Oi, work

It’s such a joy to come in this morning to find out that somebody has helpfully shut down the virtual machine I was testing a RHEL4.7 -> 5.3 migration in. Not a supported move by RedHat (as noted, their consultant will charge us lots of money to certify a process that I’ll already have done), and it involves mucking about with lots of important parts of the system. So, when I haven’t taken a snapshot in a couple of hours, and I leave a script running overnight, no big deal, eh? Sadly, the team lead did not agree, and needed the precious ESX resources for the (3!) other VMs that were running at a total of 7% CPU load. Goodbye, 800 lines of Perl to massage the system into place. This would be less of a mess if there were any sort of reasonable rollback method, but the Linux devs, in their infinite wisdom, don’t think that’s important.

In fact, if you clone a drive, the logical volume manager will arbitrarily choose which one to boot from and prevent you from managing the other, even if the contents are totally different, since the cloned logical volume will have the same UUID. More than that, you cannot boot from a LV, so RHEL sets a label in the metadata for the boot partition (typically /boot1). This means in order to have a rollback method (a -real- rollback method), you have to clone said partition, take an LVM snapshot, rename it, hack the /etc/fstab for the partition which will become recovery, munge up the bootloader config files to get it to boot from /dev/vol/orig instead of /dev/vol/upgraded, etc. It was nicer to have straight-up partitions, in a way.

The sad part is that this is a SOLVED PROBLEM. ZFS (and Solaris Live Upgrades on UFS/VxFS/SVM) handle it with aplomb. The license simply doesn’t agree with Linux developers, so they’re slowly (and poorly) implementing it with btrfs and ext4. BSD has HAMMER now, and the license permits ZFS (though only FreeBSD has integrated it so far). Hell, OSX has ZFS support (not ZFS root, but you can get around that). Even better — ext4 loses data if you get a kernel panic, since they decided to delay allocation cycles by 115 seconds (from 5 -> 120) for a marginal performance gain unless you forcefully fsync(), which sorta defeats the point of having a journaled filesystem.

Maybe the work in Solaris Live Upgrade is from Bob. It very well may be, according to him, in one of those “I don’t know whether to gape in horror, pretend it was never said, or just say ‘lolwut’” moments. Specifically, he said that Microsoft contacted him and somebody else we went to school with 10 years ago to work on Solaris. Nevermind that Solaris is 18 years old, and Solaris <2.6 goes back further than that, that's it's based on code written around the time he was born, he doesn't really know C, and it has abso-fucking-lutely nothing to do with Microsoft. For that matter, I think Xenix (Microsoft's UNIX) was sold off to SCO before I ever used a computer. The worst part, really, is that he'll be an IP lawyer, and he wants to be one of the non-litigating ones who just researches things.

At the same time, his only knowledge of RISC processors is that the GBA and DS run on ARM (which he didn't know was RISC). Arguments about whether or not the PS3, 360, Wii, DS, PS3, his cable box, microwave, phone, and virtually every other device he uses fell on deaf ears. Which is fine, normally. I don't expect people to know that their cable box uses big-endian MIPS, or that the Wii, 360, and PS3 essentially run on the same processor with minor tweaks (ok, major tweaks, but they're all PPC970 at the core). Then again, I don't expect people to litigate patents related to these things, either.

It's just that I had no way to express to him how absolutely out of his depth he was -- that this is what I do for a living (about 50% of our systems are still AIX on POWER, and some are HP-UX on PA-RISC, with a little Solaris 10), and that he's dead wrong. No successful argument could have been made, since it wasn't Microsoft on x86. At the same time, though, I couldn't explain that a $400 PS3 has no tangible benefits over a $0 laptop (given that I already have it) when it comes to running emulators hooked up to a HDTV, since the controllers work on PCs just fine, and that throwing $400 at a PS3 so I could run Linux on POWER (well, the Cell) isn't really that interesting. At some point, I stopped doing things because I could, and just went with solutions that work for what I need (hence, fileserver is Solaris, for which he insisted I needed to buy a MyBook, but he's never seen a drive fail, and the fact that it comes with them set up in RAID0 with a processor so wimpy it cannot saturate a single GigE interface isn’t a problem).

On the other hand, hanging out with Bob is entertaining most of the time, and it definitely got my mind off of the pain I’m in. Tomorrow, I think, I’ll actually sign into WoW (assuming that I don’t go watch the crappy miniseries based on crappy books [Sword of Truth] that Bob is putting on a showing of).