Jonathan Mills

My New BMW M3

jonmills — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:28:17 +0000

Here she is! My much-anticipated M3, purchased from a private seller in Winston-Salem. Until I turn my leased 328 back over to Performance BMW, it seems I’m the owner of two BMWs haha. Well, I can only drive one of them (the one that’s insured and happens to have a license plate.)

Now, it just needs iPod connectivity and we’ll be all set…

My BMW M3
(photos on google picasa)

Using RAID 10 on Mac OS X

jonmills — Thu, 28 May 2009 04:22:32 +0000

Now that your raid set is hosed, feel free to experiment with new things. Like a hybrid raid that uses a software RAID 0 to stripe across two hardware RAID 1 mirrors.

First, boot off your Mac OS X install DVD. Open RAID Utility. Use it to create two mirrors. Something like this:

Then, open Disk Utility and play with its software raid features until you make it stripe across those two mirrored volumes you just set up. Like this:

Now install Mac OS X on your new, hybrid, RAID 10, that can handle up to two disk failures (if they aren’t in the same mirror), and doesn’t become degraded in a disk failure scenario, and has very fast rebuild times. win-win-win.

Now, to go out and buy a big external drive to run Time Machine with…..

NEVER USE RAID 5. EVER.

jonmills — Thu, 28 May 2009 04:11:14 +0000

So, over a year ago I bought a Mac Pro with the Apple RAID Card. I was really disappointed to find that it didn’t support RAID 10, which is a form of nested raid whereby a RAID 0 (a stripe) is laid across two or more RAID 1’s (disk mirrors). Apple’s implementation allowed for RAID 0+1, which is the other way around: a mirror of two stripe sets usually. That is a much inferior setup, because if any single disk fails, then both disks in that striped pair are out — meaning half your mirror is down. In a RAID 10, you can lose a disk without penalty. You can even lose two disks as long as they aren’t on the same side of the stripe (i.e. aren’t both in the same mirrored pair) — again, without penalty.

In light of Apple’s foolish RAID 0+1 option on their raid card, I opted for RAID 5 instead. Against my better judgement. But with faith in Apple. AND IT FAILED. I lost one disk last week. I promptly shut down my machine in an orderly fashion (because SATA isn’t hot-swappable; only SAS can do that in a Mac Pro). I replaced the failed disk with an identical cold spare that I had on hand (holla). I booted up, I started the RAID Utility program, I marked the new disk a hot spare, the Utility added it back into my raid set and began rebuilding the array, which, of course, was in a degraded state. The rebuild finished — all lights were green — the RAID Utility told me that my RAID 5 set was “Viable (Good)”. Viola! Right?

Wrong. I rebooted the machine and it never came back up! I booted off the Mac OS X DVD and verified the volume in Disk Utility. Fail. Inaccurate record count. Unable to mount the volume. I re-open the RAID Utility and attempt a VERIFY procedure on the raid set. Fail. It won’t even start the routine.

In the end, I lost the entire 1.2 TB RAID 5, with about 600 gigs of my precious data on it. I had backups of all the most recent things, but lost some music, and quite a lot of movies I’d ripped from NetFlix DVD’s and — because of their size mainly — hadn’t backed-up onto my too-small external drive. Yeaaaah. *sigh*

Thanks, Apple.

Who doesn’t like kitten webcams

jonmills — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 04:26:52 +0000

The Crisis of Credit – Vimeo

jonmills — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 04:37:52 +0000

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.
Support the project and buy a T-Shirt! cafepress.com/crisisofcredit

Baracknophobia – ROFLMAO

jonmills — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 21:41:01 +0000

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M – Th 11p / 10c

Baracknophobia – Obey

thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Economic Crisis

Political Humor

I’m buying a house

jonmills — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 20:41:39 +0000

Yep, it’s true. And why not? The economic conditions are perfect. It just makes sense, and so I took the plunge. I found the house below and got it under contract less than two days later. This past week I compared mortgage lenders and finally decided to go with Bank of America on a 30-year fixed rate FHA mortgage at 4.75%. I uploaded the photos to my Google Picasa album. Check it out:

20 Thorne Ridge Dr, Durham, NC 27713

Hello Blog, it’s been awhile

jonmills — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 20:35:30 +0000

Okay, so I haven’t updated ye olde blog in awhile. I’ve been – ahem – busy. Perhaps I need to borrow ibiblio’s bloggy to help out. Meh, I never was much of a blogger anyway.

The good news is that in the past few months, I’ve been focusing on things I care about, like doing more reading outside of computer-related fields. Also going to the gym, and rock climbing.

I also landed a new job, as a unix systems administrator at Tekelec, Inc. (My thanks to Bob Minowicz and the good people at ResolvIT, like Kate Lewis, for assisting.)

One of my tasked projects at Tekelec is wrangling in their unix systems with something called Puppet. It’s pretty neat and I’m psyched about it. Plus, it’s always good to be the Puppetmaster. Getting it to run on Solaris 2.6 — now that’s a different story.

As of today, I’ve migrated this blog to my own virtual hosting and updated to Wordpress 2.7.1. Now, maybe I will actually spend some time and select a half-way decent theme…

Net Neutrality Advocates In Charge Of Obama Team Review of FCC

jonmills — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 18:17:59 +0000

Net Neutrality Advocates In Charge Of Obama Team Review of FCC

Take that Michael Powell! mwahahahaha! Obama picks Susan Crawford and Kevin Werbach to review the FCC for the Obama transition team. And while I’m not familiar with Werbach, I’ve read a lot of Crawford’s papers while researching Network Neutrality issues. She is the BOMB. I used to read her blog, too. This is making me feel super confident in Obama’s handling of an issue I really care about, and uber-proud of my vote. Obama will be protectin’ the interwebs for all us geeks! woohoo!

Motricity Sues Former Top Executive

jonmills — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 17:48:57 +0000

Motricity Saga Continues: Company Sues Former Top Executive

“When Steve Elfman, one of Motricity’s highest-ranking executives, left to join Sprint Nextel earlier this year, it appeared to be a bad sign for Motricity, which had just paid $135 million for Elfman’s company, InfoSpace Mobile. But in an interview with us a couple months later, Motricity’s CEO Ryan Wuerch sounded upbeat, and suggested some potential upsides to his departure: “He’s the president at Sprint (NYSE: S), which is a customer.” Sprint was never a good customer, right? “No, it was never a good InfoSpace (NSDQ: INSP) customer, but for Motricity it has been a customer for awhile.”

“Well, that optimism apparently vanished quickly: Just two days after the interview appeared in mocoNews, Motricity sued Elfman, according to the Kansas City Business Journal. The suit alleges that Elfman knew Motricity would only buy the InfoSpace mobile business if he committed to take the job of president and COO and stay for two years after the sale closed.

from mocoNews.net

Personally, I have no opinion on the matter. None whatsoever.