As a continuation to my last post about Comcast and their lovely DTA’s, I had left the “broke” one connected and running for 5 days. It never did sync up, so I decided this morning to take it to the local Comcast office and get a new one. So I made the trip out there this morning and got a new one still in the box. Once I got home I plugged it in and tried to activate it, but still a no go. I just kept saying “We’ve detected an interruption in your service…. Please call comcast”
I contacted Comcast and they sent some “special hits” to the box, but after an hour or so, nothing had changed. I then disconnected the box from my in-house cable system and connected it to the cable that came in from the pole. Still no go, this tells me that it is something on Comcast’s side and not my house cable plant. So I talked to the Comcast person some more and she scheduled a tech to come to my house next Saturday. ( I refuse to take off 8 hours during the week to wait on them).
About 40 minutes later, I got a call from Tony from Comcast in Pittsburgh. He saw my request and called to try and help me “hook the dta up”. I explained what was going on, and he pulled up my account and said “oh I see what is wrong, let me call you right back, I need to ask some one something”. Then about 5 minutes later, the box all of the sudden came to life and was working. He called back to make sure it was, to which I said yes and thanked him for helping out. He said there was some “coding” problem on their side that was causing the problem. So I bet the first box was fine after all, just no one looked at where he did to see what was wrong.
Comcast has decided to “digitize” everything, leaving maybe only local OTA channels on the analog side of their cable plant. I have seen this coming for a while and it has been making me more frustrated as time goes on. Right now I have 4 TV’s in the house 2 of which are analog only, and 2 of which are NTSC/ATSC/ClearQAM capable. 2 weeks ago Comcast sent me a letter saying that “if you don’t have a cable box or DTA (Digital Transport Adapter) on each of your TV’s you will cease to get the all the channels you get now on the analog side. I thought oh great here it comes, more money to the big ass Comcast to be able to continue to use my current analog tv’s.
So I went to Comcast’s “DigitalNow” web site and started reading that they would give you up to 2 DTA’s FREE in order for up to 2 TV’s to continue to receive limited/expanded basic channels. So I placed the order for 2 of them. They were supposed to be here on Monday, however when I checked UPS’ website, it showed that Comcast did not put my correct address on the shipping label and UPS couldn’t deliver the package. I called UPS and they refused to deliver it or change the address as Comcast had placed a mark on it that only they could change it. So I called Comcast and spent almost a half an hour on the phone (both wait time and talking time) trying to make them understand what they had did wrong. They finally had the light bulb moment and said she had to call me back.
She called me back and said that I had to go to UPS to pick it up. (UPS told me that they would charge them to change the address on it, so Comcast cheaps out again.) I stopped by UPS on Tuesday night to pick up the package and came home to hook them up. Well as luck would have it one is DOA and won’t sync or activate at all. I let it sit for about 2 hours before I contacted Comcast. Needless to say their online help people were useless.. Basically told me to unplug it and plug it back in and then let it sit for 45 minutes. Well I left it sit for 1440 minutes, and still does not work. So now I am going to have to take it to the local office to get a new one.
The one thing that makes me made about these little DTA’s (They are a PACE DC50X box), is that they only get the limited and expanded basic channels. When I signed up for them, it didn’t say this anywhere. I was assuming that it would be able to receive all the channels I currently get with the regular set top box and tivo. However while I was talking to the online rep, that is when I found out that they only get limited and expanded basic.
So now I was even more pissed, because I was under the assumption that I was going to be able to watch the full spectrum (minus the ondemand and hd channels) on these 2 tv’s. Well the reason why they only get limited and expanded basic is easy to understand when you learn that these aren’t really cable boxes. They are in fact just a little QAM tuner, the same that is in most new TV’s. The only difference between it and your TV one is that all the limited and extended basic channels have the privacy flag set. (http://www.anandtech.com/show/3570). In simplest form, these little DTA’s can receive channels that have the privacy flag set, whereas your TV “ignores” them because they are lightly encrypted.
What does this mean? Well we have went back to the 70’s and 80’s when it was required that each TV have a “cable box” because they don’t know how to tune the channels, once again making TV’s not really a TV but more of a monitor. In reality what is happening is Comcast is trying to pack so much “crap” in to the cable lines that they can no longer put filters on the cables coming in to your house to “block” channels you are not supposed to be getting. The kicker to this whole problem is I have heard that Comcast is thinking about getting rid of the limited basic tier (basicly local channels only) and making every one get the “digital starter” which is the equivalent of all the channels that these DTA’s can receive. So why the hell doesn’t Comcast just take the privacy flag off, junk these DTA’s (for those people who have TV’s with QAM tuners in them), and set the PSIP values so that the channels “appear” on the correct channels.
Not only would it make sense, less hardware they would have to maintain. Less power consumption for the consumers (you can NOT turn these DTA’s off, there is no power button, and if you have the DTA off for a while supposedly you have to reactivate it?) . It would also be less confusing for people so they don’t have yet another remote to have around the house.
So I plead with Comcast, Just make the channels in ClearQAM and stop the box madness. Because I will not pay any more money to get “real cable boxes” when you are forcing everyone to have a cable box for every tv in the house.
Havn’t really posted anything Solaris / Unix related in a while, but Oracle gave me a reason to do so today. They released Solaris 11 Express today. So like any “Sun Geek” I downloaded all the different installers; text, automated, live cd, and the full ips package stuff. First up on the install was the text based installer. Needless to say if you are used to the old Solaris text based installer, this one is almost 100% different. The colors are different, there is next to no customization of the install (you can’t do any network config other than auto(dhcp) or none), can’t pick what Filesystem you will use for root (glad I started doing all zfs roots a couple of months back.)
Some of the things I have noticed:
1. Sudo is now installed, and the first user you create (during the install) is automatically given full “root” access via sudo.
2. Seems all of the commands that were in /usr/sfw/bin are now in /usr/bin with symlinks in /usr/sfw/bin
3. There is a new /usr/gnu structure that has a lot of the GNU based commads, one cool thing [date “+%s”] now works and prints out the date since the EPOCH.
4. $PATH has /usr/gnu/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin by default. Which means doing an ls -la looks different than when using the /usr/bin/ls -la. This means it may break scripts ….
5. It seems that when installing in a VMWare environment (I was using Fusion at the moment and will try with ESX later this weekend) that on the first reboot, it will hang indefinitely. You have to do a force reboot or shutdown and restart to get it to “boot”
6. The graphical startup is sort of cool, but it “hides” all the boot messages unless you hit a key to show them
7. cc and gcc are NOT installed by default. 🙁
8. showrev doesn’t exist any more.
9. Secure by default is enabled
10. IPfilter is enabled by default (no rules though)
This year has been a busy and expensive year. Started off in February with some “snow” in the attic. I decided to add some more insulation to the attic to help out with the heating and cooling:
Attic before workAttic after installation of R-30 InsulationShowing depth of new insulation
Then in June my clothes washer decided to go on the fritz, so I had to replace it. This is when the rest of the money started going fast. In the beginning of July we had some really bad rain storms. I came home one night to find water in the garage around the walls. Nothing I hadn’t seen before, but it had been almost 6 years since I had seen it. What I found next was not what I had expected. I walked in to my finished family room and noticed that the carpet was wet. It seems that there was so much rain that it had come in to the garage and in to the family room through the basement wall. The carpet was completely soaked. Here is a pic of the carpet wet. The dark blue area is just part of what was soaked, that is where the carpet had started showing the water because the pad was completely soaked there.:
Family room carpet soaked with water
For reference this is what the carpet looked like before:
Carpet before water
Here is what I found when I started ripping up the carpet:
soaked carpet padsoaked carpet pad and carpet
What the rain did to the drive way that I had recoated with 24 tons of gravel 7 months earlier:
rain ditch in driveway
So in order to fix the “water” problem, I had Bakers Waterproofing from Pennsylvania come and install a water guard system in my basement. In the simplest terms it is a gutter that is placed under the concrete floor that allows the water to go in to a sump pump to be pumped out of the house. They warranty it for the life of the house as long as I live here, or for 25 years to the next person that owns it.
Before they came, I encased the area they were to work in in plastic. The family room looked like one of Dexter’s kill rooms:
before the demo in the family room, looks like dexters kill room
Here are the pics of some of the demolishing of the basement to install it:
part of the garage floor tore uptools of the first day of demomid-demotrench dug in the garagesump pump setunderneath stairs going in to family roomtrench in family roomwater guard with sump pumpwater guard placedstarting to pour new concretenew concrete poured in garageconcrete poured with de-humidifier access port
After the concrete has dried the family room looked like this:
family room before new carpet
So now that the basement had been fixed, something else had to happen. And true to Murphy, my air conditioner died the week that Bakers was here to do the basement work. So I had to have Air Service come out to replace my central air conditioning system.
During AC Install with rain
So what better way to finish out the summer of money spending then getting ready to replace the deck that was getting too old. Here is a before pic of the deck when I bought the house:
deck in 2003
As you can see it has a little bit of a bow in the middle of it. Fast forward 7 years and this is what it looks like:
deck in 2010deck in 2010 #2
This pic really shows the bow, (3 inches). Needless to say who ever built the deck had absolutely no clue how to build a deck or to properly support or anchor it. Picture of the deck with it over half way torn down. Thanks to my Bosch Drill and Saw:
deck mid-demo
What made me mad (but sort of glad for the demo part) was that they had only “sunk” the support posts about 3 to 4 inches in the “concrete” footer. The footer was only about 5 inches thick and no where near code.:
end of deck post
One of the posts had a nice amount of termites in it:
deck post eaten by termites
And a final picture with the deck down. I left the ledger boards for now:
deck gone
One thing I forgot to mention, and you can see in this pic, is I had new seamless gutters installed. During the winter storms we had, part of the gutter near the back bed room got bent so far that the water would run off the roof and hit the back side of the gutter and bounce back against the house.
And the final thing that I have done this year is to get new carpet put in the family room so that I can try and get it back in to order before the holiday season:
another before pic of family roomcarpet pulled up, getting ready to remove the padpad pulled upnew pad installedstretching new carpetafter carpet doneafter carpet done 2 (before furniture)after carpet done (where water was)after carpet done (family room entry way)
So what will 2011 bring? Hopefully I will get the deck replaced early in the year so I can enjoy it and some grilling during the summer. I also need to repaint the walls in the family room. ( Was wanting to do it before the carpet got installed, but they came to install it earlier than they had thought they would since it was special order carpet. ) I also hope to refinish the master bedroom in 2011 as well.
In this day and age everyone is trying to squeeze the last little drop out of every technological advance that they can. One of the technologies that is “big” is called Thin Provisioning. Basic in short terms, thin provisioning is where you tell a computer that you have X GB of disk (usually from a SAN or in VMware) but in reality you only have <X GB of disk backing it. This is big right now in SAN and VMware because enterprise disk is “expensive”. But is it really worth the cost? No!
See the main reason people (SAN or VMware admins) use Thin Provisioning is to “save” disk space. Say you have a server that performs one function and does not really use a lot of disk space, say a DNS server (either virutalized or physical booting from a SAN). Now most admins usually like to keep all their servers with a standard config. So for the sake of this post, lets say the boot disk for this server is 50GB. Now once the OS and app is installed on it, it may only be using 4 GB of that 50GB disk.
Before thin provisioning that 50GB as far as a SAN admin is concerned is 50GB used. So in comes Thin Provisioning, now the SAN admin says “hey mister computer here is your 50GB disk ;-)” But in reality it only allocates as much space as being used by the server. So now on the SAN instead of a full 50GB “used” only 4GB would be used. Sounds awesome in theory, but what happens when you add other servers in that same SAN pool (say the pool is 100GB in size). So the server admin gets another “50GB” disk from the SAN, doesn’t realize thin provisioning is in use, so they go on and install that server. Now we have 8GB in use out of the 100GB pool, but in reality all 100GB has been allocated as far as the 2 servers are concerned.
The next part is when the whole process starts to drown. The server admin asks for another disk, this time 200Gb for say a database or code repository server. Well the SAN administrator says “ok here is your 200GB disk ;-)” But put the disk in the same 100GB pool that the other two servers are in because “he knows” you won’t use all “200GB”. We have now over committed disk however the server admin does not know this has happened. Once the third servers OS has been installed (another 4GB) everything seems to be fine, and technically it is because we are only using 12 GB out of the 100GB pool. But in reality the servers are using 300GB of disk, because they are unaware that there is no space issues.
Where the fun starts is when you start loading data in to those disks. Lets say the second server was going to be a small database server, so we load Oracle and create some table spaces. We end up using up about 40 of the 50GB alloted to it. (So now we are up to 48GB of disk used in the 100GB pool). Still technically ok, but with only 52GB free we need to really start worrying about the disks and the servers. The fun begins when we start loading data on to the server with the 200GB disk. Once we get up to 52 GB used in this we have some problems. Basically all the servers will start reporting write errors or other weird issues. The server admin can’t figure out what the problem is because when he looks at the servers he see plenty of “free” space on the servers. When stuff gets really weird is when processes start dying and they won’t start when you try to restart them (maybe they write to a log file, etc). So the first thing the Server admin will try to do is reboot the server. This is where all hell breaks loose…
See when you start rebooting servers it can’t flush out writes to the disk because there is “no” space left to write to. So the file-systems end up becoming corrupted. When the server reboots, it will try to write more to the disk thinking that it has plenty of free space, but again can’t, so stuff starts hanging. So of course a reboot is done again, and again, etc…
So now you start seeing write errors showing up every where on the other servers, and from the looks it may be a SAN issue, like the disk has disappeared. So you call the SAN admin only to find out that you have been thin provisioned.
This my friends is why thin provisioning is bad and should NEVER be used. Yes it may save you some money on disk, but what you save there will be wasted when you have down time rebuilding servers and restoring data.
