I've been using muttng over mutt for the last few months. Basically, the idea boils down to the fact that there's been quite a few really useful mutt patches available for some time, but fewer and fewer of them were being added into the main mutt tree.

Finally, some folks got fed up with this, forked mutt, and imported a bunch of patches. It's hard to say for sure, but at least 15-20 patches are in there now, on top of everything that mutt already does.

Of course, you could get much of this functionality in standard mutt by applying these patches yourself... go ahead and try though, trying to get 15-20 patches to apply and not clash is quite a task :-)

Some of the more interesting features that I make use of now are header caching -- which means opening a folder with several thousand emails no longer takes 20 seconds to open (my sent mail, some 6600 messages, took that long).

It offers a sidebar, not unlike the folder list found in Thunderbird/Evolution/Outlook/etc... you can show and hide it with a single key combo, and it allows you to flip through your various mailboxes in a hurry, without actually having to flip screens by hitting 'c', then '?', then browsing.

They also went through, and made a number of "sanity" changes to the config file syntax. For example, mutt seemed to flip between using 'pgp_*' and 'gpg_*' for various config options. Muttng renamed them to the more sane 'crypt_*' (oh the irony).

And just a tiny little thing that makes a world of difference to me is the menu context patch. If you're in a folder with 100's or 1000's of messages, and you find yourself scrolling up or down through a bunch of them for whatever reason, the messages themselves only begin scrolling once your cursor hits the top of bottom of the screen. So, it's really easy to flip past the one you want. Sure, right after it slides by you scroll back down, and open it with no problem. But what if it were even easier? The menu_context option says not to scroll messages when the cursor is at the top or bottom of the screen, but instead, when it's N messages from the top of bottom of the screen. I have mine set to '5'.... meaning there are *always* at least 5 messages above and below the cursor (unless you're at the beginning or end of the mailbox, of course)

Simple pleasures, perhaps. But, anyone who knocks it just hasn't had the opportunity to use a mail client that allows you to tweak absolutally every aspect of it :-) Indeed, that may be it's one primary fault as well, the fact that you can tweak every option :-) Once you take the time to sit down and do it though, it's really hard to beat.

Oh, and muttng can act as a news reader too, but I haven't yet had a chance to try this out.

Well, sort of.

As Don recently mentioned, I've recently grown interested in working on some gigs of my own. So, on one end, we have things like the webhosting that he mentioned, as well as hosted groupware and other goodies (if you're reading this, I'll give you a discount on hosting, just ask :-) (note to current customers: it's the deal you're currently all getting... and no, there's no miracle 'free' plan, sorry ;-)

However, I've also been getting involved in side sysadmin and programming projects.

One such project deals with a small business who actually manages to pull in some 15 million hits a day on just one of his sites, which is more than Slashdot. It's been fun working on a setup that can handle that sort of traffic, without actually using a load balancer :-)

A new project that's come up is to create a simple-to-use program which can do all the following:

• Get information about movies/streams of any type, from static mpeg movies to proprietary Microsoft MMS based streams
• Given a url, verify said file/stream is working
• Given a time (in seconds), get a screenshot of the video at that time

Really, there's tools out there that can do most of the above... I don't actually have to write a video parser. What doesn't exist is an easy means of doing the above.... one has to take the existing tools, come up with the right options, and put it all together.

Having never really spent much time dorking around in the video world, I hadn't realized the complexity of many video tools. Have you ever looked at the mplayer manpage? It has nearly 40,000 words across 9000 lines.

It was a lot of fun putting this together... when building it, I had my sights on developing a tool that would allow someone to easily do what Google Video's has going. That is, given a set of video url's, verify each works... and if so, display the length, format, set of screenshots, and so on, all the goodies that you can see in this Movie on Google video's.

I honestly don't even know what they're going to use it for, I was simply given a list of options it needed to have available, and recognized that hey, they could implement Google Video's if they wanted :-)

I went out to see The Violet Burning last night. Kevin Max was playing as well.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover Brennan Strawn from Monarch actually opening for the other two.

The Violet Burning were their usual "alternative with a twist of punk" selves, a great show. Kevin Max was good, though they are bit more of a pop'y style of music than I usually prefer in bands... I'll probably get their stuff in time though. Brennan Straw was a surprise, and put on an accuistic guitar show (unlike his usual piano based music). He has a new album coming out in a month or so, which I look forward to.

Apparently, you can't just take a working CentOS/RHEL system, and add RAID to it. You'd think that would work, but no. You'll boot, and get a message like this:

Unable to find volume group volgroup00

Followed by things like "LVM Exiting", "Kernel Panic", and other crazies.

The issue is with /boot/initrd. Your initrd image is created at installation time. The initrd loads all sorts of stuff *before* the filesystem is loaded.... so anything necessary to load the filesystem is in it. Including things like ext3 drivers, LVM, RAID, and so on.

Well, if you don't setup RAID during your inital installation, for better or worse the RAID drivers are not added to your initrd. And if your system doesn't have RAID drivers, it's not going to be seeing the LVM on top of the RAID.

I was lucky enought to have a initrd with RAID laying around, but I also suspect there's a way to re-create it. Good luck :-)

Just thought I'd mention what I'm sure each and every geek is wondering... on the new Hershey's Chocolate World ride, there are 9 Wireless AP's. Six don't broadcast the ESSID. Three do, and they are "CDA3". All nine are WEP encrypted. Enjoy the ride :-)

Last week, there were several sources such as Slashdot and Digg reporting on this Ars Technia article. In it, we get to hear about AT&T's COO, Randall Stephenson, tell us about how Verizon's new fiber rollout, and 15Mb Internet connections, are irrelevant. For example:

"In the foreseeable future, having a 15 Mbps Internet capability is irrelevant
because the backbone doesn't transport at those speeds," he told the conference
attendees. Stephenson said that AT&T's field tests have shown "no discernable
difference" between AT&T's 1.5 Mbps service and Comcast's 6 Mbps because the
problem is not in the last mile but in the backbone."

Now, it's an interesting point worth verifying... but easily proven false. As a Comcast customer, if his statement were true, I would not be capable of receiving downloads at full speed, I'd be getting no more than the 1.5Mbps he's discussing. In his defense, there are certainly sites out there where I don't see that sort of bandwidth. But, that's not even the norm.

I think I know why he bought the above falsehood up. It's not even because he doesn't want people using Verizon. Though losing customers would be a bit of a bummer for them, but I'm sure they'll have plenty who stick with AT&T DSL.

No, instead, I think the problem is pure jealousy. Imagine a COO of a huge company.... so large, that you're under constant scrutiny by all your competitors, each one eager to find a chink in the armor.

This COO is absolutally using their Internet service at home... and he's feeling screwed because the rest of the United States is going to be able to get a 15Mbps Net connection, and he's stuck on a measly 1.5Mbps DSL line.

I mean, I'd be upset to. Lets keep an eye out to see how long this guy sticks with AT&T :-)

I got the letter the other day. I was elated to learn that Verizon's FIOS, their fiber rollout, would be coming to my house. That means, for what I pay the cable company now for 4Mb down / 384Kb up, I can 15Mb down and 2Mb up from Verizon. Nice.

We were told they'd let us know before they start digging, and give us a phone number, so that we can let them know about any concerns we have -- including wires of our own that we may have installed, such as dog fences and, well, robomower fences.

So, I was a little less than thrilled when I drove to work yesterday, and saw them digging in our neighborhood. No notification or phone number, just a bunch of shovels digging a 4 foot hole for the cable conduit.

The only thing going through my head was that if they cut through my robomower's line, I'm gonna have to mow the lawn myself. That's certainly enough to get anyone worked up.

I threw the car in park, and ran out to talk to them. The first thing I discovered is that none of the workers spoke English. They looked at me funny, then eventually pointed at some guy with an ipod blaring. He appeared to be listening for a bit, but when I stopped, he mumbled somethign about coming back later when the supervisor was there.

I came back over lunch to see how we could work out sparing our robomower's electric fence... they were all eating lunch as I walked up. I got to practice my Spanish -- "Habla Englais?"

I still got the funny looks, but this time they pointed me to some guy sitting in a pickup, smoking a cigarette and talking on a cell phone. When he was done on the phone, he was very amicable to the idea that I had concerns about how things would work. Which is an excellent trait for someone taking out the front lawns of an entire neighborhood.

These guys weren't Verizon employees, they were workers contracted by Verizon to lay this conduit. Verizon would come later and lay the actual fiber.

This guy explained in general what all was going to happen, which was a bit too high level for the problem we might be dealing with. He realized I wasn't quite satisfied yet and offered to walk over to our house to take a look. On the way, he explained how they ran conduit underneath the road without digging up the road. Apparently, if you dig a deep hole... say, 6 feet on either side of the road, there's some contraption you can shoot through the dirt. He called it a missle, which you can follow up with the conduit. Interesting. In fact, that's what I said, "Interesting". He said "Right, spending all day digging holes and covering them up, it's real interesting." Heh. Ok.

Anyhow, when we got to my lawn, he pointed out the likely place they'd be digging, and I explained where the wire was and how it worked. We decided the best way to handle it would be to simply mark the wire, which could be done by putting spray paint on the grass.

I asked if the color mattered... he said if I did it with anything other than white or pink, the township would likely get up in arms and have someone out there trying to figure out what was going on... apparently, the township has some elaborate scheme of colors for what represents what. Red represents electrical lines, blue is water lines, orange is sewage, etc etc. Leaving white and pink. And, Verizon had already used white to mark off some other things.

So, I was going to be painting the yard pink. Lovely.

He also said that they were capable of splicing any wire they happened to cut, which works for me.

I was glad to have spoken with him, and raced off to buy a can of pink spray paint. After work, Shana and I worked to mark off the wire (which was hard, as it's really well covered at this point).

Well, the yard is now surrounded by pink. I saw the workers get started this morning, and they appeared to be moving the line that was in their path (which is probably a pain in the butt for them, as it's staked down every few inches). But, I was thrilled to see them moving it, there's no way they would have seen it without the paint we put on it.

With 15-20 minutes of work or so, we'll be able to put the moved cable back, rather than doing the entire area.

Which brings up another point, whenever I get the FIOS installed to my door, I think I'm finally going to have to upgrade, having 802.11b is no longer fast enough to keep up with the Internet connection :-)

So, I thought maybe the cops finally caught up with me. As I was pulled over shortly after 11pm while on the way home from my Monthly Perl Meeting, I wondered which of my crimes it was they wanted me for.

To my surprise, my only offense that bothered him was the fact that not one, but both of the lights by my license plate were out. Oops.

He didn't seem very concerned, but he proceeded to ask for my license and registration, which I dug up and gave him.

I didn't realize then, but after I arrived at home without incident, I looked at the registration I handed him, and discovered that it was expired. Heh.

So, I either gave it to him with enough confidence that he didn't notice the year, or he mumbled something about what an idiot I was, but let me go because he didn't feel like doing any paperwork. Hrm.

Update: For the record, I do actually have a current registration. I just handed him the wrong one :-)

Some days, I feel like I should be paying other people to be even allowed to log in to their server, let alone touch the configuration on anything that could be used in production.

Some notes for future reference --

First, DNS and BIND isn't magic. You can't just make stuff up and expect the computer to know what you mean (retardo). The DNS zone name in the named.conf file has to match the name of the domain it's authorative for. You can't just leave arbitrary parts of the domain off and hope it knows what you mean.

Second, if you spend half an hour making changes to a config file, and no matter what you do, it's just not having the expected effect on the service you're setting up, consider the idea that you're working on the wrong config file.

Also, if you're going to be so absent minded as to leave two copies of PHP on a server, both called 'php', both in your path, don't even bother to complain when it causes problems.

If you setup an anti-DoS module on your webserver... and when you benchmark your webserver, over half the requests fail, maybe it has something to do with the fact that it's doing what you configured it to do.

Okay, so this is just really cool.

The idea is that you want a snapshot of your filesystem at one moment in time. The larger your dataset is, the harder this becomes. If, while making a backup, something changes within your data, the snapshot is corrupt.... some data is newer than others, it's out of sync.

So, some would resort to shutting down all services while the backup takes place. The problem here is obvious, there are cases where shutting down service is undesirable.

LVM Snapshots to the rescue. We take an LVM partition... lets say it's 200GB, and we use the lvm tools to make a snapshot of it, onto a 1GB partition.

If we look at the new 1GB partition, we see all the data there that's available on the 200GB partition. Since our snapshot is created, if we create new data on the 200GB partition, it does *not* show up on the 1GB snapshot.

So, how in the world do we fit 200GB into 1GB? I'm tempted to simply say magic. But the real answer is that we don't have to.

Remember, it's a snapshot, a copy of a partition at one point in time. So really, we only need to make the 1GB partition look the way the 200GB partition did, when the snapshot was taken.

Basically, what that means is that any time there is a request to change data on the 200GB partition, we just copy the existing data over to the 1GB partition first, before it's changed. That is, the kernel blocks the update for just a moment while it makes the copy.

The only data stored on the 1GB partition is the data that changed since the snapshot was taken.

So, though it looks like the 1GB partition has 200GB of data, really, most of it still resides on the original partition. Now we can make a backup of the snapshot, then remove the partition. Very slick.