodge of hardware that was typically hand-me-downs from any upgrades I did to my desktop. Prior to the introduction of the Pro to my geekosystem, Altair was my primary server, it ran Ubuntu and did everything (web, mysql, tftp, voip, dns, sftp, ssh, smb/nfs/afp, etc). Once I had Polaris, my options opened up some.

Altair Specs (old)

• 2800+ AMD Athlon
• Gigabyte GA7-NNXP Motherboard (is it bad I still remember this without having to look it up?)
• 1.5GB DDR400 Memory
• Whatever Video Card was working at the time
• 4 Port Rosewill SATA Controller
• PATA – 200GB, 320GB, 320GB, 60GB
• SATA – 320GB, 500G
• RX-82U Enclosure -> 750GB, 250G

Polaris Specs (current)

• AMD Athlon X2 3800+
• 3GB RAM (DDR400)
• Foxconn mATX Motherboard
• 160GB SATA system drive
• 250GB SATA storage drive

So I just got my Pro but wasn’t quite ready to take the retired hardware from Polaris and merge it into Altair yet. So what did I do? As any good geek would have, I installed VMWare Server One of my biggest issues with having my single box was that it was incredibly insecure. Anybody who pwned any of the services i was hosting off of it, several of them to the outside world for my remote use, had just hosed my single server. The goal was to end up with this:

Network Diagram – Spring/Summer 2008

I didn’t miss by much. I spent the latter half of the summer slowly migrating services to several VMs (Powered by Ubuntu JeOS) and ended up with a pretty sweet, diversified setup that I won’t detail here since this is supposed to be about Altair, the file server side. With the burden of these services removed from Altair I was able to do the first major overhaul of it that I have done since I first started using it in early 2006. With the intent of minimizing its energy use while maximizing storage, I ended up with these specs:

Altair Specs (new)

• Intel Celeron 430 (1.8Ghz, 35W Power consumption)
• Intel DG45ID Motherboard
• 2GB DDR2 800 (single stick)
• 2x100GB 7200RPM Seagate 2.5″ Primary Drives (Software RAID 1)
• 2x750GB Samsung Storage Drives
• 1x500GB Seagate Storage Drive
• 1x320GB Seagate Storage Drive
• Ubuntu 8.10 Server Beta (needed the new kernel support for the new hardware)

Some notes about the install, while researching what to do for a reliable, fault-tolerant drive setup for my primary data, about 30GB and growing of stuff that I would prefer not to lose, ever, I stumbled across this (Syba’s 2.5″ Mobile Drive Rack (CL-HD-MRDU25S)):

at Newegg. Populated with a pair of 100GB 2.5″ drives run in RAID 1 (mirroring), it left valuable 3.5″ slots open for larger capacity drives that I can’t afford to run mirrored, and gives me 100GB of reliable storage to use for my boot disk and precious data. I also get a read boost from them because of the RAID1, which is always nice. Of course all of this lives in my Lian-Li case, which is a twin to the case Polaris lives in (I liked it so much I bought a 2nd one when they were on sale again), which acts like a giant heatsink and keeps everything frigid.

Back to the power usage. First, a benchmark for comparison: my Mac Pro and its 4 monitor setup (1×20″, 2×17″, 1×15″) draws roughly 400W of power while i’m using it. That includes M-Audio AV30 speakers, a Cisco 7960, Netgear GS108 Gigabit Switch, USB and Firewire hubs, mouse charger(s), a 1200VA UPS, you get the picture. I forget what the exact kWh used per day was but it wasn’t nearly as bad as one would think. I think by my calculations (rough at best) it costs me about $12USD / month to power my workstation 24/7/365. Polaris and Altair running headless were peaking around 410W of power usage, not terrible but not respectable by any stretch since the Mac Pro would smoke both of them put together in any benchmark.

While Altair was down I took the liberty to check the draw on Polaris and it was hovering at 140-180W of usage, so Altair was sucking down the lions share of the power, my guess would be all those old, inefficient PATA disks. Right now fully operational with its new upgrades, Altair is drawing about 95W. I cut the power usage of that box by at least half, approaching one-third. The impact on my electricity bill each month isn’t going to be a shocking as I would like it to be, but wow. All that money I’ve been throwing away for so long on powering something so inefficient.

Right now I’m down slightly on storage, as the drives I removed aren’t quite covered by the single 750GB drive that went in their place, but I have enough headroom to account the immediate future and with the price of storage continually falling its only a matter of time before another deal on 750GB or 1TB drives tempts me enough for me to add some capacity.

Long story short, here are some pictures, try not to make fun of my “rack” too much, it works, it keeps thing cool, though I’m having to keep an eye on the temperatures in the garage, it is starting to get kinda chilly outside and I want to make sure things don’t get cold enough to start having problems with condensation…

Servers – Front View

Servers – Rear View

Altair – Side Panel & Filter

Altair – Inside Shot

Altair – The Power Supply

Altair – Syba 2.5″ Drive Bay Adapter

Altair – The Main Drives

Courtesy of Gus Mueller:

Adobe Reader 9 is out!

I had a long rant typed up, but I just deleted it in favor of simply saying (once again):

I Hate Adobe.

And also that if at any point in the future I am presented with a way to never use anything related to CS3 again, I’ll take it, run, and never look back.