Streamin’ Streamin’ Streamin’ – Though the tapes are screamin’

Posted on 12 October, 2007 by Matthias Scheler

After 6 years and one day of reliable services my Sony SDT-9000 DAT streamer broke down. It started acting up last Saturday and refused to recognize two of my tapes. I used two new tapes and managed to backup my server to the tape drive one last time.

Today the streamer didn’t recognize any tapes again, not even the two tapes which worked last week. I tried using a cleaning tape but it didn’t help. After I powercycled my server the streamer wasn’t even detected any more. Another powercycle brought it back but it still wouldn’t accept any tapes. I finally gave up and removed the streamer and the SCSI hostadapter from my server.

I’ve considered buying a new DAT streamer but decided against that option. An external harddisk offers better performance and price than a tape drive these days. So I will use my external USB 2.0 harddisk for the time being.

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Less Downtime And Problems

Posted on 23 September, 2007 by Matthias Scheler

A while ago I complained about problems with NIS under Mac OS X. The amount of comments I received on that posting suggests that a lot of people had similiar experiences.

Encouraged by Iain Patterson’s excellent post about using LDAP under Mac OS X and with a bit of help from my fellow worker Robert Brown I managed to get LDAP working. I’m using OpenLDAP on my NetBSD server to provided this service.

The LDAP directory is kept up to date by a self written Perl script. It automatically replicates the contents of the NIS maps passwd.byname, group.byname and mounts.byname into the LDAP database. As the script is automatically run by the makefile on the NIS master the LDAP server will pick up all changes immediately.

I’m using LDAP instead of NIS on my Mac for several weeks now. The change-over fixed all the problems I previously encountered:

  1. I can always login using my LDAP account after the machine finished booting up.
  2. lookupd doesn’t wedge after DNS problems anymore.
  3. I can suspend and wake up my Mac without losing access to my NFS mounted home directory.
  4. When I rebooted my server to finish the NetBSD 4.0 RC1 update the Mac handle that outage without problems.

To say it with the words of Daniel Jackson: The only way to defeat NIS is to deny it battle.

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Back to nature … at least for a while

Posted on 23 September, 2007 by Matthias Scheler

Yesterday Silke and I took advantage of the nice weather and went on a walk in the forest at Brandon Country Park. We initially planned to follow the medium length walk (3.5 miles or 5.6km). But after a few hundred meters in the cool fresh air in the wood we decided to take the long path (6 miles or 9.7km).

It was a very relaxing experiences being (almost) out of the civilisation for a while. Only the distant noise from the A11 disturbed the gentle sound of the wind and the buzzing of the insects occasionally. All the worries and stress of our everyday life seemed to be far away.

Although we didn’t walk at our top speed we needed much less than the three hours which the signpost suggested. Exhausted but happy we took a break and stocked up on some sunshine. Finally we drove back to Cambridge to have our well deserved dinner.

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