gentoo on a production server

task: find an operating system as powerful as gentoo, while makign sure you will never be out of buissnes because your sys admin is trying to "pimp your ride" and rendering the system unusable

proposed solution: use gentoo. *cough* simple isnt it? havoc arises mainly when you becoem lazy and stop keeping your system reasonably in sync with the gentoo project, updating once a week is good, ever two weeks is good, but after 3 weeks motorbiking in the middle of nowwhere you might coem home and find out that you are wwwaaaayyyyyy behind.
automating the task of updating is a bad idea, sometimes stuff breaks, its quite rare these days but can happens, usually because you have been lazy for a while. sometimes human cleverness is needed to update a package, you have to read and understand a little note attached to the update. this can only be done by doing updates once in a while. attachign little post it notes to screens or automatic email reminders or something along these lines, find a babysitter when you go on holiday for long times without internet, having your own server is a 24/7 task, if you cant do it you have to pay ppl to do it for you.
so this part of the problem is "solved". how do we make sure we can break the system and still be back up again within minutes? we mirror the root partition during everyday operation and keep our data on a different partition, mirroring it makes no sense, data has to be backed up using a different strategy, before we update soemthign that might brake we flick a magic switch and stop mirroring, give it a go, if somethign breaks we put our foot on the break and reboot booting the backup system, either we flick the magic "sync" switch and wait that what was our A system gets restored from our B system or we keep it broken chroot() into it and try and fix it, if confident that its all good again, reboot and see what happens(preferabbly in the middle of the nite) if its doesnt work we reboot and go back to the B machine, continue this for as long as you feel like doing it. this system gives you another neat advantage, look:
machine A is live at the moment, serving happily but you have been lazy and fidn that you can not easily update it to the most current software for what ever reason, you flick the magic "sync" switch, clean the root partition of the B machine and start isntalling a brandnew clean system, all set? reboot, new system comes up nicely everybody feels good, old A mchina becomes the B machine(tho this A and B logic doesnt really make any sense, the machiens are equal and there shouldnt be any reason to refer to one as A and the other as B, A is always the one thats serving or has just failed, if we reboot without failing the machien we booted into becomes the A machine.)

naturally all thsi doesnt provide you with a possibility to test your changes before you make them to fidn out if they will brake or not but thats not the aim of all this, buy a nother machien and do your tests there if you want something like this

open issues: how do we implement a mirroring strategy like this? we need a magic "sync" switch otherwise it wont work, quick look at the XEN documentation didnt yield a obvious way of doing it, does the linux kernel have somethign like this? can LVM do it for us? do we have to retreat to a hourly rsync?

12343 - 60seks

we all know what this means rite?

flickr update [edited]

new pictures taken with my snazzy k750i to be found here. dont get scared by them...,]]

tim
ps: have a look at this blog, by an english man who went to NY. oh and yes he seems to like it, find his guide to "pulling", this is a wise guy

async xmlrpc in python?

have been looking into the xmlrpc module in python and was wondering how difficult it would be to use it to buidl a async xmlrpc client.
reason for this? well ive been playing with a socket server for flash(send evil xml \0 byte seperated, greatings to all C coders) and would like to have an easy way to use data from inside zope, this elaves you with two alternatives:
- write a ZODB client
- use xmlrpc to cal zope objects
using a ZODB client seems like the "proper" way of doing this but how much work is it? zope stuff has the slight disadvantage of being quite complex, due to its power that is i believe. this makes it somewhat of a pain to use in a quick proof-of-concept hack, you have to learn before you can go and hack..,]]
so i wonder how much work would it be to make a async version of xmlrpclib? we could use the encoding/decoding features of it so we dont have to bother about the marshalling. it seem pretty straight forward to do. when you call a remote object we marshall the variables et al, stick it in a buffer, open a socket to the server, write our buffer(in a async way), read the repsonse into a buffer(asyncig), we know when we reach the end of the response(length header? its http afterall), close down the socket, unmarshall response, call the callback, c'est bonne? this makes me wonder why has noone done it? does twisted provide soemthing liek this?

oh and we could hide it in a threadpool, but this would be cheatign right?,]]

ahrg

ahrg! i hate the editor for this blog system, all this fancy javascript messes up my firefox. it replaces the cursor with a funny one so you cnat click anythign anywhere, only way out is to kill firefox...
wanted to post about vienna and plone, who is going to sponsor a trip and two tickets for me and garrit? going to the conference would be great,]]
on another note, should I learn C or java? with jython around i can produce java bytecode without having to write nasty java but then "no one" can read python and you would have to convicne your boss of introducint a nother dependancy...humm...learning C would be usefull sometimes, move speed critical stuff out of python into C, but then C is ugly as hell, not only in terms of syntax but also concept wise(what is the proper english phrase for this?)..it doesnt know anything about objects...and building dictionaries and stuff liek that involves typedef stuff, its not made for lazy ppl like me, i should be able to employ a C coder..,]] oh and there is pyrex maybe a easy way into C..and uni is goign to make me learn C next semester, ahhrg!
and now i forgot what else i wanted to post about...nevermind of to cobme again thsi weekend, see folks from germany

IDL, yacc, bison, compiler, flex

when i finish my documentation and get it reviewed i can start a new more fun task. porting a IDL compiler that is made using lex and yacc from solaris to linux. shouldnt be that hard, if the student that wrote it wasnt too lazy and wrote awful c code...does mean i have to learn some more C ..bbrrrr....just wondering what ppl use these days when building compilers, lex&yacc are well old, has there been any advance in the field of compiler creation? would expect that there are new tecniques and methods...*wonders*

c is ugly!!!int long blah; how is that more clear then blah = 3,never mind..

tim

red arrows, re-enacting, combe

been in combe, oxfordshire all weekend, well saturday& sunday. we went to blenheim palace and watched some ppl re enacting a battle for a bridge, german SS trying to get over it, US para troopers in the frontline, english soldiers providing "Backup"...yeah thats what americans are good for....a spitfire came to rescue everone, very impressive to see a plane so close, shame that flight shows arent legal anymore in germany. started to rain and cas had to go back to catch her flight so we missed the red arrows and lots of other planes, coudl see quite a few from the garden tho.
will try and find a plane display thingy in/near manchester, shoudl take soph afterall she was with the aircadets for a while and knows how a jet enginge works and now she also knows how a motorcycle engine works. oh and also she can destinquish between boy racer 2 strokes and real bikes i.e. 4 strokes..yeah!
dont know if i liek the idea of re enacting, certainly the commentator guy was crazy. "you will never be fogotten blah blubb blah" about veterans. dotn want to be dis repectful but well...ppl die..ppl are forgotten this is how it goes, there are lots of heroes in this world we dont need to keep remembering WW2 veterans more then well other important ppl....obviously they did do soemthign quite important but still...well....they were normal ppl so the "normal" war crimes and stuff will have happened. no way they didnt rape girls and i would bet quite a substantial(not a sh*t load) amount of money that there was a fair amount of torture happening.......nevermind....

living in the coutnryside is nice..its pretty there...bristol is pretty...uploaded some pictures taken on the clifton downs, want a BBQ and a bunch of friends to go and sit in the sun and all that...a crate of grolsch would be nice too.

my bike crossed the 34000km mark on the way to combe, bristol <-> combe is about 130km, no other itnrestign stats..petrol price 91.9p per litre

laundry, no not money, clothes

watching washing machines wash is fascinating, i udnerstand babies and madmen...watchign dryers is more fun tho!

pizza is nearly ready
say hello to bob the squirrle

*cough* test 2,3,4 ?

anyone out there?
lots has happened, dunno why i didnt blog anymore...but now im forced to, new solitär highscores comming in from germany,]]. Problem is I cant find it in my icq log so we will have to wait for garrit to be bored enough to play solitär again.
what happened between now and then(last entry)?

• physics exams
• new, fancy mobile
• privacy issues with google?
  
• a summer in france
• my little bike went over 3000km, all the way to bristol
• started work at scisys
• want to build a webmail client that uses lables(yeah thats gmail i know)
• solitär: 15232 punkte - 48sekunden, garrit found it
• yes, got distracted looking for a picture of my bike found this

will got check laundry now and think about what to take to oxford(well actually its combe) tmz, having pizza for tea today, had curry yesterday, no b&j's left,((, someone should write something to connect a blog to flickr to google maps, watched frank play with google earth thingy in the office yesterday and was well impressed, sometime i do need a windows machine at home, someone remind me to acquire a thing that can hold all the oil left in my bike so i can change it, someone remind me that i have to change the oil in my bike!!, and buy chain lube, where is the power cable to my external harddisk?, hope its in combe not germany, actually a questioncomma would be quite handy soph, who has the patent on that again?, uuhmm...yes...tim has to go check laundry now!

till soon