I have been planning on upgrading my web server for a long time. 
I have the last of my Novell NetWare servers that I am getting rid of,
and I am replacing them with a series of Linux servers running Fedora
Core.  I completed the first of these migrations a while back when
I installed my Linux box with qmail and replaced my old Mercury mail
server on NetWare.

Last night I began the process of installing Linux on a new
system.  I picked up the parts to assemble a nice system in a 19″
rack mount chassis.  2.4Ghz Intel Processor on a Intel 865
Motherboard.  1GB of RAM, and dual 250GB hard disks.  I got
the dual 250GB disks so that I can “mirror” them using RAID 1.

Everything went well … almost.  I spent four+ hours last night
installing over and over again since everything would appear to go
well, and the the server just would not boot.  I read a lot of
posts on-line, but nothing offered seemed to solve my problem.  I
finally noticed that when the system had been assembled, the first hard
disk was “master” on the primary IDE channel, and the second hard disk
was “slave” on the secondary IDE channel.  There was no master
device on the secondary IDE channel, so this morning I opened the case,
and changed the second hard disk to “master” … and everything worked!

So my experience is now:  When installing, have your two hard disks both be masters on the two IDE channels and things go a lot easier!

So what did I do to configure the RAID?  It was actually pretty easy except for the problem above.

1. Using the Disk Druid tool,
   I created three “Software RAID” partitions on my first hard disk by
   clicking the RAID button.  I created the first one for the /boot partition at 100MB, the second one for swap at 2000MB, and then the third for the / (root) partition that used the rest of the disk.
2. Next, I did the same to the second hard disk.  So now both
   of the disks each had three “Software RAID” partitions that were the
   correct sizes.
3. I then created the RAID 1 devices one by one.  I first
   created the md0 partition with a mount point of  “/boot” and a
   file system type of “ext3”.  Also, make sure to select RAID
   1!  I then selected the two 100MB partitions.
4. Second was the “swap” partition.  I set it to md1 and
   selected the file system type of “swap”, and again set this for RAID1
   and then selected the two 2000MB partitions.
5. Last, I created the root “/” partition by setting that as the
   mount point, setting it to be md2 and RAID 1, and then selecting the
   remaining two partitions.
6. Upon completing this, Disk Druid showed the three RAID Devices – md0 (/boot), md1 (swap), and md2 (/) and I was done.

As I proceeded through the rest of the installation, it went smooth
with no other problems.  The server installation completed and
rebooted just fine!

I got the system installed in my rack at the office, and immediately
came home to ssh in and apply updates.  The up2date session is
completing as I type this.  I have a few more things to tweak, and
then adjust some services, and then I can begin the process of
installing a bunch of new code!

I’m still out in California at the VSLive event … it’s been
great. My friend Todd called to see if I was going to be around
tonight to go to a dorkbot meeting. What? Something new to see …

I visited the web site for the San Francisco chapter of dorkbot, and I have to admit that I am bummed that I am going to miss this. The tag line is “People doing strange things with electricity” … and the list of projects sure looks cool.

I’m going to have to come back. Or even better … I’ll have to start a chapter in Salt Lake City!

I’m on my way to San Francisco to attend a conference as part of my new
job. I recently chose to join an awesome team of people at a
company called Agilix.
Agilix is revolutionizing the mobile and Tablet PC market with a
layered set of products. These products start with some of the
best tools to develop “Ink-enabled” applications for the Tablet
PC. You can go visit the Tablet PC developer site at Microsoft and download a copy. If you want to see the full breadth of what is possible, then come to the Agilix site and purchase the SDK!

The next layer up wil be the GoBinder SDK. This is a platform for
developing mobile applications and it provides a rich set of features
that ease development, and take care of many of the core tasks when
considering how to “mobilize” your application and data.

The top layer is the GoBinder product itself … a full blown
“organizer” that is currently being sold to university and colleege
students. This is a product that replaces the physical binder of
the old world, and replaces it with the same functionality on your
laptop or Tablet PC. For people that are familiar with the
Franklin-Covey set of software products, Agilix is the company that has
been writing these products for years.

Anyhow … I’ll blog more about the conference … this is going to be
fun. I look forward to exploring the Tablet PC and learning more
about how far they have come. It’s not a far leap from the
wearable computers that I have been experimenting with over the last
decade!

I haven’t been doing much commercial flying lately.  In fact, I’m
sitting here at the Salt Lake City Airport thinking that this is the
first time that I have flown in over six months!  When I was
leaving the house I had to do the standard “security review” to think
about all of the things that I might have thrown into my computer bag,
or my suitcase, while I haven’t been flying … all of the things like
a small screwdriver, my fingernail clippers, and a pair of tweezers.

Getting to the airport it wasn’t too bad … a good time of night to
fly out.  Of course I was bummed to see that only airlines like
JetBlue understand the value of free wireless.  I got a signal
from the Sprint wireless network, in partnership with the Salt Lake
City Airport, and they only wanted $9.95 for 24 hours!  Yeah …
right … can I PLEASE pay that much for Internet Access?  What
century are these guys living in?  It’s a form of extortion in my
opinion.  If you are going to charge, then make it a reasonable
price!  I would pay $10 per month … that’s what we charge on our wireless network at 80211.net.

Oh well … I’ll have bandwidth when I arrive …

I just installed the tool MasterPing that I found through the technorati
site.  It is designed to provide the blog update “pings” to
various sites on the Internet.  It’s cool to find tools like this
for Radio … I just wish more people would buy a copy of Radio so that
the development could progress faster.  It really is a cool tool
…

It is movements like this one that will prove to be the downfall of
Open Source.  This article references a blog post where an author
is promoting the Open Source movement to become an “anti-Windows”
movement.  This is absolute foolishness, IMHO.

When is it that people will learn the basics of success?  It is
about creating something, and making it something that is so good that
people adopt it for its own value.  The Open Source community
seems to have a large split … those who are truly pursuing “open”
software, and those who are motivated by a desire to “fight
Microsoft.”  The sad thing is that the “fight Microsoft” crowd are
doing more damage to Open Source than they could ever imagine.

To talk about an Open Source strategy that involves applications being
written to only support a particular operating system, Linux, in order
to “force” people to migrate to that operating system, will only turn
the Open Source movement into the next “lock-in” for potential
customers.  This is always a failed strategy.  If Linux is
going to succeed and be adopted, it will be due to the fact that it
delivers real value.  If people are forced to Linux to use Open
Source, then both will be impacted in a negative way.  Humans like
the opportunity to choose value … not be forced into a particular
choice.

On top of that, most advanced strategists and scientists fully
understand that operating systems are becoming a commodity with little
differentiation.  It is only the Linux groupies and extremists
that want to force the whole world to Linux.  If you look around,
there are numerous other kernels that exist – Darwin (Apple), SkyOS,
Solaris, etc. – that have nothing to do with Linux.  As an Open
Source developer, why would you want to tie your application to a
specific kernel and its future?  Don’t most developers realize
there will be other kernels in the future?  It seems that much of
the world has seen the advantages of virtual machines and
cross-platform development langauges.  Is Linux really so weak
that it can only succeed if people are forced to go to it?  I don’t think so.

Instead of turning Open Source into Anti-Microsoft Source, embrace the
real notion of Open Source and write to be completely abstracted from
the many kernels of the world.  The strongest solution will
survive and flourish!

Open Source on Windows – Boon or Bane for Linux? [Slashdot:]

Today I was able to get out skiing at park City Ski Resort with my
cousin Brian.  It was a great day, and the snow and weather just
worked.  On top of that, I got to catch up with my cousin and hear
more about what he has been doing.  Brian and his wife have a
architectural firm called Dake Wilson Architects and they are building some amazing homes and buildings.  They came out for the Sundance Film Festival.

While they were here, I learned that Brian not only did the designs for
the Puma Stores, but he also worked on Bill Joy’s home in Aspen. 
It’s also fun to search Google for relatives!  I found that Renee
also wrote a brief article about their Eco-Home in LA … they are great people and it was good to see them.

This is a good article that talks about the next generation of speed
tests for transferring information. The article from
ComputerWorld shows that the research into DWDM and other types of
modulation are still progressing.

Wow! That’s fast TCP!.
Data has been sent across a wide-area optical network at 101Gbit/sec.,
the fastest-ever sustained data transmission speed, equivalent to
downloading three full DVD movies per second, or transmitting all of
the content of the Library of
Congress in 1… [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News]

Well … after that last series of posts … it seems that Radio is behaving again …

It’s amazing … it seems that I really can’t have a consistant
experience with Radio. After crossing into the New Year I can’t
post to my weblog home page …

{Multiple post and publishes …}

Radio has so much potential … but it’s problems like this that drive
me nuts and burn up too many hours. I have looked for support,
however it’s all like a big guessing game to see what might be
going
wrong.

{Multiple post and publishes …}

My newest 2005 posts won’t show up, however when I keep editing and
publishing this post I can see Radio upstreaming all of the old
archived posts … and only 25 at a time.

{Multiple post and publishes …}

It seemed to work it’s way through all of the archived posts …
and then even published some rss files … but that’s it.  This
absolutely sucks.