A New Computer -- Printing

Setting up my multi-function printer on Ubuntu has always been interesting. When I first got my printer, it was so new I had to download and build hplip, the printing subsystem.

It looks like installation is a lot easier now, but to get started you still have to go into a terminal and type:

hp-setup

That starts a GUI that easily discovered my printer on the network. Unfortunately, when I tried to install the driver, it failed with "The download of the digital signature file failed." That sucks. But wait! The server that holds the drivers is actually run by the Linux Foundation, and it was off the air because of the security breach almost a month ago.


Finally, about a week and a half later, hp-setup worked. It now brings up a GUI window and walks you through a few steps: You have to tell it whether you printer is USB, parallel or network-connected. It's not much closer to being, "It just works."

A New Computer -- Touchpad Too Sensitive

The touchpad on the last two laptops I've had have been way too sensitive. There should be a better solution, but for now I'm installing the touchpad indicator:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/atareao
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install touchpad-indicator

Update: I found that the clicking on the trackpad indicator icon didn't work reliably until I rebooted.

Microsoft Considering Again Buying Yahoo

Microsoft is again considering buying Yahoo. According to one MS executive, the acquisition would allow them to "obliterate AOL." AOL still exists?

As a Yahoo shareholder, I hope MS buys. If I were a MS shareholder, I'd be afraid, very afraid.

A New Computer -- Installing VirtualBox

I installed VirtualBox from the Ubuntu Software Centre on my new computer. I had already copied over my VM -- it came with all the other files when I copied everything under /home.

When I figured out how to run VirtualBox under Unity (it's under Accessories), it came up and knew about all the VMs I had on the old machine. When I started my Windows VM, it complained that it couldn't find "/usr/share/virtualbox/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso". Sure enough, the iso wasn't anywhere on the new machine.

However, for my purposes I didn't need the iso. I just unloaded the iso from the virtual CD device for the virtual machine, and tried restarting. It worked.

I would need the guest additions iso sometime, so, with the virtual machine running, I went to the Devices-> Install Guest Additions menu. It asked me if I wanted to download the file from the Internet, and I said "yes".

A New Computer

The backlight died on my Lenovo x300 a couple of weeks ago, so I bought a Dell Vostro with Ubuntu pre-installed. Here's how I got from one to the other:

The Dell website said I was getting Ubuntu 11.04, but out of the box the computer had 10.10 on it. My first try upgrading to 11.04 failed. When it tried to reboot, it said the device for / wasn't ready. Fortunately, I somehow got to the old grub screen that let me choose which image to boot, and at the bottom there was an option to return the box to factory state.

I tried that, and it worked. I had about 10 minutes of the spinning "wait" cursor before it started doing something, but by being patient I got the box back to factory state.

So I went through the process of updating 10.10, reboot, then upgrade to 11.04 again. This time I saved the sudoers file. I was asked whether to keep the old one or use the new one as part of the installation.

I'm going to force myself to use Unity for a while. That's causing me some grief, but I'm already finding so of the tricks that make Unity more productive (try right-clicking the "Applications" or "Files & Folders" icons in the Launcher bar).

To get my old files over from the old computer, I connected a 1 TB USB drive to the old laptop, shut down Evolution, virtual machines, and any other applications that might be updating files while I copied, and did:

sudo cp -a /home /media/wd1tbb/home

I have a lot of software installed on the old machine. I found excellent instructions here about how to move Ubuntu from one machine to another, preserving your environment and installed software as much as possible. The instructions are for when both machines are running exactly the same version of Ubuntu.

I was moving from 10.04 to 11.04, so I didn't meet the criteria. I generated the list of installed packages anyway, and took a look at the list using a text editor. The vast majority of the packages are what I'd call supporting or system packages. So I think I'll skip that step.

But wait. The Ubuntu Software Centre has a better idea of what's an application package. I'll have to look into where it gets its list.

Any, back to copying my file. I did:

sudo cp -aiv /media/wd1tbb/home/reid /home

Then I used judgement to decide whether to overwrite or not.

Argh! For some reason, the new computer has the original user with uid=1001, not uid=1000 like every other Ubuntu I've installed. I had to run commands like this to fix up the files I copied over:

sudo find /home -gid 1000 -uid 1000 -exec chown -h 1001:1001 \{} \;

Then, probably because I've upgraded versions of Evolution, just copying the files across wasn't enough. I had to go back to the old machine and make an Evolution backup, copy it to the new machine, and set up Evolution from the backup. This was made more interesting because the Evolution setup wizard would show the text in each window for only a few seconds, then it would disappear. By fiddling and trying a few times I was able to get Evolution going. (A lot of work considering I may well switch back to Thunderbird soon.)

That's the basics. I think I'll post this now, and add new posts for all the other work I'll have to do (like lower the sensitivity of the touch pad).

Network Team for Data Centre Relocations

I had a real "Doh" moment this week. We're about 80 percent of the way through relocating a 500 server data centre. Things have been going pretty well, but right from the start we've found we were under-staffed on the network side. We have a pretty good process in place, with what I think is just the right amount of documentation. The individuals working on the network team are excellent. We even brought in one more person than we had planned for, but we're still struggling with burnout.

The light bulb went on for me a few days ago: Here, like other IT organizations of similar size and purpose, we have about ten times as many server admins as we do network admins. We have a bigger pool of people on the server side to draw from when we organize the relocations, which typically happen over night or on the weekend. While we rotate the network guys for the nights and weekends, it's a smaller pool. They do shifts more often, and they more often have to come in the next day, because they have to plan for the next relocation on their list and it's coming soon.

Another factor is that, in our case, the network team started intense work earlier than everyone else. We're occupying a brand new cage in a data centre, so the network team had to build the whole data centre network first. They did three weeks of intense work before we moved any servers at all.

As we hit six months of intense work for the network team, the strain is showing. We're going to try to rearrange some work and delay what we can. Other than that, we'll probably have to suck up the remaining 20 percent of the project somehow.

In the future, I'm not sure what I'd do. One approach, if I had enough budget, would be to hire a couple of contract network admins well in advance. Tell them they're going to work Wednesday to Sunday, and often at night. Train them up ahead of time so they're as effective as your in-house people. Then give most of the nasty shifts to the contractors.

What would you do?

(If you're looking for numbers, we have three full-time network engineers, and we're drawing on the operational pool from time to time.)

The Data Centre Relocation Calendar

I'm past the half-way point in relocating a 500-server data centre. The servers are a real variety -- a typical medium-scale business data centre. We're using mostly internal resources, supplemented by some contractors like myself with data centre relocation experience.

I chose not to come in and impose a relocation methodology on everyone. There are a lot of reasons for that, some of which were out of my control. Rather than using a methodology out of the can, I tried to foster an environment where the team members would build the methodology that worked for them.

This turned out to be quite successful. One of the items that emerged fairly late for us, but was very successful, was a shared calendar in Microsoft Outlook/Exchange. (The tool wasn't important. It could have been done in Google Calendar. Use whatever your organization is already using.)

The shared calendar contained an event for every relocation of some unit of work -- typically some service or application visible to some part of the business or the public. Within the calendar event we put a high-level description of what was moving, the name of the coordinator for that unit of work, and hyperlinks to the detailed planning documents in our project shared folders. The calendar was readable by anyone in the corporation, but only my team members could modify it.

What struck me about the calendar was how it organically became a focal point for all sorts of meetings, including our weekly status meeting. Without having to make any pronouncements, people just began to put the calendar up on the big screen at the start of most of our meetings. We could see at a glance when we might be stretching our resources too thin. The chatter within the corporation that we weren't communicating enough diminished noticeably.

Based on my experience, I'd push for a calendar like this much earlier in the project. We built it late in our project because I had a lot of people on my team who were reluctant to talk about dates until they had all the information possible. We got so much value in having the calendar that I think it's worth it to make a calendar early in the planning stage, even if the dates are going to change.