It’s been a few months since my last post.. I’ve definitely let my blog go by the wayside.  It just seems I’ve been running out of things to tinker with.  But, when I do get around to doing something that I can’t find much information on while googling I try and document it somewhere.

Recently, I acquired a 1TB drive for my Gaming Desktop.  I wasn’t able to afford additional hard drives when I purchased that system and as such have just been running with a 2GB swap, 20GB root, and ~478GB for a home.  No fault tolerance, and no way to add more space when my home gets full aside adding a new drive and making a new partition and mount-point.  So, when I got the 1TB drive I came up with the best I could do under the circumstances (I believe).

Optimally, you want the same size hard drives for a RAID array.  However, with linux software raid it’s really irrelevant as it just uses partitions of a drive, not whole drives themselves.  So I should be able to RAID 1 a 500GB partition on the 500GB drive (whole disk) and a 500GB partition on the 1TB drive (so half the drive) and put an LVM on top for future expansion.  Now, googling for LVM on Raid for Ubuntu will invariably get you lots of results, like this one or this one.

Unfortunately, almost all of the documentation is old with 9.04 or previous being the ones setup on, and typically using LILO if true LVM on Raid or having a /boot outside the LVM for grub and most using the alternative installer CD.  With 9.10 and up getting grub2 by default it’s supposed to have support for booting directly to LVM partitions now negating the need for a separate /boot or LILO.

I wanted to know if it would be possible to manually setup my drives using the standard mdadm and lvm2 commands, and then use the graphical installer to select my LVM’s, install, and boot.  This is what I did.

I know I’ve been missing lately; I have gotten myself pretty busy between WoW, setting up an HA/LB (High Availability/Load Balancing) web and database server(s) for a client and just time with the family.

If you haven’t seen it before, Ultra Monkey is quite a simple and nice set of tools to manage an HA/LB configuration – and it has several good example configurations to get you started.

If you have read my previous articles you may have seen that I have an N810 internet tablet.  There is a new device out now that is the successor to that, the N900 cell phone.  I have written a small PyQt4 application for the N900 called pyPianobar.  Because this is PyQt4, if you grab the deb and extract it on your Linux Desktop (such as Ubuntu), you can actually use it there too! (You’ll need to install pianobar first)  This gives you Pandora Radio on your desktop, or your N900 :).

I’m currently trying to save up for an N900 so I can do some more tinkering, but also been waiting to see what will come of the new MeeGo (what a horrible name) that spawned as the result of an Intel (Moblin)/Nokia (Maemo) drunken one-night stand.

I’ve setup and been using Moblin on my Acer Aspire One – and it’s not too bad.  It’s childish, but so is everything now days (ever seen an iPhone? Ugh.)  Once I see for sure that the community will get a decent MeeGo port over to the N900 that is likely to be my next phone, even if it is $500+.  Yes, I’m saying it’s worth it :).

I don’t want the next Nokia device because they’ve already said it will be a capacitive touch screen like the Android and iPhone mess and capacitive is just not as accurate as resistive.  I also like using a Stylus when I want to be particular.  As an example, watch this – specifically the very last 30 seconds of the video or so.  It shows a very nice Avatar drawing done with the default Sketch app on the phone.  I just don’t think something like that is possible on capacitive.. and I don’t need multi-touch.

On the WoW front, I’ve written a small addon for Feral Druid’s that uses the Faceroller mod.  It will show a decent kitty rotation for high-DPS making it quite a bit simpler to keep track of everything.  The next update, which hopefully will be soon, will include a minor prediction system and a bear rotation for tanking.

As you can see, I keep myself entertained :).  I never can just “do” something, I have to toy with it – code something for it, tinker with it… eventually break it :D.  I still haven’t gotten the hang of the whole Blogging scene though and as such my blog tends to fall by the way-side.  There’s already so many out there on any given topic that it’s usually just a waste for me to add yet another reference or complaint for XYZ in yet another blog.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed the update – check out the N900, WoW and Ultra Monkey someday :).

I realized that I have been somewhat neglecting my blog of late.  I have a very valid and perfectly acceptable excuse however – I have re-addicted myself to WoW.   World of Warcraft has, of course, become a perfectly acceptable reason to miss work, ignore your spouse, neglect your kids, and make new “real” friends that are approximately the size of my pinky.

Personally, I’ll never quite have the character or personal fortitude and dedication that my fellow (WoWites?  WoWers?… Idiots?) have.  While I will admit to sometimes being sucked in and staying awake until 2 AM in the morning… somehow I manage to pull my lazy ass out of bed at 6:30 and still make it to work on time.  Every night, somewhere between the hours of 6-8 pm, I even manage to get off the computer and go sit with my wife and kids around the dinner table and eat something so I don’t wind up being found dead at my computer from starvation.

Maybe it’s just me… but I seem to be perfectly capable of leading a normal, everyday, life outside of Azeroth.  It’s called self-control people.

Unfortunately…. my blog did suffer :).  So, while my real life has remained in tact, my online life has shifted from re-compiling software, breaking internet tablets, reloading ATI graphics drivers on my Gamer for the millionth time, and blogging… to looking at the ass of a cartoon character running around pretending to be bad as hell.

To add a note and further nerdify myself I shall say that I actually preferred Everquest 2 to WoW; but unfortunately everyone I know plays WoW and I’ve heard that saying “When in Rome…” and all that.  Guess I’m becoming a conformist.

On a more serious note, I have managed to switch myself to HandBrake instead of using my custom mencoder scripts mentioned in some previous articles – but it required compiling the SVN version as the released version doesn’t support Karmic Koala.  Or at least didn’t… it appears that they now have a 9.10 deb available and ready on their download site.  Mayhaps I’ll try it.  Anyway, HandBrake has proved quite easy in selecting my MKV specifications and ripping movies.

I missed the update last month to the ATI drivers, hard to keep track now that Ubuntu has permitted me to be a lazy bastard and get my drivers direct from the Karmic repositories.  No more compiling or manual installing hassle anymore.  That also means though that I no longer have to keep refreshing ATI’s website waiting for the “next release” to fix some glitch.  For the past couple months my Gamer has been running flawless…………. playing WoW :).

Oh, I don’t think I blogged this so I shall mention it here:  I finally got a stable overclock with my Gamer that I am content with!  After many, many, many….. and many more…. reboots changing between every possible combination of FSB, voltages, and Memory timings (since I do not have an AMD Black Edition processor) that I could think of I finally got it.  Initially I was *very* conservative about my CPU voltages which was causing my instability problems.. I did not want to go too far into the “red” according to my motherboard on the stock cooler.  I feared I’d cause some real damage.

I broke down and to ease my mind I bought a Xigmatek Dark Knight with an AM2 Type-X Adapter to allow me to mount it horizontally on the processor.  After this I cranked up the voltages.  I ended up with a FSB of 250@1.5v, the cpu multi dropped to x14.5, my memory set to 1333mhz with 6-6-6-24 timings giving me a 3.625ghz.  So I basically have an AMD Phenom II 945 acting as a 965 but without the Black Edition.  Probably should have just bought the 965 :).  My temperatures now never break 40c, even under a torture test.  It gives me great joy just thinking about that :).

Let’s see.. is there any other nonsense that most of you won’t care about anyway?  Oh, I wrote a small “Texts from Last Night” RSS app for the Android phone I have, but I haven’t added any finishing touches to it or published it to the market yet.  All it is currently is an RSS feed that pulls only from TFLN, may as well get a normal RSS feed app and just add TFLN’s URL to it :).  It was more of a proof of concept for me anyway, as I haven’t fully decided if I want to get into the whole mobile phone development scene.  So much work, all my stuff would be free so very little profit, and… I got WoW to play damnit!

So there we have it… I easily could have filled 3-4 whole blog posts with each of those topics individually if I was truly an attention whore… but I’m not completely.  Honest.  So instead we get a single blog post spanning several completely unrelated topics and jumbles together into an incoherent mess!!!  I blame WoW…. everyone else does!

Go play WoW!  Maybe you too can join the thousands of people that seem to ruin their lives over a damned game!

Today’s post is just my thoughts on my most recent class + exam.  The RHCE is considered by many people to be one of the best (and most difficult) Linux-based certifications that an SA can get.  For that reason, I have desperately wanted this certification for quite some time, but I could never afford the cost.

Luckily, a bunch of SA’s at my current job got together and submitted for our employer to front the cost of 2 Boot Camp-like courses and exams back to back.  I got in the second one.  The course we took wasn’t the RHCE 300 boot camp, it was a modified version offered by Guru Labs called the GL301.  I do believe this course was very helpful in me passing my exam with the score that I did (you’ll see below) – but I likely would have passed the test without it.

All of the blogs and forums that I read from so many people talk about how painful and difficult the RHCE exam was that it almost makes the exam seem godlike and impossible.  I actually think all of that sort of made the experience almost disappointing.

I did come across this guys blog here that explained how he “self-trained” himself to ace his exam.

Like him, I don’t want to “downplay” the significance of the RHCE certificate, or make anyone think they can sleep their way through the test – but it most certainly isn’t an impassable exam by any measure, which is definitely the impression you get when reading other blogs and forums. I had no books or study material beyond the book given by the boot camp we took, and a CentOS 5 virtual machine in VirtualBox.

I personally have had very little “enterprise” linux experience with employers – most of my knowledge comes from about 10 years of tinkering with just about every flavor of linux I could get my hands on.  From Red Hat 7 through Fedora Core 4 I used Red Hat a lot, after FC4 however I sort of drifted away and into debian based systems with a few gentoo servers.  Now I am almost exclusively Ubuntu for the desktop, and Debian for a server.  This was one of my biggest concerns with going for the RHCE, I was under the impression I would need to know “red hat” specific ways of doing things.  While I am, of course, bound by Red Hat to STFU about anything exam related – I’ll say I was very pleased to discover that the “how” was irrelevant.. all that mattered is “Does it work?”

Just to sort of put the difficulty of the exam into perspective, however, I’ll say this: In the first group of people that took the exam (approx 13-14 people) – we had 1 RHCE, and 1 RHCT pass.  I do not know yet how many passed or failed in my class.  The thing to note about this though is the majority of the people that went with me or before me were not full Systems Administrators, they were DBA’s or some other Application Administrator that was required to get an OS certification.  So, if you don’t find yourself routinely administering a complete linux system very often – you’re definitely going to want brush up on everything you see in the RHCE Prep Guide that Red Hat is “nice” enough to give us.  It’s about all the legal information you can get about the exam.

Now for my Results:

The results of your RHCE Certification Exam are reported below.  The
RHCE Certification Exam allows candidates to qualify for the
Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) and Red Hat Certified Technician
(RHCT) certificates.  Please note that the RHCE designation is
understood to both include and supersede the RHCT designation.

RHCE requirements: score of 70 or higher on RHCT components (100 points)
score of 70 or higher on RHCE components (100 points)

RHCT requirement:  score of 70 or higher on RHCT components (100 points)

RHCT components score:                             100.0
RHCE components score:                             100.0

RHCE Certification:                                PASS

Congratulations — you are now certified as a Red Hat Certified
Engineer!

I finished all of the requirements in 1.5 hours, and spent the remaining 2 hours simply testing my configurations and even going above and beyond the requirements in terms of security (because I was getting bored).

This exam is definitely passable, but be sure you have the experience listed on Red Hat’s website.  I strongly recommend taking the Red Hat pre-Assessment questionaire – but also recommend you give them a fake email address and phone number unless you want to be constantly harassed by “Red Hat training” specialists that want to figure out when you want to take a course.  It’s actually quite annoying and my biggest frown at Red Hat.  Just because I took your pre-assessment quizzes doesn’t mean I want you to contact me to “help me out”.   Red Hat isn’t the only business that employs this tactic of course… but I dislike it anywhere it’s used.

Thanks for stopping by, I’m going to go celebrate my Ace of the RHCE exam!

Happy Studying!

Looks like ATI posted their official 9.10 drivers yesterday.  As always you can grab them here.  These are in the official release notes:

Resolved Issues
The following section provides a brief description of resolved issues with the latest
version of the ATI CatalystTM Linux software suite. These include:

• “aticonfig -xinerama=on” no longer results in different dimensions and DPI settings between Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04
• CAL SDK samples will no longer throw an error message while executing on the second ASIC
• Playback with UVD acceleration no longer causes Mplayer to terminate abruptly or display blank video
• Display corruption no longer observed after changing TV format from NTSC to PAL and restarting X server
• System now responds properly when multi-display mode is being configured
• Pressing the “Detect Displays” button in Catalyst Control Center will now detect newly hotplugged displays properly
• System no longer becomes unresponsive when playing VC-1 or H.264 content in dual stream with SD MPEG content
• Changes to gamma values are no longer applied to the wrong display when X is restarted
• With CrossFire enabled, pressing the “Detect Displays” button no longer causes the “3D” settings drop down menu to expand in the Catalyst Control Center Display Manager
• Desktop rotation changes will no longer cause segmentation fault in clone mode
• Systems with both CRT and LVDS displays connected will now respond properly when starting the X server

Known Issues

• With CrossFire enabled, system may become unresponsive when switching to DC
  (battery) mode with full-screen applications running
• Desktop resolution changes through Catalyst Control Center might not be applied
  after restarting X
• System may become unresponsive when toggling between virtual terminals in multi-head configuration with applications running
• System may become unreponsive after executing specific combinations of XRandR reflections and rotations
• X server may fail to start GUI Desktop Manager after enabling secondary adapter using Catalyst Control Center
• [Ubuntu 9.04] Animated busy mouse cursor may disappear or flicker in clone mode
• Corruption may be visible after hotplugging a display and doing a Virtual Terminal switch
• [RHEL 5.3] The secondary display may become disabled after resuming from sleep/hibernation in big desktop mode
• Screen rotation may result in corrupt video playback
• [SUSE 11.1] Unplugging the secondary display and terminating the X server (Ctrl + Alt + Backspace) may cause the primary display to become blank and display corruption
• fgl_glxgears application may fail to function and cause the system to stop responding while performing OpenGL GLX Remote Rendering
• In dual-head mode, performing a XRandR command (rotation or screen resolution change) on screen 1 may cause both screens to display corruption
• Segmentation fault may occur or system may display error during boot up if X is stopped in Dual-Head mode

People at phoronix of course have a thread going, and so far they haven’t been screaming foul too much.  But it has just been a day :).  There isn’t too much to say about this release, however, as Ubuntu Karmic has had 9.10 drivers in their repo’s since last month. I will say that I’ve been gaming in Left 4 Dead and WoW in wine since they were added to Karmic and I’ve had very little problems. So far my biggest complaints have been in video playback with my HDTV. Overall, I still am very happy with ATI’s new support model for Linux.

So, here’s to waiting for 9.11 – hope they come out earlier in the month than 9.10 did!

Happy Gaming!