Ronald Prettyman

Same frame rate, same source, same audio rate. different bit rate.
One is 1500megs one is 700megs
Can you tell the difference?

Answers in the comments

I keep getting sucked into KDE 4. It just doesn’t seem to want to run stable on any of my hardware. I’m sure some people out their having it running great. But I haven’t had much luck. I haven’t tried to or even looked up how to optimize it cause I usually don’t care that much about the gui. I just find it interesting that distributions are incorporating it so early.  But as a gui interface, an alternative gui interface and considering how hard Nokia is trying to push the latest QT I can understand the logic.

But imagine if Samba 4 was released today, because they wanted to adopt it. That would quickly become very frustrating. I have been eagerly waiting for a production ready release for quiete awhile. Just for the oppurtunity to even considering eliminating all those active directory servers or at least cutting them down. I honestly believe Samba 4 could be whats needed to finally bring Linux onto the mainstream desktop. I can’t say its entirely a good thing. But I could see it happening and its exciting considering how long I’ve spent convencing friends and family to switch. Or at least considering their opions. At least it give microsoft a run for their money. But if Samba 4 took off and began mass adoption and migration. The implication would be massive. Once the server end was moved to linux in the domain controller sector, it wouldn’t be longer before organization considered moving their workstations too.

Now when you think about it, this could be what Oracle has in mind. Sun’s offerings make up a good chunk of the average linux distribution. If Oracle controlled them and linux took off on the desktop, Oracle would be in a very similar situation to where Microsoft is today. And knowing what I know about their history I think their is a very good chance, they may be planning to try and bring linux into the main stream and have their name on it. Hopefully better then Corels Walmart attempt.

Ok so you have a zfs volume in Opensolaris and you want it in Linux. So theirs no easy way to say this, but its not as easy as zfs import -a

You have to convert it to a lower version and theirs no easy way to do that.

Here is how I did it. I just don’t like how slow OpenSolaris is on x86 hardware so I’m moving my fileserver back to linux but I still want ZFS. I did some test in linux and it works great, better then it does in BSD which is surprising.

The best way to do this, is to export to the volume created in linux then export it to file from linux then import it into the newly created verision in linux.

The linux version doesn’t do well with internal send/receive. External send to internal receive. Or sending or receving to or from files <> seems to work well but its doesn’t want to duplicate pool to pool locally. I tested it with small and large pools and the two step process seems to work best. I don’t see this being fixed in the future as their doesn’t seem to be development at the moment.

I believe their is a good chance that oracle might pick up zfs and make it more compatible with Linux, either by relicensing it or something along thoses lines. They seem to have a vested interested in linux and adding ZFS support to their Redhat clone might help to give them an advantage. If I was oracle I would definately be looking at ZFS closely as well as other solaris feature. Some features of solaris would be nice to have in Linux. Such as zfs, dtrace, svc(SMF). I personally belive that the linux kernel is a supperior kernel in function, but wish it had a more open licensing like bsd. Their is a great deal more compatible with bsd at least from a legal standpoint.

I’ll update this tomorrow, with step by step instructions. With possible alternatives that should work according to ZFS specifications, but just didn’t in my setup, probably due mostly to the stablility of the still fairly young linux port of ZFS. Also note that in my experience thus far I have not had any luck running iostat while their is any activity on a zfs partition. I am curious to see if these compatibilites transfer to FreeBSD and I have a pretty good feeling they will as I belive this the version are the same and FreeBSD might even be a later version in the current build (13 I believe). Freebsd seems to have a higher likely hood of stability and has more development going on with ZFS probably due to the fack that it is being incorporated into the kernel and Solaris and BSD have more in common then Linux and Solaris.

EDIT: ZFS is still not usable on Linux. Hopefully this will change in the future. Maybe a change of licenses…

This also works for installing any plugin on any system or codec(though codec goes in gstreamer or xmms2 depending on the system its also very similar to how you’d do it on linux or bsd).
Ok, first download the plugin from Adobe.
Save it, gunzip2 it, untar it and your get libflash….so
copy it to
/usr/lib/firefox/plugins and restart firefox
You now have flash. Congrats.
Same thing with the mp3 libmp3….so except your wnat to put it in
/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.1/

Conclusion: Mysql Works better on Solaris Sparc then OpenSolaris x86. I’m going to rerun that test one of these days with Solaris 10 on x86 hardware and see if I still get such strange  results on amp benchmarks.

I’m about to test out opensolaris on one of my sparc servers. But before I begin I’m backing up all my data. I moved most of it though conventional methods but decided to try out zfs dump.

I just sent an entire filesystem over the network from one machine to the other with one command.

sudo zfs send rpool/www@current | ssh ronald@pink.rp.lan "pfexec /usr/sbin/zfs receive music/www"
I created a snapshot of my www folder and sent it over the network to my opensolaris server. From sparc to x86 in a single command. And now its replicated and safe.

I just finished modding my router. It was over heating and rather then get a better one just soldered a fan to the power intake. It works pretty good, keeping it kewl. I have it as an exhaust and it has ventilation on the bottom for intake. Should lower the temperature and help it run more stable seems to act up when it gets too hot.

Update: Had it up for a couple hours now, and its still cold to the touch, the air coming out of the exhaust fan is also fairly cool. So I would take this as a mix. This device needs better exhaust it gets hot fast, especially when you have 6 or 7 connections coming though it.

UPDATE: Purchased a new modem since comcast has upgraded their infrastructure in the area and wanted to take advantage of it. new speeds

For all you Windows Experts, theirs something thats been said which is true of unix as well. 

Before I take this discussion further why not just lay out the pecking order of O/S’s

1. UNIX
2. BSD
3. Linux
4. Windows
5. Mac

So the explanation. Their are two exceptions, at the beginning and at the end. But, Linux users usually know windows better then windows users, bsd users usually know linux better then linux users. UNIX users know their too damn good to worry about the rest, and Mac people think their too good, but really their just too busy stairing at pretty pictures to knowtice their brain cells melting away.

Whats that Mac is UNIX, well yes Apple did pay for the Unix licensing bla bla bla. Go f{CENSORED) shove this i{censored} up you {CENSORED}

Mac sucks, unless you happen to have an insatiable desire to be controlled by something beautiful. You don’t run a mac, a mac runs you.

But anyway before I start smoking from the ears in disgust. I’ll elaborate on why it is that Linux is better then Windows. Now let me just say, how much do you love having to restart your system, After EVERYTHING, anything. Its so annoying, Windows GUI is the from the kernel level. Their is no layering. Their GUI, then GUI, GUI. Thats it. Now I take that back, the kernel isn’t a gui, but their is no User interface outside the gui in a modern windows system. If you install Windows Server with out the gui, it loads windows with a terminal window. WTF.

But really what makes Linux so much better is this. With the exception of a Kernel update you never have to restart to install updates, you could install upgrade versions and not have to restart. Great example is debian 4 to debian 5. This was a huge upgrade. I had a debian system at work. apt-get dist-upgrade. DONE. Boom, new version. Now this was a workstation not a server so its much a server would have more to consider before doing this, but on a workstation, if app-x breaks from the upgrade, upgrade app-x. Not as simple on a server cause your software might depend on something app-x specific and require a rewrite before upgrading, but thats what you hired system admins for. To keep the system secure and stable with out breaking app-x.

I have a horrible time staying on subject on this blog. But thats why its mine. See the about section for more details.

The only advantage I will give to windows is NTFS. I kinda like NTFS you don’t have to unmount to do a check. Well thats all their getting on that. And their system is really stable considering the large amount of hardware and software support not to mention backwards compatibility. For a system that just simply works windows xp is great. But wait thats right, Microsoft decided to abandon XP users and drop their support of XP, not that they didn’t decide that a long time ago. And not that this discision has brought wonderful new minds into the Linux community but still.

I honestly don’t have anything against Microsoft. Competition is good. And if everyone ran linux, well I might have to run virus scan, and pay more attention to security updates. But they don’t and the big exploit market in linux is on the server side.

Not to mention how hard it would be to find any viable information about Linux. Ever try looking for technical information on windows with the internet, its not nearly as easy as linux, so much garbage on the windows side, too many hands in the pot. Too many people trying to make a dishonest buck. KNOCK on wood, linux hasn’t had the same plague of vagrant programmers filling the internet with garbage. Probably because the user base of Linux is above and beyound in intellgence and computer understanding that any attempt at propigating garbage just doesn’t get off the ground.

I  upgraded my main system to OpenSuse 11.1 well more a switch then an upgrade. I was done playing with Ubuntu. I had installed it to help my cousin get his system setup, I don’t know the gui that well and had to refresh to walk him though some of the basics. But personally not a huge fan of Ubuntu for me, its great for beginners but for a veteran it can quickly become annoying, it has its own way of doing things, that can be nice if you like the Ubuntu way, but I’m not a fan of it.

Not that OpenSuse doesn’t have its fair share of OpenSuse specific ways, it doesn’t assume your completely retarded, which can get annoying in Ubuntu, when you start changing things it doesn’t want you to change, its great if you don’t know how to compile things for yourself or don’t have version requirements. I mean yes on paper it sounds great, but too many of their packages just don’t work. And I’d rather just compile what I want and install from the reposititories what I want. Don’t get me wrong I’m not a compile junky, I hate gentoo, its way to slow. I mean sure if you don’t change things or install updates its fast once its setup. But yeah, I don’t like compiling everything, just certain applications and libaries.

But anyway,  I switched to OpenSuSe and I’m pretty happy with it, not as simple as Ubuntu, but still pretty easy to just get stuff done and all.