How I Relearned the Consequences of Improper Monitoring

I had just lost the RAID array that hosts my ESXi data store. I didn’t yet know that’s what had happened, but with some investigation, some embarrassment, and a bit of swearing, I would find out that an oversight on my part three years ago would lead to this happening.

I first realized there was trouble when every VM on the host became unresponsive. Most notably, the Plex Media Server fell off the network which caused the episode of Modern Family that we were watching to immediately freeze. What was odd to me is that while the VMs were unreachable, the ESXi host itself was fine. I could ping it, ssh to it and load it up with the vSphere client. The first wave of panic hit me when I found messages like this in the host’s event log:

RAID Volume is Disconnected
RAID Volume is Disconnected

This was quickly confirmed from the ssh shell by looking for the data store and finding that a) the symlink for the volume (RAID1) pointed to a non-existent directory and b) the reported size of the volume was a paltry 450MB compared to the 930GB I expected.

RAID1 Volume isn't Mounted
RAID1 Volume isn’t Mounted

Since I knew from prior experience Continue reading

4 reasons Microsoft Teams will kill Slack… and 4 reasons it won’t

Microsoft Teams is nearing its official debut. Designed as a hub for teamwork, the cloud-based Teams gives employees access to content, tools, people and conversations within the Office 365 environment. Groups and subgroups can communicate and collaborate using text-based chat, file sharing, and video and voice chats.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

51% off Foval 150PSI Car Digital Tire Pressure Air Gauge – Deal Alert

This tire pressure guage from Fovsal features a lighted nozzle and display screen for ultimate visibility in low light, and doubles as a vehicle emergency tool with LED flashlight, car window breaker, seat belt cutter, and red safety light.  It averages 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon, where its typical list price of $20 has been reduced 51% to just $9.87. See it now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Raspberry Pi’s new computer for industrial applications goes on sale

The new Raspberry Pi single-board computer is smaller and cheaper than the last, but its makers aren't expecting the same rush of buyers that previous models have seen.The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 will be more of a "slow burn," than last year's Raspberry Pi 3, its creator Eben Upton predicted.That's because it's designed not for school and home use but for industrial applications. To make use of it, buyers will first need to design a product with a slot on the circuit board to accommodate it and that, he said, will take time.The Compute Module 3 has the same four-core, 64-bit Broadcom BCM2837 processor and 1GB of RAM as the credit-card-sized Raspberry Pi 3, but is less than half the size and missing the Ethernet, USB, SD Card and display sockets of its larger cousin. It also has no Wi-Fi.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OPML-to-Markdown Conversion Script

In this post, I’d like to share a script I wrote to help with converting Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML) documents to Markdown. If you read the recent update on my Linux migration plans, you may recall that I identified OPML files (created in OmniOutliner) as an area where some work was going to be required. This script is the result of my efforts in this area.

<aside>Before I continue, I want to very briefly point out that this script was written to help in my specific use case. It’s quite likely that you’ll want or need to adjust the behaviors of this script in order to meet the needs of your particular use case.</aside>

This script takes advantage of two tools: pandoc and sed. pandoc is a third-party tool that is easily installed on Ubuntu using apt or apt-get. (I haven’t checked other Linux distributions, but I suspect packages are available there as well.) pandoc is also available for OS X, making it a very handy cross-platform tool to have in my toolchest. (See this post for more information on how you can use pandoc in a Markdown-heavy environment.) sed, of course, is a Continue reading

Book Report: Machete Season

Overview

Jean Hatzfeld’s Machete Season: the Killers in Rwanda Speak is a much different book than the Pol Pot history that I covered a couple of weeks ago. It’s harder to write about, because it’s just what the title describes: the killers in their own words, interspersed with short contextual explanations of the events surrounding the Rwandan genocide.

Hatzfeld – who has also written two books about the horrific Baltic wars of the 1990s – argues that many of what the mainstream media call genocides should be described as war crimes instead: brutal, unacceptable mass killings of defenseless humans that nonetheless take place in the the context of reducing a population’s ability to wage war. Genocide, he argues, is a term that should be reserved to describe an effort to completely exterminate a population and leave it incapable of ever recovering. In the Rwandan genocide, for example, the Hutu killers often preferred to murder women and children first, because it would leave the Tutsi population less capable of carrying on to the next generation.

History

Modern Rwanda has three main ethnic groups: the majority Hutu, the minority Tutsi, and a small population of Twa jungle-dwelling hunter-gatherers. At the time of Continue reading

Looking Ahead To The Next Platforms That Will Define 2017

The old Chinese saying, “May you live in interesting times,” is supposed to be a curse, uttered perhaps with a wry smile and a glint in the eye. But it is also, we think, a blessing, particularly in an IT sector that could use some constructive change.

Considering how much change the tech market, and therefore the companies, governments, and educational institutions of the world, have had to endure in the past three decades – and the accelerating pace of change over that period – you might be thinking it would be good to take a breather, to coast for …

Looking Ahead To The Next Platforms That Will Define 2017 was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Pot dispensary IT director asks for help after tracking system software was hacked

Of course, in the digital world, anyone can claim to be anyone. Yet a person claiming to be the IT director of a medical marijuana dispensary took to Slashdot in hopes of receiving legal advice after the point of sale system the MMJ used was hacked.Denver-based MJ Freeway, a medical marijuana “seed-to-sale” tracking software company experienced a “service interruption” – that turned out to be a hack – a week ago on January 8. The hack of the point-of-sale system left more than 1,000 retail cannabis clients in 23 states unable to track sales and inventories. Without a way to keep records in order to comply with state regulations, some dispensaries shut down, while others reverted to tracking sales via pen and paper.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Pot dispensary IT director asks for help after tracking system software was hacked

Of course, in the digital world, anyone can claim to be anyone. Yet a person claiming to be the IT director of a medical marijuana dispensary took to Slashdot in hopes of receiving legal advice after the point of sale system the MMJ used was hacked.Denver-based MJ Freeway, a medical marijuana “seed-to-sale” tracking software company experienced a “service interruption” – that turned out to be a hack – a week ago on January 8. The hack of the point-of-sale system left more than 1,000 retail cannabis clients in 23 states unable to track sales and inventories. Without a way to keep records in order to comply with state regulations, some dispensaries shut down, while others reverted to tracking sales via pen and paper.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Arris in bid for Brocade network unit: sources | Reuters

Arris wants to buy the Ruckus wireless business.

Arris is looking to buy Brocade’s network edge business, which is the most valuable of the assets being sold, according to the sources. Arris is not in talks to buy other parts of the business being divested by Brocade that include data centers, switching and software, the sources added.

Apparently talks to buy other parts of the business in whole or part are not working out.

Broadcom had divided up Brocade’s divestiture into three pieces after an earlier deal to sell the whole business to a private equity firm fell apart late last year, according to the sources. A private equity firm could still step up to buy all three pieces, the people said.

Arris in bid for Brocade network unit: sources | Reuters

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Response: Codec 2 700C | Rowetel

Acceptable quality open source voice codec in 700 bps

My endeavor to produce a digital voice mode that competes with SSB continues. For a big chunk of 2016 I took a break from this work as I was gainfully employed on a commercial HF modem project. However since December I have once again been working on a 700 bit/s codec. The goal is voice quality roughly the same as the current 1300 bit/s mode. This can then be mated with the coherent PSK modem, and possibly the 4FSK modem for trials over HF channels.

Codec 2 700C | Rowetel

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