Life with Technology – The Saga Continues

The constant rolling of technology continues at our home. Its been relatively uneventful so I haven’t posted every detail. In fact, I’ve forgotten (and am too lazy to look back) the last time I posted about a certain piece of hardware or software. So in this post I’ll just skip over the history and jump to right where things are at today.

We are using iPhone 6s and 6s+ currently along with iPad Air 2 and Pro 9.7. Late 2012 MacBook Pro, late 2014 Mac Mini, and mid 2012 Mac Pro. All running the latest iOS and macOS Sierra. Nothing particularly eventful, just the normal minor struggles with less than stellar software. It is what it is and there is really nothing better out there.

I still have the 2009 Mac Pro (flashed to 2010). The power supply has been going for a year or more. Doesn’t reliably come out of sleep but can always be coaxed into turning on. In order to sell it I would have to replace (or repair) the power supply which, at this point, would cost half of what I could sell it for.

I got rid of the SuperMicro servers last fall and replaced with a pair of used Dell R710 II. I have a love/hate relationship with x86/x64 things but these are pretty good. Definitely better than the SuperMicro crap. For being such a commodity product these days, there really isn’t a whole lot of choice – either Dell or HP. The server is running Solaris 11.3 and a similar mix of services as before.

Our ISP finally dropped the ax and we could no longer host a SMTP server in our home. I’m now using a small virtual server at cloudsigma.com running FreeBSD for email. Using namecheap.com for domain registrar (like it better than Godaddy). All in all pretty good setup and I will be moving our cloud backups to it eventually. Yes, running a public email server can be a security nightmare. I’ve configured ours to only receive email from our known forwarders for our domains. You may wonder why I don’t just rely on Google or Apple to host our email. I steer clear of Google as much as possible as I don’t like being monetized.

OSX Serial Number in VirtualBox

VirtualBox does not by default make a serial number available to OS X guests. Of course OS X runs just fine inside VirtualBox running on a Mac even in that case. But due to the serial number being “0” the App Store and Server applications will not work.

The solution is to determine the serial number of the real Mac by opening About This Mac or running System Information. It is an alphanumeric string. On my Mac Pro 5,1 it begins with a letter and is 11 characters long.

In Terminal run the following command substituting the name of your VirtualBox virtual machine and your serial number (all one line):

VBoxManage setextradata “<your-vm-name>” VBoxInternal/Devices/efi/0/Config/DmiSystemSerial “<your-serial-number>“

Starting up the machine after this change will then present a serial number that matches the base system and applications will function correctly.

This was tested on a Mac Pro 5,1 running 10.10.5 with VirtualBox 5.0.14. The guest was 10.11.3.

ZFS and Samsung SSD Scrub Errors

I installed Solaris 11.3 on a mirrored pair of 256GB Samsung 850 Pro SSDs. A mirrored pair of 512GB Samsung 850 Pro SSDs are used for user storage. Top-rated SSDs.

Imagine my surprise when scrubs almost immediately started faulting due to too many checksum (cksum) errors. Clearing the errors and running scrub over and over showed that all 4 drives were having lots of errors.

All 4 drives have the latest firmware. ZFS cksum errors on … nails the cause. Apparently Samsung has a bug with 512 sector sizes (both EVO & Pro and previous series (for example 840)). Sigh. ZFS and Advanced Format disks is excellent.

Unfortunately, changing to 4K sectors requires recreating the pool. (Use zfs send (with -R) and zfs receive to backup the pool and later restore it.)

The following line needed to be added to /kernel/drv/sd.conf followed by a reboot:

sd-config-list = “ATA     Samsung SSD 850 “, “physical-block-size:4096”;

Any pools created on a Samsung 850 after the reboot will have a 4K sector size. After doing this my 512GB pair holding upool scrubs clean.

This is where the workaround ends. Solaris (or more accurately BIOS) doesn’t support 4K sector sizes for root pool on BIOS-based systems.

Thanks Samsung. Think about this for a moment. All those systems out there running Samsung SSDs in 512 mode are (without ZFS) silently corrupting data! (Combined with the scandal of firmware updates bricking drives I have to wonder if Samsung is worthy of the rating.) Kudos again to the ZFS creators.

What to do now? For starters I’ve changed my scrub cron entry to run every night instead of once a week. I will contemplate the additional cost of buying a pair of 240GB SanDisk Extreme Pro to replace my rpool drives.

Update:

I decided not to spend the time reinstalling or trying to shrink (ugly manually copying) rpool to fit on the SanDisk. Instead I got a pair of Crucial MX100 256GB so that I could easily migrate (made one the 3rd mirror, detached one of the Samsungs, added the second Crucial as yet another 3rd mirror, and then detached the last Samsung). Haven’t seen a single checksum error since. To top it off, my simple speed testing reveals that the Crucial mirror is ~2X as fast as the other Samsung 850 Pro 512GB mirror (running with 4K sectors)! I may never buy another Samsung SSD again.

 

 

Solaris 11.3 Home Server

It was that time again. Time to tweak the old home server. Since the last reinstall back in the fall of 2013 I have done nothing other than a 11.2 upgrade about a year ago. I didn’t comment about it because it was a non-event – just push go 🙂 I could have done the same this time but I wanted to switch to SSD storage for speed. So I used this “opportunity” to make some other changes. Experience has taught me that whenever I hear that word I should expect things to take longer. It did.

I’ve been using a 192.168.7.x network forever. Over time it had become a bit of a mess. So the first opportunity was to transition to a 10.0.x.x network. Even my house has too many devices to make all the changes in a day and neither I, nor my small family, wanted to be without a working setup. My “router” is a NetGear R7000 which doesn’t support more than two (WAN & LAN) networks. Fortunately my multiple NetGear GS108T (V1) switches support VLANs. I bought a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X – a great device for only $60. Initially I have it routing between the two internal networks but not external.

I installed the software on the  nearly identical spare server moving services incrementally over a few days. The setup is very similar to the previous system except that I decided to move all our Apple Calendars, Reminders, and Contacts to iCloud. The new setup doesn’t have the calendar zone. While I am still concerned about the privacy of such data I just didn’t want to spend the time setting up my own services using Postgres, PHP, and Davical. Apple devices require additional quirky configuration.

I initially setup the backup zone using the latest versions of duplicity and duply. duply is a bash script and it is Linux-centric. In the past I had to tweak it to work on Solaris. With the current release there were too many new things that needed fixing so I abandoned that version and went back to what I had been using.

I’ll avoid a rant about the state of portability in 2016.

One problem with the SSDs remain and will be the subject of my next post.

So was it worth it? Absolutely. The speed improvements are impressive. Boot time is better and NFS clients are snappier.

 

OS X Yosemite – NFS Homes

All our machines have been running Yosemite for a couple of months now. Meh. Even 10.10.3 is still shaky with WiFi on our MacBookPro. Overall my opinion is it isn’t significantly worse or significantly better than Mavericks.

After many years of suffering with home directories on a NFS server I finally gave up, at least partially. The simple fact is that Apple can’t seem to write software that behaves with ~/Library over NFS. Reluctantly I moved ~/Library to local storage and left a symlink for ~/Library. Every machine I use therefore has to have its own local Library. The machine I consider my primary box does rsync every night copying the local Library to ~/.Library. It isn’t ideal but allows me to continue having the benefits of a served home directory without the grief of Apple flaws.

As a side, ~/Library is such a junk yard. Moderately important configuration information is wildly mixed with unimportant cached data. Are there no design standards at Apple? Or are they this poor?

What does Apple spend all their R&D money on? What are so many people doing? They have the resources to revolutionize the art of software engineering. But we get this.

OS X Yosemite / Generally Declining Quality of Software

Expecting to step on a land mine I hesitantly upgraded my wife’s Macbook Pro to Yosemite (better her than me 🙂 ).  Mistake.  It’s a mid-2012 model, not very old.  Well, some “older” models have a nasty Wi-Fi problem as in it won’t maintain a connection for more than a couple of minutes.

One has to pause here and ask how the hell did such a massive flaw get released?  It isn’t like it’s an 8 year old model about to be discontinued.  There is no bloody excuse for this.

How fitting that my last post some time ago was about software dung.

Our iPhone 4 (I can’t say “4s” because some moron named their product that way – we have 2 of them) have reached the age where the new iOS (8) doesn’t work on them.  Our iPads are much more recent so it works on them – sorta.

My Mac Pro, still on Mavericks, won’t sleep reliably, frequently loses settings for Finder sidebar, and a variety of other shit.  You know, basic everyday stuff that any tester should have seen immediately.

To put it bluntly, every f’ing release adds some shit that we don’t need and breaks something we do.  I feel like I’m back in corporate days getting a fresh Micro$oft enema.

Web sites are going the same way – pretty f’ing eye candy that doesn’t work.  DirecTV DVRs too.

The sick part about it is that software has been devalued (by us – everyone) to the point that there is nobody who cares any more.  No need for any company to bother as there is no competitor who is better.  They are more concerned about changing the f’ing look of the icons than actually doing something useful (ya hear me Jony Ive?).

The FOSS community isn’t any better.  Tried to build a recent GCC lately?

This is just the latest decay of a civilization.  I guess it has to die under its own weight before we can start over.

Of Dung, Corporations, Governments, and IT

“IT” has been in the news a lot lately. Not because the problems are anything new or unique. They are just typical corporations and governments doing things as they have always been done. Recent events only got the attention of the press because they affected many people in a short amount of time – not the usual ongoing misery.

For those not up on the current news, the extra public displays I speak of are the credit card fiasco at several large retailers and the problems of the many health care exchanges. Really no value in pointing a finger at specific companies (health care exchanges may appear to be a disaster created by the government but in reality they are the disasters of the huge corporations that implemented them) because that would be a bit unfair since they are merely representatives of an industry that is to blame. I shudder when I see other news about the support for Windows XP security fixes ending and how ~95% of the countries ATMs run XP.

In my career I never actually worked in IT (for which I am eternally grateful). But all of my <work was involved with products that were sold to IT organizations. Creating technology has pretty much the same organizational stink as IT does. Or more correctly, corporations (and governments) promulgate the stink to every corner of every organization. Some would argue that this isn't true of the great american "small company"; I've been there too and while it may not stink as bad it still stinks.

I recently had an ephiphany as to how to represent corporations / governments / working-individuals (drones?) in simple pictures. No doubt there will be many people who take offense claiming that they are not like that or that they don't participate in a work environment that is like it. Possibly. If you are in such a very small minority consider yourself one of the few luckiest people on the planet. In my career I've known plenty of people from brilliant to just plain good that, due solely to the purgatory inflected upon them by their work environment, still end up having the same affect. I spent my entire career rolling those things so I was not one of the lucky.

First, a picture of a typical work environment from a bit of a distance. A little hard to be sure what one is looking at.

Then, a little closer.  Still hard to be sure.

Oh, that’s what those are.

That pretty much sums up most of the products as well as the processes/organizations that makes them. The excuse is the same as what that little bug has to say – I gotta make a living.

In the 30+ years since I started in the industry I can honestly say that the only thing that has changed is that the balls are a bit bigger and rounder. Congratulations.

iOS 7 – Not Impressed

We have two iPhone 4 and one iPad 3.  All been running iOS 7 for a few days.

If there is anything positive about this supposed upgrade we can’t see it because we are too busy seeing all the negatives.

1. Jony Ive can take his visual aesthetics back to the drawing board and try again.  We were not fans of skeuomorphism but this washed out bright dull garbage isn’t an improvement.  All those pixels available in retina and they utilize few of them.  We do like the improvement in default font size (selectable) and Bold but then you have to use those things to overcome your text getting lost in the glare.
2. Apparently it was time to slow down all the older devices to push people to buy new.  Things are slower now.  Sometimes simple scrolling just goes out to lunch for long periods of time – with absolutely NO feedback of any kind (like a busy icon/symbol).  There are some suggestions out there that might have some affect but not back to where it used to be.  Fail.
3. Battery life seems to have been shortened.
4. The security, or more correctly the total lack of security, bug on the lock screen is just shocking.  How the fxxx could that have gotten through QA?
5. My wife’s pretty background pictures no longer work.  They get zoomed way too much and resizing just doesn’t work.

I’m sure there are many more.  Apple, you guys blew it.  Its long past time to go back and self examine your quality.  It isn’t the level expected of a premium brand (and I’m not just referring to iOS – applies to OS X as well).

Small Detail Causes Boot Hangs on Solaris 11.1 with H8DM3

Booting Solaris 11.1 on a Supermicro H8DM3 will likely hang right after the Solaris banner.  If you boot with verbose you will see something about a EHCI problem.

This is resolved by changing the BIOS SouthBridge/MCP55 Chipset Configuration setting for USB 2.0 Controller Mode from HiSpeed to FullSpeed.

Sigh.  BIOS sucks.

Faster NFS Solaris and OS X

I’ve increased the bulk speed of OS X NFS client against Solaris NFS server by increasing the default rwsize to 1048576 which is now the default on Solaris.  On OS X Mountain Lion, add rwsize=1048576 to AUTOMOUNTD_MNTOPTS in /etc/autofs.conf and reboot OS X.

AUTOMOUNTD_MNTOPTS=nosuid,nodev,rwsize=1048576

In my case, over gigabit ethernet, my bulk throughput went up from ~28 MB/s to ~40 MB/s.