Tag: technology

“Today is officially a bad day…”

The X Prize Cup was held this past weekend, and among the contestants was Armadillo Aerospace, headed by none other than 3D game programming guru, John Carmack. John and his intrepid crew have been working for about seven years on their rocketry project. Currently, their goal is to enter, and win, the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge.

The challenge is described as follows :

The Competition is divided into two levels. Level 1 requires a rocket to take off from a designated launch area, rocket up to 150 feet (50 meters) altitude, then hover for 90 seconds while landing precisely on a landing pad 100 meters away. The flight must then be repeated in reverse and both flights, along with all of the necessary preparation for each, must take place within a two and a half hour period.

The more difficult course, Level 2, requires the rocket to hover for twice as long before landing precisely on a simulated lunar surface, packed with craters and boulders to mimic actual lunar terrain. The hover times are calculated so that the Level 2 mission closely simulates the power needed to perform the real lunar mission.

It sounds simple, but, as with most rocketry projects, it’s not. John and his team competed in 2006, but were not successful. They had another chance this past weekend to take another shot at the prize, a cool $350,000. Six flight attempts later, however, they walked away empty handed.

That’s not to say, however, that they didn’t accomplish anything at all. Even among the failures, Armadillo accomplished a lot. Two flights were quite successful, though they only accomplished the first part of the level 1 flight. A third flight was able to hover for a full 83 seconds, despite a crack in the combustion chamber. Overall, these were great accomplishments.

John Demar, a regular on the ARocket mailing list, was kind enough to post a bunch of photos from the event. John Carmack, just prior to leaving for the cup, posted a video of the AST qualifying flight at the Oklahoma space port. I’m sure John, or one of the crew, will post a complete run-down of the event on the Armadillo site when they get back home.

While they were unsuccessful this year, they were the only team to enter the competition. I can’t wait to see what they do next!

AIR, and a Prism

Web 2.0 is upon us, and with it comes new technologies determined to integrate it with our daily activities.  Thus far, interacting with the web has been through the use of a web browser such as Firefox, Opera, or Internet Explorer.  But, times are changing…

 

Let’s take a peek at two new technologies that are poised to change the web world and truly integrate web-based applications with traditional desktop applications.

 

First up is Adobe AIR, formerly known as Apollo.  According to Adobe :

Adobe® AIR lets developers use their existing web development skills in HTML, AJAX, Flash and Flex to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop.

In a nutshell, it brings web-based content directly into standalone applications.  In other words, developers can write a complete web-based application and distribute it as a downloadable application.  It’s a pretty neat concept as it allows you access to the standard UI elements of a desktop application, while allowing you to use standard web technologies such as HTML and JavaScript.

It’s cross-platform, like Java, so you can build a small distributable application without needing to distribute the framework as well.  It also supports offline use.  In other words, you can interact with web-based applications, while not connected to the Internet.  There are limitations, of course, but all of your interactions are queued up and synchronized with the online portion of the application the next time you connect.

It looks like a pretty cool technology.  Time will tell if it takes off or not.  One drawback, depending on who you are, is that this is not an open-source solution.  This is an Adobe product and with that comes all of the Adobe licensing.

 

The other new technology is Mozilla Lab’s Prism.  Prism is similar to AIR in that it strives to create desktop-based applications using web technologies, but so far, it’s doing it in a manner opposite to that of AIR.  Prism allows you to encapsulate on-line content into a simple desktop application, minus any of the fancy UI elements associated with the Firefox web browser.  The result is a fast web-based application running in a normal desktop window.

It doesn’t sound like much now, but it has potential.  Mozilla has plans to add new functionality to the web to allow for offline data storage, 3D graphics, and more.  So, instead of extending the capabilities of Prism, Mozilla wants to extend the capabilities of the web.

So why the different approach?  Well, with AIR, if you are away from your computer for some reason, you may not be able to access the same content you normally would.  AIR may not be installed on the new machine, and you may not have permission to install it.  You can likely access the web-based version of the application you were using, but you may end up with limited functionality.

Prism, on the other hand, allows you to use web applications as if they were desktop applications.  But, at the end of the day, it’s still a web application.  So, if you find yourself on someone else’s machine, without Prism, a simple web browser will do.

 

Both technologies clearly have advantages and only time will tell if either, or both, survive.  It’s a strange, new world, and I’m excited….

Stop Car Thief!

Technology is wonderful, and we are advancing by leaps and bounds every day.  Everything is becoming more connected, and in some cases, smarter.  For instance, are you aware that almost every modern vehicle is microprocessor controlled?  Computers inside the engine control everything from the fuel mixture to the airflow through the engine.

Other computer-based systems in your car can add features such as GPS navigation, or even connect you to a central monitoring station.  GM seems to have cornered the market on mobile assistance with it’s OnStar service.  OnStar is an in-vehicle system that allows the owner to report emergencies, get directions, make phone calls, and even remotely unlock your car doors.

Well, OnStar recently announced plans to add another feature to it’s service.  Dubbed “Stolen Vehicle Slowdown,” this new service allows police to remotely stop a stolen vehicle.  The service is supposed to start in 2009 with about 20 models.  Basically, when the police identify a stolen vehicle, they can have the OnStar technician automatically disable the vehicle, leaving the thief with control over the steering and brakes, only.  OnStar also mentions that they may issue a verbal warning to the would-be thief, prior to disabling the car.

 

But is this too much power?  What are the implications here?  OnStar is already a wireless system that allows remote unlocking of your car doors.  It reports back vehicle information to OnStar who can then warn you about impending vehicle problems.  Remote diagnostics can be run to determine the cause of a malfunction.  And now, remotely, the vehicle can be disabled?

As history has shown us, nothing is unhackable.  How long will it be until hackers identify a way around the OnStar security and find a way to disable vehicles at-will?  It will likely start as a joke, disabling vehicles on the highway, causing havoc with traffic, but in a relatively safe manner.  How about disabling the boss’s car?  But then someone will use this new power for evil.  Car jackers will start disabling cars to make it easier to steal them.  Criminals will disable vehicles so they can rob or harm the driver.

So how far is too far?  Is there any way to make services such as this safe?

Whoa! Slow down! Or else…

There have been rumblings over the past few years about companies that are throttling customer bandwidth and, in some instances, canceling their service. I can confirm one of the rumors, having worked for the company, and I would tend to believe the other rumors. The problem with most of these situations is that none of these companies ever solidly defines what will result in throttling or loss of service. In fact, most of them merely put clauses in their Terms of Service that states that the bandwidth they are purchasing is not sustained, not guaranteed, etc.

Once particular company has been in the news as of late, having cut customers off time and time again. In fact, they have, what appears to be, a super-secret internal group of customer support representatives that deal with the “offenders.” Really, I’m not making this up. Check out this blog entry. This is pretty typical of companies that enact these types of policies. What I find interesting here is how Comcast determines who to disable. According to the blog entry by Rocketman, Comcast is essentially determining who the top 1% of users are for each month and giving them a high-usage warning. The interesting bit is that this is almost exactly how my previous employer was handling it.

Well, apparently Comcast has come out with a statement to clarify what excessive usage is. According to Comcast, excessive usage is defined as “a user who downloads the equivalent of 30,000 songs, 250,000 pictures, or 13 million emails.” So let’s pull this apart a little. The terms they use are rather interesting. Songs? Pictures? How is this even close to descriptive enough to use? A song can vary wildly in size depending on the encoding method, bitrate, etc. So the same song can range from 1 MB to 100 MB pretty easily. How about pictures then? Well, what kind of pictures? After all, thumbnails are pictures too. So, again, we can vary the size of a picture from 10 KB to 10 MB, depending on the size and detail of the picture. And, of course, let’s not forget emails. An average email is about 10 KB or so, but these can also range up to several MB in size.

So let’s try out some simple math on this. Email seems to be the easiest to deal with, so we’ll use that. 13 Million emails in one month, assuming a 10 KB average size for each email, results in approximately 130 GB of data. That’s only an average of 50 KB per seconds over the course of 30 days. If we assume a user is only on the computer for 8 hours a day, that’s an average of 150KB per second for the entire 8 hours each day. Of course, we don’t normally download at such a consistent rate, it’s much more bursty in nature.

Now, I don’t believe the average user is going to download this much data, but there are business professionals who could easily exceed this rate. But I think the bigger issue here is how these companies are handling these issues. They advertise and sell access rates ranging anywhere from 3 Meg to 10 Meg and then get upset when the customers actually use that bandwidth. Assuming a 3M profile, that means you can download something in the range of 972 GB of data in one month. 10M is even more fun, allowing a max rate of about 3.2 TB. Think about that for a minute. That means you can only use about 13% of a 3M profile, and 4% of a 10M profile before they’ll terminate your service.

While I understand that providers need to ensure that everyone receives a consistent, reliable service, I don’t believe they can treat customers like this. We’ll see how this turns out over time, but I expect that as video becomes more popular, you’ll see customers that exceed this rate on a much more consistent basis. I wonder how providers will handle that…

Satellite TV Woes

Back in the day, I had Analog and then Digital cable.  Having been employed by a sister company of the local cable company, I enjoyed free cable.  There were a lot of digital artifacts, and the picture wasn’t always that great, but it was free and I learned to live with it.

After I left that company, I had to pay full price for the digital cable I had installed.  Of course, I was used to a larger package and the price just outright shocked me.  With the cable modem included, it was somewhere in the $150 a month range.  Between the signal issues on the cable TV, and the constant cable modem outages, I happily decided to drop both the cable and the cable modem and move on to DSL and Satellite TV.

My first foray into Satellite TV was with Dish Networks.  The choice to do so was mostly guided by my brother’s employment by Dish.  So, we checked it out and had it installed.  At the time, they were running a free DVR promotion, so we grabbed that as well.

Dish is great.  The DVR was a dual tuner, so we were able to hook two TVs up to it.  We could record two shows at once, and watch two recorded shows at the same time, one on each TV.  It was pure TV bliss, and it got better.  Dish started adding little features here and there that I started noticing more and more.  First, the on-screen guide started showing better summaries of the shows.  Then it would show the year the show was produced in.  And finally, it started showing actual episode number information.  Little things, but it made all the difference.

Dish, however, had it’s problems.  My family and I only watch a few channels.  The kids like the cartoon channels : Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, Noggin, and Boomerang.  My wife enjoys the local channels for current shows such as CSI and Law and Order, and also the educational channels such as The History Channel, The Science Channel, and Discovery.  And myself, I’m into stuff like Scifi, FX, and occasionally, G4.  CSI and Law and Order are on my menu as well.  The problem is, in order to get all of the channels we wanted, we needed to subscribe to the largest Dish package.  It’s still cheaper than cable, but more money than we wanted to pay to pick up one or two extra channels.

Enter DirecTV.  DirecTV offered all the channels we wanted in their basic package.  So, we ordered it.  As it turns out, they’ve partnered with Verizon, so we can get our phone, DSL, and dish all on the same bill.  Personally, I couldn’t care less about that, but I guess it is convenient.

At any rate, we got DirecTV about a month or so ago.  Again, we got the DVR, but there’s a problem there.  DirecTV doesn’t offer a dual TV DVR.  It’s dual tuner so we can tape two shows simultaneously, but you can only hook a single TV up to it.  Our other TV has a normal DirecTV receiver on it.  Strike one against DirecTV, and we didn’t even have it hooked up yet.

So the guy comes and installs all the new stuff.  They used the same mount that the Dish Networks dish was mounted on, as well as the same cables, so that was convenient.  Dish Networks used some really high quality cables, so I was pleased that we were able to keep them.  Everything was installed, and the installer was pretty cool.  He explained everything and then went on his way.

I started messing around with the DVR and immediately noticed some very annoying problems.  The remote is a universal remote.  Dish Networks used them too.  The problem with the DirecTV remote, however, is that apparently when you interact with the TV, VCR, or DVD player, it needs to send the signal to the DirecTV receiver first before it will send the signal to the other equipment.  This means merely pressing the volume control results in nothing.  You need to hold the volume down for about a second before it will change the volume on the TV.  Very, very annoying.  I also noticed a considerable pause between pressing buttons on the controller and having the DVR respond.  The standalone receiver is much quicker, but there is definitely a noticeable lag there.  Strike two.

Continuing to mess around with the DVR, I started checking out how to set up the record timers and whatnot.  DirecTV has a nice guide feature the automatically breaks down the channels into sub-groups such as movie channels, family channels, etc.  They also have a nicer search feature than Dish does.  As you type in what you’re searching for, it automatically refreshes the list of found items, allowing you a quick shortcut to jump over and choose what you’re looking for.  Dish allows you to put arbitrary words in and record based on title matches, but I’m not sure if DirecTV does.  I never used that feature anyway.  So the subgroups and the search features are a score for DirecTV.

Once in the guide, however, it gets annoying.  Dish will automatically mask out any unsubscribed channels for you, where DirecTV does not.  Or, rather, if they do, it’s buried somewhere in the options and I can’t find it.  Because of this, I find all sorts of movies and programs that look cool, but give me a “you’re not subscribed to this channel” message when I try to watch them.  Quite annoying.

I set up a bunch of timers for shows my family and I like to watch.  It was pretty easy and worked well.  A few days later, I checked the shows that recorded.  DirecTV groups together episodes for shows which is a really nice feature.  However, I noticed that one or two shows never recorded.  Dish had a problem once in a while with recording new shows where the show didn’t have a “new” flag on it and it would skip it.  Thinking this was the problem with DirecTV, I just switched the timer to record all shows.  I’d have to delete a bunch of shows I already saw, but that’s no big deal.

Another week goes by, still no shows.  Apparently DirecTV doesn’t want me to watch my shows.  Now I’m completely frustrated.  Strike three.

Unfortunately, I’m in a two year contract, so I just have to live with this.  I’m definitely looking to get my Dish Networks setup back at the end, though.  That extra few bucks we spent on Dish was well worth it.

 

DirecTV definitely has some features that Dish doesn’t, but the lack of a dual tuner, the lag time between the controller and the receiver, and the refusal to tape some shows is just too much.  The latter two I can live with, but the dual TV DVR was just awesome and I really miss it.  Since I only have the DVR on the main TV in the house, I need to wait until the kids go to bed before I can watch my shows in peace.  Of course, I need to go to bed too since I get up early for work.  This leaves virtually no time for the few shows I watch, and as a result, I have a bunch of stuff recorded that I haven’t been able to watch yet.  And, since it’s that time of the year where most of my shows aren’t being shown, I know that it’s only going to get worse.

I’m just annoyed at this point.  If you have a choice between Dish and DirecTV, I definitely suggest Dish.  It’s much better in the long run and definitely worth the extra few dollars.

Backups? Where?

It’s been a bit hectic, sorry for the long time between posting.

 

So, backups.  Backups are important, we all know that.  So how many people actually follow their own advice and back their data up?  Yeah, it’s a sad situation for desktops.  The server world is a little different, though, with literally tens, possibly hundreds of different backup utilities available.

 

My preferred backup tool of choice is the Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver, or AMANDA for short.  AMANDA has been around since before 1997 and has evolved into a pretty decent backup system.  Initially intended for single tape-based backups, options have been added recently to allow for tape spanning and disk-based backups as well.

Getting started with AMANDA can be a bit of a chore.  The hardest part, at least for me, was getting the tape backup machine running.  Once that was out of the way, the rest of it was pretty easy.  The config can be a little overwhelming if you don’t understand the options, but there are a lot of guides on the Internet to explain it.  In fact, the “tutorial” I originally used is located here.

Once it’s up and running, you’ll receive a daily email from Amanda letting you know how the previous nights backup went.  All of the various AMANDA utilities are command-line based.  There is no official GUI at all.  Of course, this causes a lot of people to shy away from the system.  But overall, once you get the hang of it, it’s pretty easy to use.

Recovery from backup is a pretty simple process.  On the machine you’re recovering, run the amrecover program.  You then use regular filesystem commands to locate the files you want to restore and add them to the restore list.  When you’ve added all the files, issue the extract command and it will restore all of the files you’ve chosen.  It’s works quite well, I’ve had to use it once or twice…  Lemme tell ya, the first time I had to restore from backups I was sweatin bullets..  After the first one worked flawlessly, subsequent restores were completed with a much lower stress level.  It’s great to know that there are backups available in the case of an emergency.

AMANDA is a great tool for backing up servers, but what about clients?  There is a Windows client as well that runs using Cygwin, a free open-source Linux-like environment for Windows.  Instructions for setting something like this up are located in the AMANDA documentation.  I haven’t tried this, but it doesn’t look too hard.  Other client backup options include remote NFS and SAMBA shares.

Overall, AMANDA is a great backup tool that has saved me a few times.  I definitely recommend checking it out.

Hard drive failure reports

FAST ’07, the File and Storage Technology conference, was held from February 13th through the 16th. During the conference, a number of interesting papers were presented, two of which I want to highlight. I learned of these papers through posts on Slashdot rather than actually attending the conference. Honestly, I’m not a storage expert, but I find these studies interesting.

The first study, “Disk Failures in the Real World: What Does an MTTF of 1,000,000 Hours Mean to You?” was written by a Carnegie Mellon University professor, Garth Gibson, and a recent PhD graduate, Bianca Schroeder.

This study looked into the manufacturer’s specifications of MTTF, mean time to failure, and AFR, annual failure rate, compared to real-world hard drive replacement rates. The paper is heavily littered with statistical analysis, making it a rough read for some. However, if you can wade through all of the statistics, there is some good information here.

Manufacturers generally list MTTF rates of 1,000,000 to 1,500,000 hours. AFR is calculated by taking the number of hours in a year and dividing it by the MTTF. This means that the AFR ranges from 0.54% to 0.88%. In a nutshell, this means you have a 0.5 to 0.9% chance of your hard drive failing each year.

As explained in the study, determining whether a hard drive has failed or not is problematic at best. Manufacturers report that up to 40% of drives returned as bad are found to have no defects.

The study concludes that real world usage shows a much higher failure rate than that of the published MTTF values. Also, the failure rates between different types of drives such as SCSI, SATA, and FC, are similar. The authors go on to recommend some changes to the standards based on their findings.

The second study, “Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population” was presented by a number of Google researchers, Eduardo Pinheiro, Wolf-Dietrich Weber and Luiz Andr´e Barroso. This paper is geared towards trying to find trends in the failures. Essentially, the goal is to create a reliable model to predict a drive failure so that the drive can be replaced before essential data is lost.

The researchers used an extensive database of hard drive statistics gathered from the 100,000+ hard drives deployed throughout their infrastructure. Statistics such as utilization, temperature, and a variety of SMART (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) signals were collected over a five year period.

This study is well written and can be easily understood by non-academicians and those without statistical analysis training. The data is clearly laid out and each parameter studied is clearly explained.

Traditionally, temperature and utilization were pinpointed as the root cause of most failures. However, this study clearly shows a very small correlation between failure rates and these two parameters. In fact, failure rates due to high utilization seemed to be highest for drives under one year old, and stayed within 1% of low utilization drives. It was only at the end of a given drives expected lifetime that the failure rate due to high utilization jumped up again. Temperature was even more of a surprise showing that low temperature drives failed more often than high temperature drives until about the third year of life.

The report basically concludes that a reliable model of failure detection is mostly impossible at this time. The reason for this is that there is no clear indication of a reliable parameter for detecting imminent failure. SMART signals were useful in indicating impending failures and most drives fail within 60 days of the first reported errors. However, 36% of their failed drives reported no errors at all, making SMART a poor overall predictor.

Unfortunately, neither of these studies elaborated on the manufacturer or model of the drives used. This is likely due to professional courtesy and a lack of interest in being sued for defamation of character. While these studies will doubtlessly be useful to those designing large-scale storage networks, manufacturer specific information would be of great help.

For me, I mostly rely on Seagate hard drives. I’ve had very good luck with them, having had only a handful fail on me over the past few years. Maxtor used to be my second choice for drives, but they were acquired by Seagate at the end of 2005. I tend to stay away from Western Digital drives having had several bad experiences with them in the past. In fact, my brother had one of their drives literally catch fire and destroy his computer. IBM has also had some issues in the past, especially with their Deskstar line of drives which many people nicknamed the “Death Star” drive.

With the amount of information currently stored on hard drives today, and the massive amount in the future, hard drive reliability is a concern for many vendors. It should be a concern for end-users as well, although end-users are not likely to take this concern seriously. Overall these two reports are excellent overview of the current state of reliability and the trends seen today. Hopefully drive manufacturers can take these reports and use them to design changes to increase reliability, and to facilitate earlier detection of impending failures.

Book Review : 19 Deadly Sins of Software Security

Security is a pretty hot topic these days. Problems range from zombie computers acquired through viral attacks, to targeted intrusion of high-visibility targets. In many cases, insecure software is to blame for the security breach. With the increasing complexity of today’s software and the increased presence of criminals online, security is of the utmost importance.

19 Deadly Sins of Software Security was written by a trio of security researchers and software developers. The original list of 19 sins was developed by John Viega at the behest of Amit Yoran who was the Director of the Department of Homeland Security’s National Cyber Security Division. The list details 19 of the most common security flaws that exist in computer software.

The book details each flaw and the potential security risks posed when the flaw exists in your code. Examples of flawed software are presented to provide an insight into the seriousness of these flaws. The authors also detail ways to find these flaws in your code, and steps to prevent the problem in the future.

Overall the book covers most of the commonly known security flaws. These include SQL Injection, Cross Site Scripting, and Buffer Overruns. There are also a few lesser known flaws such as Integer Overflows and Format String problems.

The authors recognize that software flaws can also consist of conceptual and usability errors. For instance, one of the sins covered is the failure to protect network traffic. While the book goes into greater detail, this flaw generally means that the designer did not take into account the open network and failed to encrypt important data.

The last chapter covers usability. The authors detail how many applications leave too many options open for the user while making dialogs cryptic in nature. Default settings are either set too loose for proper security, or the fallback mechanisms used in the event of a failure cause more harm than good. As the Microsoft Security Response Center put it, “Security only works if the secure way also happens to be the easy way.”

This book is great for both novice and seasoned developers. As with most security books, it covers much of the same material, but is presented in new ways. Continual reminders about security can only help developers produce more secure code.

[Other References]

10 Immutable Laws of Security Administration

10 Immutable Laws of Security

Michael Howard’s Weblog

John Viega’s HomePage

Linux Software Raid

I had to replace a bad hard drive in a Linux box recently and I thought perhaps I’d detail the procedure I used.  This particular box uses software raid, so there are a few extra steps to getting the drive up and running.

Normally when a hard drive fails, you lose any data on it.  This is, of course, why we back things up.  In my case, I have two drives in a raid level 1 configuration.  There are a number of raid levels that dictate various states of redundancy (or lack thereof in the instance of level 0).  The raid levels are as follows (Copied from Wikipedia):

  • RAID 0: Striped Set
  • RAID 1: Mirrored Set
  • RAID 3/4: Striped with Dedicated Parity
  • RAID 5: Striped Set with Distributed Parity
  • RAID 6: Striped Set with Dual Distributed Parity

There are additional raid levels for nested raid as well as some non-standard raid levels.  For more information on those, see the Wikipedia article referenced above.

 

The hard drive in my case failed in kind of a weird way.  Only one of the partitions on the drive was malfunctioning.  Upon booting the server, however, the bios complained about the drive being bad.  So, better safe than sorry, I replaced the drive.

Raid level 1 is a mirrored raid.  As with most raid levels, the hard drives being raided should be identical.  It is possible to use different models and sizes in the same raid, but there are drawbacks such as a reduction in speed, possible increased failure rates, wasted space, etc.  Replacing a drive in a mirrored raid is pretty straightforward.  After identifying the problem drive, I physically removed the faulty drive and replaced it with a new one.

The secondary drive was the failed drive, so this replacement was pretty easy.  In the case of a primary drive failure, it’s easiest to move the secondary drive into the primary slot before replacing the failed drive.

Once the new drive has been installed, boot the system up and it should load up your favorite Linux distro.  The system should boot normally with a few errors regarding the degraded raid state.

After the system has booted, login to the system and use fdisk to partition the new drive.  Make sure you set the drive IDs back to Linux raid.  When finished, the partition table will look something like this :

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdb1   *           1          26      208813+  fd  Linux raid autodetect
/dev/hdb2              27        3850    30716280   fd  Linux raid autodetect
/dev/hdb3            3851        5125    10241437+  fd  Linux raid autodetect
/dev/hdb4            5126       19457   115121790    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hdb5            5126        6400    10241406   fd  Linux raid autodetect
/dev/hdb6            6401        7037     5116671   fd  Linux raid autodetect
/dev/hdb7            7038        7164     1020096   82  Linux swap
/dev/hdb8            7165       19457    98743491   fd  Linux raid autodetect

Once the partitions have been set up, you need to format the drive with a filesystem.  This is a pretty painless process depending on your filesystem of choice.  I happen to be using ext3 as my filesystem, so I use the mke2fs program to format the drive.  To format an ext3 partition use the following command (This command, as well as the commands that follow, need to be run as root, so be sure to use sudo.) :

mke2fs -j /dev/hdb1

Once all of the drives have been formatted you can move on to creating the swap partition.  This is done using the mkswap program as follows :

mkswap /dev/hdb7

Once the swap drive has been formatted, activate it so the system can use it.  The swapon command achieves this goal :

swapon -a /dev/hdb7

And finally you can add the drives to the raid using mdadm.  mdadm is a single command with a plethora of uses.  It builds, monitors, and alters raid arrays.  To add a drive to the array use the following :

mdadm -a /dev/md1 /dev/hdb1

And that’s all there is to it.  If you’d like to watch the array rebuild itself, about as much fun as watching paint dry, you can do the following :

watch cat /proc/mdstat

And that’s all there is to it.  Software raid has come a long way and it’s quite stable these days.  I’ve been happily running it on my Linux machines for several years now.  It works well when hardware raid is not available or as a cheaper solution.  I’m quite happy with the performance and reliability of software raid and I definitely recommend it.

Carmack on the PS3 and 360

John Carmack, the 3D game engine guru from id Software and a game developer I hold in very high regard, and Todd Hollenshead, CEO of id Software, were recently interviewed by GameInformer. Carmack recently received a Technology Emmy for his work and innovation on 3D engines, a well deserved award.

I was a bit surprised while reading the interview. Carmack seems to be a pretty big believer in DirectX these days, and thinks highly of the XBox 360. On the flip side, he’s not a fan of the asymmetric CPU of the PS3 and thinks Sony has dropped the ball when it comes to tools. I never realized that Carmack was such a fan of DirectX. He used to tout OpenGL so highly.

Todd and Carmack also talked about episodic gaming. Their general consensus seems to be that episodic gaming just isn’t there yet. It doesn’t make sense because by the time you get the first episode out, you’ve essentially completed all of the development. Shipping episodes at that point doesn’t make sense since you’ve already spent the capital to make the game to begin with.

Episodic games seem like a great idea from the outside, but perhaps they’re right. Traditionally, the initial games have sold well, but expansion packs don’t. Episodic gaming may be similar in nature with respect to sales. If the content is right, however, perhaps episodes will work. But then there’s the issue of release times. If you release a 5-10 hour episode, when is the optimal time to release the next episode? You’ll have gamers who play the entire episode on the day it’s released and then get bored waiting for more. And then there’s the gamers who take their time and finish the episode in a week or two. If you release too early, you upset those some people who don’t want to have to pay for content constantly, while waiting may cause those bored customers to lose interest.

The interview covered a few more areas such as DirectX, Quakecon, and Hollywood. I encourage you to check it out, it makes for good reading!