I have been playing around with http://wolframalpha.com lately and it has a lot of power behind it. I mostly use it for doing math stuff when I don’t have a calculator in front of me and it can even do some stuff I cant do on my ti-89 like Laplace transforms. When it returns a result it often time gives a comparison of other things that have the same unit. As an example, I asked it about 15 gigs and it immediately figured out what I was talking about and told me how big that was in relation to a blueray disk,60%, as well as how long it would download at different speeds. All this information got me thinking about what kind of questions it can answer and what it cant. The questions it cant answer fall into 3 main categories and while I could never list all the things it can answer I can easily list what kind of questions I want it to answer.

My filesyserver at home is a opensolaris box using raidz under zfs and right now it is having some problems. Recently I had to replace a drive that did not fail but it was making some clicking noises. After repplacing it the first resilver left me with an error about a snapshot that i didn’t need being damaged. okay i can live with that, so i just need to delete the snapshot and bring the pools redundancy back up. well, it reslivered everything, but it didn’t seem like the pool was running completely. i cleared the error and it started to resilver again. same thing happened again but now i am getting a warning for something else <0x5c>:<0x64d62> and now the resilver is going past 100% and copying more then the amount of data i have. some posts online suggest disabling snapshots because they are keeping it from completing. didnt work so i reboot the computer and when it comes back online it starts resilvering automatically. again it goes to 100% and keeps working but this time it takes two files with it, the one before and <0x2b3>:<0x64d62>. looking to another post i see to upgrade opensolaris and try again, i do that, but now i am starting to get worried about playing fast and loose with my data. i still hvent fixed the problem but i want to have some assurance i am not going to make it worse.

Just sent to PROD a copy of my personal site. PROD is a 20$ vps currently hosting two websites and it is running open source software which is important. thanks to jamescarnley[http://jamescarnley.com] for doing some beta testing.

My department has several linux computers and auditing the logs is very tiresome if they are all localized to each computer. While the vanilla syslog offers remote logging features it uses udp and thus many things can affect the chance of log messages reaching their destination. the message dropping problem is not as widespread in syslog-ng since it uses tcp to transmit log packets.

Compiling syslog-ng is required as the only syslog-ng binaries are licensed and require a contract to purchase. under rhel/centos the eventlog compilation goes as planed, but things start going wrong when auto configuring syslog-ng itself. it will complain. _configure: error: Cannot find eventlog version >= 0.2: is pkg-config in path? _this is a easy problem that can be fixed with running configure in the following way:

linux server: leif

solaris client: sisu

export the shares on leif to sisu and then exportfs -r

add an entry in /etc/hosts.allow on leif

on sisu modify the file /etc/auto_master and add the line

/- auto_direct

in /etc/auto_direct add lines like

/home -rw leif:/home

reboot and celebrate

if that is working its now time to set up nis to get remote logins

first set up the domainname in /etc/defaultdomain and use the domainname tool to set it