Caught at one hundred and twenty metres per second

Still no solution on the issues I wrote about a few days ago.
Mentions of the problems are surprisingly few and in between; either it's not universal or people just don't notice / are not bothered by it.

Something awry on Gmail this evening... I've been having status messages — you know, the yellow/orangish overlay on top of the page that usually shows when an action has finished — telling me that "the system encountered a problem" for a few hours now while reading my email, intermittently.
Now all of a sudden, I'm dropped in the "old version" of the Gmail interface and there's no longer a choice at the top for the current UI, you know, the one with the funky coloured labels and such; which disappearance leads me to believe that it's not just a client side issue. I'm simply curious now how long it'll take them to fix things.

Update As I finished this post and went back to navigating through Gmail, the new UI is back. That didn't take them long...
Second update ... but the service also wasn't fixed, I almost immediately started getting error status messages again. And now I'm back into the "old" UI. As I'll be off for bed soon, I probably won't find out how long it'll take. Not that I'm that interested.

Yesterday I noticed two particular headlines standing out in the financial news. The oldest, which was actually from tuesday, read that the European Central Bank was again injecting money into the financial markets. The other one was that home confiscations in the US were way up.

I think the ECB is sending a very bad message to financial institutions here, not by intervening in the market in the first place, but by continuing to provide shelter after a couple of weeks: “act however irresponsibly that you wish to, we'll help you out if you get into trouble anyway.”

While they bear a large part of the responsibility by financing the US mortgage crisis in the first place, big institutions will get out largely unharmed in the long run. At the same time real persons — often lured by overly bullish financial news undoubtedly — will get burned, together with some of the smaller lenders who cannot get enough money back in time.

Capitalist protectionism, at its worst.

Last monday I had to order a computer for use as a workstation for a graphic designer. When I called Dell and asked for a specification on a Dimension system, the — overall very helpful and friendly — account manager stated that the Dimension range was discontinued for business customers and available for consumers only. He told me that the new Vostro line was their new SMB offer.

When I pointed out to him that not only was the Dimension still listed on their SMB web pages, but that the Vostro was inattractive because it could not be upgraded beyond 4GB of memory, he was surprised at first and then stated that `a 64 bit OS was needed anyway to be able to use more than 4GB of memory'.
But if I needed more memory, a Precision workstation would be a good alternative. Well, any Precision I could configure on the Dell website would end up costing 1.5 times as much as a similarly configured Dimension. (which means that I had to add a graphics card with higher 3D performance on the Dimension as what was needed, since this computer was meant for 2D graphic design)
At this point, the sales representative tried building a Precision configuration himself to specifications I had provided him with, but with maximum discount he could apply the price still came out over 30% (meaning, over 300 EUR) more than a Dimension to these same specs. At which point he gave in :)

I seriously hope that the sales person was mistakenly saying that the Dimension would go away as a Dell business offer (though that means that some review of internal communications would be in order). While I'm sure the Vostro line has it's merit, these are some points that make it a lousy or at least undesirable option in some cases:

• memory size limited to 4GB
• currently, no quad core processor option — while this may not be very benificial a lot of the time it would improve workloads that can make use of threading; in addition the Q6600 on the Dimension was only about 10 EUR more costly than the dual core E6600
• while it wasn't that much of an issue in this case, the actual lack of an option to configure a better 3D graphics card than the preconfigured card

The way I see it, the Vostro should be a valuable add-on to Dell's SMB offering at the bottom segment. Throwing out the Dimension would leave a hole between Vostro and Precision. And I'm not sure where exactly the Optiplex fits in; it appears to be more along the Vostro looking at specs, but it's price tag is closer to Precision — it's main feature seems to be a higher default support level.

Well, I don't know John Brougher well enough to judge his wisdom, but today I read Slow down the queuing and it was so recognizable. Especially the symptoms of bookmark queuing and tabbed browser sessions.

And, independently, (mainly guided by tips from a number of other "personal improvement" blogs) I had come to the same resolution of the problem. So there must be wisdom at least in his article...

A month or two ago, I installed Etch/amd64 on a HP system which uses the ATI SB400 chipset. It worked great mostly, but sound was choppy from the start.
I decided this week to investigate and quickly discovered that oss emulation on this chipset is giving most people issues. It turns out the solution, for a GNOME desktop, is really simple: remove the libesd0 package and install libesd-alsa0 instead, so that esd does not use OSS emulation.

Which begs the question, could the Debian installation system be made smarter so that systems using ALSA drivers wouldn't use OSS unless for applications that only support the latter?

Today I discovered a very useful and nearly undocumented Openswan configuration parameter, which goes by the name of leftsourceip (and symmetrically rightsourceip). What it does is telling the Linux Openswan VPN gateway what address to send traffic from, which it generates itself, and is destined for the other side of the VPN connection. Apparently there are some caveats when using the KLIPS IPsec stack, but it works great when using NETKEY. Details available in the thread up to and following this message on the Openswan Users mailinglist.

The immediate advantage of using leftsourceip is that you can just reach machines on the far end of the connection, from either gateway where you've set it, without having to specify source interface or address on the internal network.

There's already a patch in the Openswan BTS; hopefully it will be integrated soon.

The picture below is a hardware test setup I ran this morning, with an old and discarded motherboard which has a Pentium III CPU on it running at 733 MHz. Since that's still faster than any other system I own save for the ibook (which is a G3 running at 800 MHz), I wanted to see if it was truely broken as reported, or not. The issue, which I actually witnessed before, was that on initial boot it tended to restart up, to a few dozen times. These restarts could happen from early post BIOS stage up to while logging on. Once it had been powered on for a little while, the restarts would usually go away.



I assembled any missing parts - video card, memory, and an AT case from which I used the reset button as the power switch to the ATX motherboard - and started by running memtest on it. Which ran just fine for nearly half an hour; but I ran memtest before to try and help diagnose the problem and it had run fine then, too.
So I crossed my fingers and tried running a Linux Live CD from it. Unfortunately, after about half a minute the system restarted once again. The only parts remaining from the original system were the motherboard and CPU, power supply and DVD-ROM (but not the IDE cable). With that in mind, the most likely culprits are indeed motherboard or CPU.

Chances of being able to rescue the parts are nearly nil, but I'm still curious about what could be the actual failing part. Are there any thorough hardware tests around, which could be run (preferably) from bootable CD or floppy?

While I did not aim for it, it was a little disappointing to learn that I got soooooo close to hitting #350000.

Not sure that I have enough of it, but I can try anyway. Here's one for the unlucky administrators who have an Exchange server amidst their server farm.
If a windows server running Exchange 2003 logs the following error event in the System log when it is restarted:

Access denied attempting to launch a DCOM Server. The server is:
{9DA0E106-86CE-11D1-8699-00C04FB98036}
The user is SYSTEM/NT AUTHORITY, SID=S-1-5-18.

then one possible cause is that the Microsoft Search service is missing a startup dependency on the Exchange Information Store – which is not obvious from anything in the event message or the surrounding ones. Searching the web does not list anything relevant at first either, you have to check lower ranked results to find the solution listed in the post by user "zeeshan_xt" in this message board thread. Hopefully this post helps it move up a bit.