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One of my coworkers recently bought a car and wanted to get some photos of the car so he asked me to take some pic…little did he know that I wasn’t taking them with a point and shoot 
Though this was done over my lunch break and the shoot took like 10 minutes there weren’t much pics that I took of the car but these are my favorites:
I had to blur the license plate for privacy though I’m not too happy about the blur because it messes up the pic…in my opinion.
Since I took my camera to work I also took a bit of time to take a couple of shots:
This one was taken through the glass of my cubicle thus the reflection you see
My collection of Fanta cans…well not really a collection just too lazy to take them to the recycling bin though I eventually do so
-LM
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On Wednesday morning I woke up to find that it was raining outside which just makes you want to stay in bed and go back to sleep but unfortunately that can’t be done every time. Because of a tropical storm, I believe, that is currently hitting Nicaragua we are getting some rain down here in Costa Rica and it rained for two days straight…today I woke up to see that there are clear blue skies and it was sunny outside.
I took the photo above while waiting for the bus on Wednesday at around 7pm. I’ve been recently doing quite a bit of photography with my cellphone though mostly in black and white and I’m really loving the shots that I’ve gotten with the cellphone camera. They have not been retouched on Photoshop or anything just resized and watermarked 
Here are my favorites:
Yesterday my cellphone had quite a day. On my way to work I went to get my phone to see what time it was since my watch decided that it didn’t want to move any further and the phone decided to fall into a puddle…the only puddle on the sidewalk it would fit and it has to fall there. I quickly pick up the phone and check to see if it still works but I saw that it said inactive SIM prior to turning off.
I dry the phone and also the water that went inside the phone which luckily didn’t touch the battery and then tried to power it on…the phone was working but a row of keys were lit all the time and also the LEDs on the back of the phone but it was working.
When I finally reach my desk I start trying to fix the phone and decide to do a Master Reset which resolved the issue with the lights and the fact that I was unable to get the phone recognized by the computer.
Before lunch I decided to do a firmware upgrade, since I had done a master reset earlier, so I proceed with the firmware upgrade. The firmware was downloaded successfully and after 4% that was uploaded to the phone the computer decides to lock up which caused me to panic. I took off the battery and attempted to power on the phone, after inserting the battery again of course, and it wouldn’t power up. Before calling it a day with the phone I attempted to do a firmware upgrade again and to my surprise the phone was still being recognized by the software and this time the upgrade went well and the phone is still alive.
The photo above and the one below were shot when I got back home.
-LM
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So I’m trying to set up my home network to have a lot of gadgetry and network appliances, such as Zenoss, so I’ve been busy trying to get this to work.
First came the FreeNAS which went pretty smoothly and I’m quite happy with that application and the features it offers. I recently started to play with the iSCSI functionality. I’m actually still looking for something out there that will emulate a tape device over iSCSI and that is open source so if you have any ideas on this please let me know.
I had previously seen Zenoss on Hak5, which is a podcast/vidcast that I often watch, and was interested in this project. I took irken, the Sun Netra T1, and installed it on this machine but ran into some trouble, ran a command by mistake and ended up reinstalling Debian on it. I lost count after the third reinstall of Zenoss but didn’t give up and the issue I got after almost getting everything up and running was that python decided to go haywire and started to use up all the processor time. I have finally been able to get it to a point where it works and it even gets quite a lot of information from the devices in the network. I just need to finish fixing some glitches and also configure the snmpd daemon in Linux and snmp service in Windows.
The number one problem I have right now is that SNMP doesn’t always report everything that I want it to report though it does report a lot more now than it did when I first got it installed. For FreeNAS it doesn’t show the mounted partitions, for the Windows machine it says that the processor is Intel and the printer doesn’t show anything other than the standard device information. SNMP is a new thing for me and everywhere I look it’s so lacking information that it still doesn’t explain the information enough so that I can successfully set everything up. I might even look into setting up some ssh config so that Zenoss can get the necessary information from the hosts without going through SNMP.
The other problem which I think I know how to resolve but can’t remember where to change the setting is that gen, the file server, shows up as being down because it doesn’t seem to respond to pings in time and this might be due to that iSCSI that I have setup…I might have to enable that other interface on that machine after all. I ran a ping command through Zenoss and it shows that the server is responding to ping but the first response takes 4.5 ms which I believe is above the threshold that this appliance has configured if only I remembered where to change this setting…
Once I get all devices up and running without any events being generated that are unnecessary I will proceed to get as much data monitored as possible, I will then proceed to add my mother’s PC and my dad’s laptop to the mix and finally set up the e-mail system so that it will send me e-mails when something goes down though the laptop might actually not go into the mix for obvious reasons I don’t want to get 200 messages in the morning saying that the device with the name blue doesn’t respond to pings.
-LM
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I went to monitor the process of the file copy from the second hard drive to the USB attached hard drive to see how much longer it would take and I simply had it with waiting for the copy to complete so I just went and copied what was ultimately necessary and didn’t backup everything else…mostly because they had previously been backed up.
After doing that I recabled the hard drives and booted up FreeNAS so that I could add those extra hard drives to the mix and have my file server back up and running. In order to restore the data I decided to do it over the network as it would be way faster than connecting to the USB 1.0, yes it’s a 1.0 and I confirmed it with the dmesg output that FreeNAS attaches to the e-mail, and copying all the files back. I hooked up the hard drive to my Windows box at which point I realized that I had formated the hard drive using ext2 file system and not NTFS or FAT32, no that FAT32 would have worked anyways, so I just went ahead and installed the drivers on Windows so that it could read this drive’s partition correctly. Proceeded to copy some of the files over back to the server and it took around 50 minutes to complete…damn I should have done the backup this way
This file server doesn’t just store my files it also stores my dad’s files and soon it will also store my mom’s files so I had to set it up in a way that only my user would have access to my files and not everyone else so I looked around for the setting and it appears that FreeNAS doesn’t have an option that will do this for you so I went to the next best thing and set the permissions on the directory but first I created a group for myself. After creating a group for myself I then proceeded to run a chown on my directory so that it belonged to my group and not the general family group. Next I wanted to protect the user home directories and set the permissions to only allow the user and group to have read and write access to the directories and others wouldn’t even be able to see the contents. I left the group as being able to read and write because sometimes my parents will ask me to move some files to their directories so I needed to have access to their directories.
To change the permissions on the directories you need to go into the console tool in the advanced menu and run the commands from there since connecting via SSH will only allow you to access your user account and doesn’t have the option to become root and I guess this is something that you’d want for security reasons.
I’m very satisfied with FreeNAS at this point and would recommend it to anyone that wants to set up a File Server. 
-LM
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I started backing up the files on that file server this past Monday evening…five days later…well it’s still backing up but we’ve made progress since last night I started to backup the second hard drive and hopefully it’s done by tomorrow.
And why does it take so long to back up? Well when I started the backup of the second hard drive I added the option to the cp command to show a “progress bar” if the copy operation is going to take too long…which we know is the case and I didn’t know this option actually existed. Well I forgot what the option was but will sure look for it and post it later on
There is no actual progress bar shown but it does show the bandwidth, the percentage copied and the ETA. I didn’t sit for an hour to watch the progress but I did notice that the peak was a bit higher than 1 meg and then it slowed down to less than 1 meg and add the fact that you are filling up a buffer which is then written to the hard drive, or so I believe, it just slows down everything there. I failed to notice that the USB ports are version 1.1 and not 2.0…sigh
So I began my next project…installing Zenoss. This is a tool that is used by network and system administrators to monitor multiple machines and devices that are connected on the network. Last night I got it installed on Irken, one of the two Sun Netra T1 servers that I have, and it runs pretty good. I also checked to see which devices on my network had SNMP running and get them monitored by Zenoss.
The hardest part was getting the SNMP Daemon running on Irken since the documentation on the Zenoss site wasn’t detailed enough. I gave up after a couple of minutes of trying to get it running with the snmpconf and I find this tool quite complicated. I googled and found a better guide that actually got it up and working by editing the actual configuration file.
Right now the Linksys WRT54G, which is running the DD-WRT firmware, and the HP printer are successfully added to the Zenoss application. I attempted to add my Linux desktop but that didn’t go so well since I was unable to get the SNMP running so that it can report the information…still working on this. I’ll attempt to get the Windows desktop running and monitored through Zenoss. The Linux machines in the network might not end up using the SNMP service but send the information over SSH to Irken but I won’t give up easily.
After getting Zenoss deployed and working correctly I will start to work on getting the Linksys WRT54G to act as the network firewall so that I can get back Zion, the other Sun Netra T1 server, and use it to set up that VPN that I want. I had upgraded the router to the VPN version of the DD-WRT software but I was reading about it and appears that I could run into bricking my router because of the file being too long and not being able to fit in the memory. I’ve thought about virtualization but currently only my Windows machine is multi-core and since this isn’t a machine that will always be at home I don’t want to start adding services to it that when I move this machine will become unavailable. Sure I could use any of my single-core machines to do virtualization but I’d want something with a bit more performance…that’s my point of view and I’m sticking to it.
-LM
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I was finally able to get a 500GB hard drive nearing the end of the day today which basically means that I won’t be able to finish with the file server today. I recabled the hard drives that are currently there so I would only access the two storage hard drives and not touch the hard drive that has the FreeNAS installed and I also hooked up the 500GB hard drive to the server.
I was able to get a 500GB Seagate SATA hard drive but since that server doesn’t support SATA I had to also get an external enclosure that would convert from SATA to USB so that I can hook it up to that server. I used the SysRescCD to boot up that box and mount the three hard drives to copy all data from the storage hard drives over to the 500GB HD.
Formatting the new hard drive took like forever to do and it now has an ext3 partition. I’m copying all the data over to that drive as I’m writing this and it seems that it’s going to happen all through the night. If copy goes without a glitch, even if it takes all day tomorrow, I will be hooking everything back the way it was and formatting the storage hard drives in that server to copy all the data back again to those hard drives.
After this I’ll be looking into using that 500GB HD as my backup solution and possibly moving it offsite to have a backup kept offsite. In case this were to be the scenario then the hard drive would be encrypted using truecrypt and data stored on it encrypted. Either that or I’ll be using it to store my photographs…
-LM
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