My experience is based on SUSE SLES 11 SP1/SP2 with a stock kernel, so YMMV if you’re running a newer mainline kernel without all the backports.

I tested on two Supermicro systems. One with an LSI HBA card with 22x 2TB enterprise SATA drives (originally purchased to run OpenSolaris/ZFS). Second has an Adaptec hardware RAID controller with 36x 2TB enterprise SATA drives. Some of the data loss and stability issues I experienced may be attributed to later discovering the “enterprise” drives used in the first system turned out to be less RAID-friendly than the manufacturer claimed, eventually leading to them to replace ALL of my drives with a different model.

Btrfs was a preview in SLES SP1 and is “supported” in SP2 but with major restrictions if you wanted a supported configuration. Support in SP2 requires that you create btrfs filesystems using Yast and live with the limited options it allows. I’m guessing what you can do via Yast is the subset of features they tested enough to be willing to try and support. I tried using Yast to set up btrfs on one of our systems, but found their constraints too limiting given my use case and the organization I’d settled on in the SP1 days.

Read More…

Update I should note I only partially sorted out getting this to actually work. Probably requires more tinkering and may be best to just go get an app that does the lock/unlock for you.

This procedure is roughly based on Lock Your Mac When Your iPhone Is Out of Range. I’d seen this in the past, but never got around to figuring out how to set it up. Since I’ve got an iPhone with good battery life, leaving Bluetooth on isn’t as scary as it was on my old Android phone, so I thought I’d give it a shot.

I’ve gone the extra steps of figuring out how to retrieve your password from Keychain in order to do the unlock. The sample unlock AppleScript in that post suggests storing your Mac account password in plain text in the script (not so great) and offers that you can save your script as “Run-only” to obfuscate it. I tried that for kicks and while the script itself is obfuscated, your plain text password is still there if you just cat the file.

Read More…

Read More…

Yet another time of migration (blog-wise)… TextDrive -> Joyent -> TextDrive 2 My web hosting has been a little up in the air recently (see Slashdot: Joyent Drops Lifetime Account Holders). I paid a few hundred bucks several years back (2005) for “lifetime” web hosting at what I perceived to be a cool up and coming company (read: they claimed to be pushing to support a lot of the flashy new web tech that wasn’t well supported by most shared web hosting providers at the time).

Read More…

My foray into the world of Android phones is finally at an end, and am now the owner of a shiny iPhone 4S. It was an interesting experiment, and there were a few features that I will miss that I haven’t found a way to do on the iPhone, but the Android experience finally got bad enough (and I hit my 2 year contract anniversary) to push for a phone upgrade at work. There were just too many issues with my Droid and Android in general from a usability standpoint to suffer it any further. Issues with the Android ecosystem (at least as I’ve been able to experience it… maybe 4.0 will really start to address some of their problems):

Read More…

I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time, but I’m finally doing it. When I first got into having a website, I’d registered my domain name with GoDaddy based on some recommendations at the time. Since then, I’ve seen a lot of reasons to move away from them, but never quite got around to it. But their support for SOPA has finally pushed me to transfer my domains elsewhere. For now, I’ve moved most of my domains over to Namecheap and the ones I couldn’t over to Name.com. I’m sure GoDaddy doesn’t really give a rip that I’m leaving (since I only had a few domains with them), but their support of SOPA has prompted others to move 100s of domains elsewhere and some big clients to threaten to move 100s to 1000s more if they don’t change their stance on this lousy piece of proposed legislation (e.g., see this Reddit thread.

Read More…

You can track her progress at: acgottlieb.blogspot.com

Surprise! We’d been up to Vanderbilt for our last clinic visit before the planned c-section and had just finished our tour of L&D; and were walking to the car to head home when baby Adelaide must’ve decided she liked the place so much she wanted to stay. Amanda’s water broke and so we went right back in and now baby Addy’s here! She was born @ 13:01 on the 17th and weighed in at a healthy 6 lbs 11 oz at 19 1/w inches.

Read More…

So this upcoming week is the big annual supercomputing convention, SC10, down in New Orleans. Since I’m skipping out (anxiously waiting for the arrival of Little Miss Sunshine), I’ve got time to actually try and read through the slew of new product announcements and news coverage. So today I saw this quote on twitter from hpc_guru and just had to share:

“Cost of the building next generation of supercomputers is not the problem. The cost of running the machines is what concerns engineers.”

Read More…

To celebrate, here’s some awesomeness from Mobile, AL: Leprechaun in Mobile, Alabama