5 February 2015

Home

I finally got curtain brackets mounted in the family room, though no curtains are hung yet. Last night my drill battery died, and I ended up with a drill bit stuck in the wall; but now it’s out, anchors in, and brackets hung. Tonight, curtains.

Tech

My piratebox still won’t install the software from the usb stick, claiming that the storage device is full. Since there’s plenty of space left on the usb stick, I can only assume it’s talking about the internal storage. Maybe I flashed it incorrectly? Or maybe a previous failed install has left it without some space it exepcts to have? Or maybe I need to do some kind of reset?

In any case, I was able to telnet in, re-flashed the firmware manually, hit the reset button for good measure, and then tried installing again from install_piratebox.zip. This time it worked, and I have a “PirateBox” ssid once again following me around. I must admit, though: I’m a bit disappointed by the “new, responsive” layout. I think it’s really only the media browser that has improved.

I don’t know that I’m going to do anything about it today, but I’d really like to install OpenProject on civilfritz. I think it would help Andi and me work together to get projects done at home.

CU

We had a meeting with Peak and IBM storage about a possible replacement for the existing home and projects storage N-series system. They are proposing a black-box GPFS system “IBM StoreWise v7000 Unified” which I should look into further. They have also mentioned ESS nee GSS (hopefully still a grey-box solution), though they didn’t have many details on what that would look like. They weren’t even sure if it’s running Linux or AIX. (I’m hoping that their first instinct was wrong, and that it’s Linux on Power.)

We have a talk scheduled about upgrading the PetaLibrary. I specifically am of the opinion that we should be using the PetaLibrary to house home and projects. The way I see it, we should have two independent filesets, /pl/home/ and /pl/projects/, and just NFS export and snapshot each of them. We could even still have each home and project directory be a dependent fileset underneath, if we want.

I’m going to keep working on the user guide today. Hopefully I’ll have a batch queueing / slurm guide to give to Aaron by tomorrow.

I also need to work on a local passwords pam config to tick off the last of my performance plan post-its.

Before I do anything, though, I should look through org-mode and calendar to see what else I might be forgetting.