Feeding the Neurons

• The Infamous 2009 LimeWire Pizza Fiasco

July 2, 2009

• Hammering Usernames

July 1, 2009

• CouchDB Cluster

October 30, 2008

• Hive - A Petabyte Scale Data Warehouse using Hadoop

June 10, 2009

• Gates, Schmidt Discuss “Something Called The Internet” In 1994 (CLIP)

June 15, 2009

• Lies Entrepreneurs Tell Themselves

June 15, 2009

• Epitaph for an Entrepreneur

June 18, 2009

• Bit.ly’s Grand Plans, And Their Inevitable Clash With Digg: Bitly Now

June 29, 2009

Project of the Week: Install Gentoo Linux on an AlphaServer 4100 This system arrived with two 533 Mhz Alpha processors with 4MB of cache each and 4GB of RAM. It also had a storage array with three 9.1 GB drives, a working floppy drive and a broken CD-ROM drive. As the CD-ROM drive was not functional, I decided to install Gentoo by booting over the network. What follows is a list of steps that were taken in order to get Gentoo installed on this machine. Three seperate machines were used in this process:

• DHCP Server, an existing server that on the local network that would be used for DHCP and as a TFTP server.
• Existing Alpha Server, an existing server that was used to compile the netboot kernel for the new server.
• AS4100, the new server.

Each step will be prefixed with the server it was performed on.

1. DHCP Server: Installed DHCP.
   

   emerge dhcp

2. DHCP Server: Configured /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf as follows: ddns-update-style none; subnet 10.1.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 { pool { range dynamic-bootp 10.1.1.160 10.1.1.162; } option domain-name-servers 68.12.16.30; option routers 10.1.1.1; authoritative; allow bootp; allow booting; host alpha4100 { hardware ethernet 00:00:f8:09:4a:83; next-server 10.1.1.62; fixed-address 10.1.1.160; filename “/bootpfile”; }
3. DHCP Server: Started DHCP server:
   

   /etc/init.d/dhcpd start

4. DHCP Server: Installed tftp-hpa:
   

   emerge tftp-hpa

5. DHCP Server: Created /tftproot directory:
   

   mkdir /tftproot

6. Alpha Server: On another alpha machine I had already set up with Gentoo I built the bootpfile from the kernel sources I had configured previously (Making sure that I had support for serial console, NFS root mounting and kernel level IP configuration enabled in the kernel):
   

   make bootimage; make bootpfile

7. Alpha Server: Copied /usr/src/linux/arch/alpha/boot/bootpfile from to /tftproot on the DHCP Server
8. DHCP Server: Started the tftp server:
   

   /etc/init.d/in.tftpd start

9. DHCP Server: Created a directory called /diskless on my DHCP server:
   

   mkdir /diskless

10. DHCP Server: I already had nfs installed (emerge nfs) and configured on the system used as the DHCP server so I added the following line to /etc/exports:
    

    /diskless *(rw,no_root_squash)

11. DHCP Server: I then reloaded my exported filesystems on the DHCP Server:
    

    /etc/init.d/nfs reload

12. DHCP Server: Downloaded and extracted the Gentoo Stage 3 tarball to /diskless
13. DHCP Server: Edited /diskless/etc/fstab and changed root filesystem line to: 10.1.1.62:/diskless / nfs defaults 0 0
14. DHCP Server: Copied /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow to /diskless/etc/
15. Alpha Server: Built portmap and devfsd packages emerge �buildpkgonly portmap emerge �buildpkgonly devfsd
16. Alpha Server: Copy portmap and devfsd packages to /usr/portage/packages on DHCP Server
17. DHCP Server: Install portmap and devfsd into /diskless: ROOT=/diskless/ emerge -k portmap devfsd
18. DHCP Server: Remove package tarballs from /usr/portage/packages.
19. DHCP Server: Manually add portmap and sshd to default runlevel. cd /diskless/etc/runlevels/default ln -sf ../../init.d/portmap portmap ln -sf ../../init.d/sshd sshd
20. DHCP Server: Set the serial terminal device in /diskless/etc/inittab by changing ttyS0 to ttyS00
21. Boot the AS4100
22. The AS4100 should boot and be accessible through either the serial console or via ssh using the IP address that was assigned in the DHCP configuration file.
23. Setting up the AS4100 further involved following the setups in the Gentoo Handbook.

On September 13th, 2001, I was listening to the radio in my car, still reflecting on what had just occured two days before. As I drove down a vacant street, a song I had heard a hundred times before began to play. However, this time, the song had a new meaning to me. The song was Outside [Lyrics, Staind.com], by Aaron Lewis, lead singer of the rock band StainD [Official Site, Staind.com]. As I listened to the song, the images I had seen online and on television began to flash through my head. As soon as I got home that evening, I sat down at my workstation and fired up Adobe Premiere. I pulled out my StainD CD and imported a copy of the full band version of Outside into Premiere. I then began looking for images that I could piece together to create a lasting memory of how I felt that day. The video that you can get to below is the fruit of that labor. Put together in a few short hours, it is nowhere near perfect, but it is a raw look into how I personally felt in the aftermath of September 11th. By putting it out here in this format for all to see I hope that others, like myself, can go back and view it from time to time so that we never forget the magnitude of what happened that day. The video is a collection of purely still images, no video footage.

In Memory Of…