This is a good time to call your A/C maintenance folks and have them do a check-up on your units. Check for loose or worn belts and other problems. If you've added more equipment since last summer your unit may now be underpowered. Remember that if your computers consume 50Kw of power, your A/C units should be using about the same (or more) to cool those computers. That's the laws physics speaking, I didn't invent that rule. The energy it takes to create heat equals the energy required to remove that much heat.
Why do A/C units often fail on a 3-day weekend? During the week the office building has its own A/C. The computer room's A/C only has to remove the heat generated by the equipment in the room. On the weekends the build's A/C is powered off and now the 6 sides (4 walls, floor and ceiling) of the computer room are getting hot. Heat seeps in. Now the computer room's A/C unit has more work to do.
A 3-day weekend is 84 hours (Friday 6pm until Tuesday 6am). That's a lot of time to be running continuously. Belts wear out. Underpowered units overheat and die. Unlike a home A/C unit which turns on for a few minutes out of every hour, a computer-room A/C unit ("industrial unit") runs 40-50 minutes out of every hour. Something running that much has to be specially engineered.
Most counties have a 3-day weekend in May. By the 2nd or 3rd day the A/C unit is working as much as a typical day during the summer. If your computer room doesn't survive that weekend, imagine a summer full of days just like it.
To prevent a cooling emergency make sure that your monitoring system is also watching the heat and humidity of your room. There are many SNMP-accessible units for less than $100. If you detect temperatures of 38 degrees C you should be alerted. More if that rises to 40 within 30 minutes it is unlikely that the temperature will go down on its own. You can reduce some of the heat in the room by simply shutting down some non-essential machines (The Practice of System and Network Administration has tips about creating a "shutdown list"). Having the ability to remotely power off machines can save you a trip to the office. Lacking that, shutting down a machine will make it generate less heat even if it is powered up. Sitting at a "press any key to boot" prompt often generates little heat compared to a machine that is actively processing. If powering off the non-critical machines isn't enough, shut down critical equipment but not the equipment involved in letting you access the monitoring systems (usually the network equipment). That way you can bring things back up remotely. Of course, as a last resort you'll need to power off those bits of equipment too.
Having cooling emergency? Cooling units can be rented on an emergency basis to help you through a failed cooling unit, or to supplement a cooling unit that is underpowered. There are many companies looking to help you out with a rental unit.
If you have a small room that needs to be cooled (a telecom closet that now has a rack of machines) I've had good luck with a $300 unit available at Walmart. For $300 it isn't great, but I can buy one in less than an hour without having to wait for management to approve the purchase. Heck, for $300 you can buy two and still be below the spending limit of a typical IT manager. The Sunpentown 1200 and the Amcor 12000E are models that one can purchase for about $600 that re-evaporates any water condensation and exhausts it with the hot air. Not having to empty a bucket of water every day is worth the extra cost. The unit is intended for home use, so don't try to use it as a permanent solution. (Not that I didn't use it for more than a year at one company.) It has one flaw... after a power outage it defaults to being off. I guess that is typical of a consumer unit. Be sure to put a big sign on it that explains exactly what to do to turn it back on after a power outage. (The sign I made says step by step what buttons to press, and what color each LED should be if it is running properly. I then had a non-system administrator test the process.)
In summary: test your A/C units now. Monitor them, especially on the weekends. Be ready with a backup plan if your A/C unit breaks. Do all this and you can prevent an expensive and painful meltdown.
]]>You may have heard of Unicode, the replacement for ASCII that lets you type in hundreds of languages. Did you know that the same organization maintains the Common Locale Data Repository, which includes machine-readable definitions of how dates are represented, words are sorted, and so on. The latest update is going to attempt to include even more attributes: not just the date format, but the format for date ranges; not just how to alphabetize words, but the alternate sorting rules used in that country's phone book, ...
The Unicode CLDR Project has set up a web site where people can review their current data and submit updates.
I think it is great that they are opening the project and searching for volunteers. A project like this can only be done with the power of the open web.
The project's homepage: http://unicode.org/cldr/
Anyone can view the data. You only need to create an account to report updates or make suggestions.
If you are interested in what kind of bugs are being reported, view the recent submissions here.
If you know a particular language or culture very well, please volunteer!
]]>The first clue that this RFC was real was that it wasn't published on April 1st like other funny RFCs. However, in our defense, neither was RFC 527: ARPAWOCKY or other documents we reprinted in Part III: Poetry in Motion.
Ironically we had thought of picking a random non-funny RFC and publishing just to see if anyone noticed. Originally all RFCs were published on the first of the month, so many many many RFCs were published on April 1st of each year. Sorting through all of them to find which were fake was a difficult task. The RPC mechanism that resulted in NFS have so little security was published on April 1st. Was it a joke all along? That would explain a lot.
The book, with unpublished commentary from some big names in the history of the Internet, can be purchased from booksellers such as Amazon.com. More information on www.rfc-humor.com
--Tom Limoncelli
]]>The times people got fired often involved violating corporate policies, such as forging email from important people. I once saw a person forge email from a manager... oh, I won't finish the story, that's enough of a "no no" at most companies. Of course, if they had warned the manager he could have been involved and it would have been even funnier.
We once convinced a manager to email out a new data storage policy: Since the voice mail system deletes messages that are more than 10 days old, why not do something similar on our NFS servers? Certainly a file that hasn't been used in 10 weeks can't be too important. Imagine how convenient it will be to have your home directory automatically cleaned this way? Most everyone thought it was funny, except one person that was very embarrassed when he took his complaint to the VP, who had a much better sense of humor.
The RFC documents that define how the internet works includes many fake documents that are hilarious. www.rfc-humor lists them all. This includes the famous RFC for how to send TCP/IP packets over carrier pigeon.
Peter H. Salus and I compiled all the funny RFCs and put them into a book. Why sell something that you can get for free online? Well, first of all we added commentary, some of which is written by famous industry folks. Secondly, it's nice to have all the RFCs in one place. It looks great on a coffee table or in your office. (Oh, and you get to see the brilliant cover design that I did.)
You can still order it in time for April 1st. Makes a perfect give for the geek that has everything. Order today!
]]>Complete details are available on the East Africa Google Gadget Competition website. A PDF suitable for your university bulletin board is available here.
I just released 1.002 which adds some new features that make it easier to generate MX records for domain names with no A records, and not generate NS records for DNS masters. Other bug fixes and improvements are included.
HostDB is released under the GPL, supported on the HostDB-fans mailing list, and supported by the community. This recent release includes patches contributed by Sebastian Heidl.
]]>Thanks to Moore's Law, just about any thing you build today can be done on something the size of an iPod, you just have to wait long enough. What year will an entire SAP deployment be the size of an iPod? What year will an entire service like gmail be the size of an iPod? What year will a PeopleSoft installation be the size of an iPod? An entire Remedy helpdesk ticket system iPod?
In that year... will someone want to pay $millions for an equivalent PeopleSoft installation when it is on an iPod? I doubt it. Would PeopleSoft be able to stay in business selling an iPod-priced device? I doubt it. So will this kind of innovation come from an outside competitor? I'd assume so... just like phone companies couldn't make the leap to VoIP and were instead put out of business by the likes of Cisco.
I wonder if prior to complete (for example) PeopleSoft iPods, there will be a generation of single-function bricks that are connected via standard interfaces. You buy a database brick, a core IT services (DNS, authentication, ActiveDir/LDAP) brick, and a PeopleSoft app brick; and they provide the service together. Sort of like legos.
What app will be on your brick?
]]>I don't mean that one needs to plan the fun. Nothing could be less fun than a plan like...
8:00 party starts
8:05 lift beer to mouth, drink
8:10 laugh at joke someone tells
8:11 think of funny retort, say it out loud
That would be dreadful.
However big fun stuff requires planning. Concert tickets need to be bought in advance, anything involving seeing friends requires scheduling it with them in advance, etc. I consider it "fun" to speak at Linux/FOSS/etc. User Groups, but that takes months of advance planning to get on their schedules, book travel, and so on. If I don't invest some time in planning those things, they don't happen.
Therefore this weekend my SO and I spent some time talking about things we wanted to do, marked up our calendar to show when we had off from work (a lot of holidays coming up), marked various conferences we're attending, RSVPed to various parties we'd been invited to, and used our calendar to pick dates to see various shows. Of note, we're going to see Emo Philips perform in NYC on Jan 18, we bought broadway show tickets to see The Farnsworth Invention (written by West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin) on Feb 21, and we're planning on attending a mid-winter SF on called Wicked Faire. The Emo Philips show is general admission... if you happen to be in the area and want to join the group of us attending, please let me know.
However, there are ways to reduce the planning required. One way is to set up a regularly scheduled night. For example, I know some couples that always keep Wednesday night open for "date nights". Families often set aside one night a week for "family game night".
Weekends don't need too much planning: For just about any place in the world there is a web site that lists events in your area this weekend and rarely do they require much planning except having something to wear. If you live in NYC there are sites like Nonsense NYC, Gemini and Scorpio, and FlavorPill. Flavorpill has listings for many cities. My little town of Montclair, New Jersey has BaristaNet which lists many events.
I do like to do spur-of-the-moment outings to see movies, get dinner, etc. but it is difficult to find which friends happen to be in the same situation at the very same moment. Phoning them can be embarrassing... "Hi! Are you free to see a movie in an hour?" is kind of rude, and guilt-inducing if people have to say "no" all the time. I'd rather have a system that would notify my local friends by TXT message. They could ignore it if they are busy, or call me if they want to come. "Local" could be defined as everyone I know on Orkut or FaceBook, that happens to be physically near me (either defined by their address, twitter status, or the GPS on their phone). That would be awesome. Someone should invent that.
What's your most effective way to make sure there's enough fun in your life?
]]>Fernanda Weiden of Google in Zurich gives her perspectives on women and Latin Americans in the open source community, the Brazilian Women in Free Software, Debian Women and the Free Software Foundation of Latin America
True story about Fernanda: She taught herself English by reading Linux "man" pages.
]]>Strata recently pointed me to an excellent audio workshop on the topic. It's a 2.5 hour MP3 that you listen to. There is a 10-page PDF that you need to print out first because the audio program pauses for you to fill out the blanks in the sheet. Don't try to just follow along viewing the PDF on the screen; having it on paper is worth it.
Download it here: http://theownerscircle.com/seminar-download.html
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