In Valid Logic

I must say that this morning, I was rather disappointed in Blackberry that they still haven't straightened out the whole daylight savings system.  I mean come on, you would have thought that was solved back in March.

Woke up this morning, just like any Sunday, got ready, headed out to church, and then afterwards we went by Starbucks for some coffee and a bagel with my wife's parents.  Before heading to Starbucks, I remembered hearing my father in law telling my mother in law that it was just after 10am, which made sense since mass started at 9:15 (they are quick).  But then while sitting in Starbucks, about to leave, I check what time it is on my Blackberry and it says 9:45am.  I'm like, ok, what the hell?  My father in law looks at his phone and it says 10:45am.  Now we're all confused.  Which one is right.  Did we change time today?  No, no way we could have, we were on time to mass, we would have been an hour early if it did.  Ok, so why did my phone decide to change today?

Low and behold, 7 months after the whole fiasco with the new dates for daylight savings, Blackberry still seems to have missed the mark.  Today was the normal day for the time change, however with the new dates, it is actually next weekend.

This was a rather annoying flash back to March, when on the day the time changed, my less-than-intelligent phone didn't automatically update, so I had to manually set it ahead an hour, and then two weeks later, when the old date would have been, it jumped ahead another hour.

And so now, I need to manually set my phone ahead an hour so that it remains accurate, and then remember to change it back again next weekend for the actual time change.

I am rather disappointed that Blackberry doesn't seem to have gotten this resolved.  Will I have to deal with this next year, assuming I still have this phone?  I know the phone regularly downloads updates through the network, since I've seen it wake up and restart in the middle of the night before (including once before a flight in the morning to Dallas, which made me nervous since I was using the phone as my alarm clock).

Now I know this post will invite a bunch of "get an iPhone comments"… inevitably.  I would like an iPhone, except: (1) only Cingular/AT&T (can't make their mind up on who they are), and their coverage is not the best here, (2) no 3G, only EDGE, (3) from what I've heard, it is a little underpowered.  Maybe I'll get a 2nd gen, which by now is only 6-8 months away.

Until then, just be stuck with my Blackberry and bad daylight savings roll over dates.

It was not even a year ago that I setup my home NAS server complete with RAID, however now I am abandoning it.  Previously, I had disliked Windows Home Server's idea of redundancy, however some recent events with my not-as-trust Infrant ReadyNAS NV have changed my opinion.

About two months ago, I had a little issue with my NAS storage box.  I was out over town over the weekend and when I came home, I found that the unit was off.  No power had gone out, since no clocks were blinking, but the box was off, and when I pushed the power button, it wouldn't turn on.  Took it out from behind my monitors, blew out the dust, and then it worked.  Was confused why that fixed it, but hey, it was working again.  However, over the next week, I started smelling something occasionally in my office that smelled like burning potatoes.  It smelled like it was coming from my ceiling fan (though turns out it was the ceiling fan blowing down the bad smell it pulled up from the NAS area)… after a week of having the NAS back up, it was broke again, and this time for good.

It turned out it was just a blown power supply, and it was somewhat common the model I had.  I ended up fixing it by popping out its proprietary PSU and replacing it with a normal big-ass ATX PSU, since I found all you needed to do for them to be compatible was snip a little wire it didn't use (used a cheap spare PSU I had laying around).  This brought up several problems with this type of box though.

First, it is entirely proprietary.  Custom power supply, custom hardware, custom build of some Linux distribution, integrated RAID controller… nothing is end-user swappable.  Compare that with a home-PC based storage system.  Dead PSU?  Ok, run to Fry's, by a new one, done.  Dead motherboard?  Get another.  Dead CPU?  Get another.  Some may be bigger headaches to get up and going, but for the most part, no need to RMA the entire unit.

While it supports RAID for hard drive redundancy, everything else about the unit is a closed box.  When the unit was broken, there was no way for me to access my data.  I couldn't plug the drives into another system.  I couldn't pull the controller out and access the array on another system.  Nothing.  Your data gets locked to that device.  To get access to your data, you have to get the device running again.  This sucks when you store all your important data on there.

All this made me take another look at Windows Home Server.  Its idea of redundant storage is to just keep two copies of the file.  Have a hard drive die?  No problem, it can rebalance its storage and ensure another copy of that data is somewhere.  Want to add more drives?  No problem, plug them in (can't exactly do that once you have all 4 drives in on the NAS solution).  With its "two copies" idea, it is basically RAID1, but without the dependence on a RAID controller.  Say you have a total system failure with WHS and need access to some of your data.  All you have to do is plug that drive into another system.  It is just a regular NTFS partition with some special directory structure.  Just go to the drive, Shares, Photos, and boom, there is the Photos share.  Additionally, even though you will get 1/2 your drive capacity with the "two copies" method, you have to face one ever growing reality… storage is cheap!  Run out of space?  It is pretty easy and rather inexpensive to add another drive.  You can get a 500gb hard drive for ~$100 nowadays… so for $200, you have 500gb of redundant storage with WHS.  $0.40 a gigabyte?  Not too shabby.

On top of that, I can now backup all the PCs in my house nice and easily (as opposed to buying several copies of Acronis TrueImage).

What's next?  Maybe when I find some free time, I'll write up a little add-in to WHS to support remote off-site backups with rsync or some other continuous backup software.

Lately I've still been using Microsoft Money 2007, however I had never installed their stupid internet update patch and I'd noticed some issues lately with not being able to download updates.  I figured they were phasing out the old service, so I would need to finally install the updates.

Then I was searching online to find their instructions for installing the updates and ran across their Online Service Policy, which states:

Microsoft® Money 2007 includes up to two (2) years of Online Services. You will be able to use the Online Services in Microsoft Money 2007 for a period of two (2) years from activation of the product or until September 1, 2009, whichever is earlier. After expiration, if you elect not to upgrade to the then-current version of Microsoft Money after the Online Services period ends, you will not be able to automatically update your accounts and investment values in Microsoft Money 2007.

Now that nuts.  I know they had phased out some of the earlier versions, but it never really hit me that they'd be phasing out my version, or that it was actually already planned and enforced based on my purchase date.  So based on this, I can only update my accounts online for about 10 more months?  And then I'm cut off unless I do their forced upgrade?  That is just ridiculous to me.  I have no interest in upgrading at this time, and I don't really want to have to in the future.  Each version of Money gets incrementally worse not better.

Goodbye Money, hello Wesabe, and I mean for good.  I am done with Microsoft Money.  I don't care how painful it is, but I am 100% done with MS Money from now on.  Tonight, I'll switch over all my online bill pay from Money to my bank's website, export all of my accounts, and import them one by one into Wesabe.  Then over time, I'll be sure to get all the transactions named and tagged.

I had posted a while ago about my fascination with servers, and this weekend I expanded upon my setup a little bit further.  I previously had a single server installed, and additional hardware spam filter.  Recently I'd decided the spam filter wasn't working out quite how I liked it since their licensing of "per-user" was too wide on what was considered a user.  Additionally, on the main server, I was pretty much reaching my capacity in terms of disk space.

After 6 months of having it deployed, I had it to a nice level where the services I was offering were nice and stable, the server was paying for itself pretty well, and I'd decided to kick it up a notch closer to where I'd ultimately envisioned it.

My vision is basically to have a high availability server with no single point of failure.  This isn't really something I can do overnight, so doing it incrementally as I can make certain upgrades.  Overall, need multiple virtual server nodes with failover, shared storage with replication and failover (multi-pathing), each server hooked up to two ethernet switches in spanning tree, all servers with redundant power supplies hooked up to separate power circuits, etc.  It isn't necessarily rocket science, basically just two of everything.  This kind of goal is a ways off.  It isn't necessarily expensive to do if you do it as you have the demand/income to do it.

Why do something like this?  Because it is fun… if that makes any sense.  It is a little bit of a challenge and can be interesting to attempt.  IE, for redundant storage, want to play around with looking at Solaris + ZFS + SunCluster (to get HA-ZFS) + iSCSI Target.  Surprisingly, that setup is not some super expensive enterprise setup, just takes some time to configure and test.

So what all did I do this weekend?  I basically went from a single server to five servers, plus my own switch, and added in a hardware firewall.  Software firewalls are ok, but can be annoying sometimes.  I've seen Windows updates that reset some firewall rules, or reactivate the firewall on NICs that it was disabled on before.  They don't protect against things like DoS/DDoS.  And I've seen exploits/viruses that are actually kind enough to open up firewall ports for the backdoors they install.  How nice of them.

It total, it took me 14 hours to get everything up and running.  Was one obstacle after another, since additional power was added, but it wasn't brought into the rack, I had a last-minute configuration change made to the firewall that broke some stuff (doh), installing the rails and running cables was a pain since the rack is very tight on space (not conducive to nice cable management).  And then I had to migrate a bunch of data and repurpose the old server, which took forever and then some.  So I was there from about 12 noon til about 2am… but it was a good time… just not something I want to do that often.

So now my little network is made up of Dell servers, HP ProCurve networking, and Juniper routing/security.  That 24 port switch fills up quickly when you have 3 connections per server (one for public traffic, one for iSCSI traffic, and one for remote management).

Figured I might as well post some more pictures of Nick.  Right now, he sitting next to me in his little papasan seat, making a big poop.  Trish and I will have fun with that later.

I kid, it isn't really a grind, though today is my first day back to work after my two weeks paternity leave.  My time off was not nearly as productive as I thought it would be.  Honestly, I think I had this glorified image of it as some nice time off and was going to work on some little coding projects, like trying out Silverlight and such, but absolutely none of that happened.  The time was pretty much just spent taking care of Nick and trying to sleep.

As of today, Nick is now two weeks old and he had his first doctor's appointment.  At birth, he was 7lbs 15oz and 19", after birth he dropped to about 7lbs 11oz, and as of today, he is 8lbs 4oz and 20 1/8".  Doctor said everything is look good with him.  Belly button is almost healed, his snip-snip is all healed.

At nights, Nick is starting to do really well.  He has a trained, I guess.  We found he likes sleeping in his papasan more than his basinet, since it props him up more and also kind of wraps him, rather than him being flat on his back in the basinet.  Lately he has been going 2 hours between feedings, and starting to get to 3 hours, and he sleeps nice and quiet between feedings.  Works out very well for us, since we get nice 2-3 hour blocks of sleep.

We've also been starting to take Nick outside some.  On Sunday he went to church and brunch with us.  He was awake for quite awhile and then just passed out and slept through brunch.  The other day, we went out to get a Halloween costume for him, and he just slept soundly.  Then today he went out to the doctor and was basically awake the whole time.

The past few days, he has been starting to stay awake more and is starting to hold his head up on his own, looking all around.  He is very curious about his environment, and seems to be conscious of colors.  At the doctors office, behind me was a board with a bunch of colors and he was all captivated by it.  He seems to like my office a lot too, especially when I have the ceiling fan on.  It is kind of nice too as he actually looks at us.