VMWare Player 3.1 and Ubuntu 10.04

I almost gave up on 10.04 as a host OS since Player 3.0.1 didn't get on well with it; frequent freezes and hard reset. However, last week (May 25) VMware released Player 3.1: and that has cured the problem. So far 6 days entirely problem free.

PR Disaster? Or something more machievellian?

First some observations about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. According to 60 Minutes, the Deepwater Horizon did have a pretty good safety record until last month. BP's recent spate of safety problems may have as much to do with its takeover of ARCO as anything else. The well that the Deepwater Horizon drilled was apparently at a record-breaking depth below sea level; working in these conditions means charting new technological territory. The government can't "take over" the effort to plug the well since the only people / companies with the requisite capabilities (knowledge and physical assets) for working at these depths are BP and the companies (Transocena, and Halliburton) who are its partners in crime.

As frustration rises so does the level of inflammatory rhetoric. Even those who may know better likely feel compelled in their public utterances to ratchet up the level of accusations and demands for action. BP and the US government need each other. BP needs access to new oil leases, and US (and thus the government) needs the energy. But BP screwed up by appearing to be trying to shift blame onto its partners and the government screwed up by not setting expectations and by making illogical or impractical demands of BP, and by making promises on which it can't make good.

On side note, it's interesting that states don't want the ferderal government to spend federal tax dollars - unless it's on their state. Bobby Jindal, a one time opponent of the stimulus bill, now appears quite keen (an understatement) to accept help from the feds.

OK. So much for the boring stuff; what about a conspiracy theory. Of all the oil majors, BP was the first to embrace the idea of a transition to greener non fossil fuel energy. Its new 'flower' logo and the name change from British Petroleum to BP reflected both its increasing internationalization (if I remember this was about the time it bought ARCO) and a vision of being about more than just petroleum products.

Suppose that in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the government acts to transition more quickly than before towards green energy. Of all the majors, perhaps BP is best positioned to take advantage of such a shift in policy. So given the spill (and I'm not saying that BP blew up the rig intentionally; I am sure it genuinely was an accident), does BP benefit more, relative to its competitors, by making the oil industry look good or making it look irresponsible. Since I doubt that any legislation could be directed exclusively at a single company, all the oil majors would bear the same burden. And those companies with the greatest diversity and the least dependence on oil will profit the most.

"I'm just saying...", as they say.

Another Normal Accident

The explosion on the Deepwater Horizon, the oil platform leased by BP from Transocean, seems to be another or Chuck Perrow's "Normal Accidents" - that is something catastrophic that arises when a number of smaller errors and problems compound. According to Mike Williams, an electrical engineer on board the rig when the explosion occurred, who was interviewed on 60 Minutes, there were a variety of factors, "a series of mishaps", that together seem to have lead to the disaster. The drill string was raised accidentally while the BOP (blow-out preventer) was being tested, causing damage to the "annular" rubber seal at the top of the BOP. Chunks of rubber were coming up in the drilling fluid, but this dismissed as not "not out of the ordinary - not a big deal"; presumably, this may not have been and unusual occurrence. One of the BOP control pods was partly inoperative - but then there are two for exactly that reason and the second was thought to be operating properly. Because the drilling operation had been delayed by unexpectedly tough going , the project was 200% over time, and there was increase pressure to speed up the end of project. This lead to a decision to withdraw the mud from the bore hole before the third and final plug was set. Each element on its own was clearly serious, but not catastrophic; their albeit improbable coincidence was.

Walter Taub

Walter Taub was an actor, and my uncle. This picture I took in about 1976 I think in the house I grew up in in Sussex. He and his wife Luxi visited infrequently, largely a result of the authoritarian Czech Communist government. He was fairly well know in West Germany as well as in Czechoslovakia. I saw him only twice on the stage, once in Salzburg at tne Festival in about 1975, and once at the Burgtheater in Vienna in 1977. I understood little since my German is very rudimentary, but I do remember that he seemed to have what people refer to as "stage presence". When he made his first entrance, there was an expectant and appreciative murmuring from the audience. He waited it seemed several second before delivering his first line, heightening the anticipation. Perhaps it's a combination of notoriety and fame, and reacting to that - an unspoken dialog between actor and audience. He had a deep resonant voice - somewhere I've got a recording of his portrayal of Svek which I should try and find, if only to see it corresponds to my memory of his voice from 30 years ago. I do remember he had a good sense of humor, something that he must have needed: he signed Charter 77, a document critical of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. To suppress what the government saw as seditious activities, it degreed that while he could continue to act on the Czech stage, his name could never be mentioned in the program or the reviews; a pretty good way to squash someone's career. Things could have been worse, were it not for his friendship with Willi Brandt, the West German Chancellor. Brandt intervened on his behalf and as a result he was allowed to travel to the West (though hie wife, Luxi, could never accompany him outside the country). He was thus able to continue to work both in films and on the stage. Both Lux and Walter were in West Germany in 1968 when the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia. They could have remained there; Walter had plenty of work. But Lux was determined for many reasons to return home to Prague. I never asked Lux about this, but my father suspected this was a decision she later bitterly regretted. Prague, when I visited in 1977, was pretty gray but the architecture was wonderful. The underground was being build then and I remember huge stretches of Narodni with the water main and electrical conduits exhumed and elevated on a huge scaffolding that stretched for what seemed like miles. Despite the political restrictions and economic mis-management (not something it appears on which communist countries have a monopoly) that meant queuing for bread and meat, Lux, as something of a celebrity, had what in relative terms was a fairly easy life. She was well known at the best restaurants in the city, and dined out regularly. But I don't think she was very happy. By the early 1990s her memory was fading and in 1995 or 96 she was taken into hospital and I went to Prague for a couple of weeks to see her; she died the day before I was due to return to France.

Oral history

My father died about two and a bit years ago: he was 91. Although I had urged him to write about his experiences, he never really had the patience, and as a result much of the richness and variety of his experiences are now lost. Much as I was moved by Umberto Eco's depiction of the loss of knowledge when the monastery library burned, I am also perturbed that without some effort to record for future generations certain profound experiences, we will be collectively the poorer. Although no one reads this bolg (that's fine - my reason for writing it doesn't include seeking fame on the internet), I hope that in some way serves as a contribution to an electronic 'oral history'.

At the end of the war in Europe (WWII), my father led a small team of doctors from Britain back into Czechoslovakia. Since there was still fighting on the Eastern front, their route was strangely circuitous. One of the team's first tasks was go into the Nazi concentration camp at Terezin. The team had brought DDT, a pesticide that was in short supply in Europe. Their task was to rid the camp of potential carriers of disease.

My father was somewhat circumspect about what they found - they were the first people to enter the camp after the Nazi's left - but I do remember him recounting the unspeakable sight of mountainous piles of human bodies. The corpses were so emaciated they assumed all were dead, but to their horror, found that some (many) were actually alive. They spent several days sorting the dead from the living and spraying them with DDT. What happened after the first day or two, I'm not sure. My memory and my father's telling of the story (which I last heard perhaps 25 years ago) are unfortunately fading from memory.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and VMware Player 3.0.1

After three days it's pretty clear these two don't really play well together. Interestingly I'm having the same kinds of problems as I had a while back with VMware Workstation 6.5.3 and Fedora 9: the mouse and keyboard freeze without warning, ssh from other machines is blocked and there is no alternative but a reset. I read somewhere that 10.04 has done away with HAL and I have a sneaking suspicion that Fedora did the same with Core 9. Perhaps that's the issue...

Who knows. I don't have time to look into it. If I was a good citizen I might soldier on and submit bug reports but since I have already wasted far too long recovering from the mess the crash during the 10.04 install made of my RAID array, I'm not feeling all that charitable. So everything is being backed up (twice) and I'm going back to 9.10 which has worked well for six months. Perhaps in year when the bugs are worked out I'll give 10.04 another try but frankly I'm loosing my appetite for the latest if this amount of faffing around is the cost.

This of course is the side of the open source development model that commercial software companies stress though I had studiously turned a blind eye to. There is no direct accountability for poorly written products, and so what one gains with hundreds or thousands of beta testers, one looses in a lack of discipline, control and accountability. Swings and roundabouts, and there is no free lunch.

Not so Safecopybackup

Last year I moved my offsite backup service From Mozy to Safecopybackup.com. In hindsight, a very very poor decision. Here's why:

1. While the client application appears to be tracking files in real time, and even tells you that backups are complete, they're not. A few files (and yes they were ones I wanted) I modified yesterday hadn't been backed up for three weeks.
2. Recovering data from a complete drive failure is nearly impossible because there is a limit of 200MB in the files that the web interface will allow you to zip and download.
3. Don't think that the Windows webDAV will allow you to get around this restriction; it collapses regularly and stops when files are "not found" on the server which happens frequently.
4. Files are sometimes restored with garbled file names.

So while you can see your data on their website, for all practical purposes it's not recoverable, unless you have a month and want to download files one at a time.

What I imagine most people look at when considering a backup service is the security of the store, the easy of setup and the simplicity and regularity with which files are saved. What I certainly didn't look at was what happens when you have a large volume of data to restore. Even when I had to restore the odd file here and there, something that bought me into direct contact with the restore function, the penny still didn't drop. Having spent almost a week restoring files piecemeal, it's not something I'm likely to forget any time soon.

Some thoughts about software RAID

Last week I upgraded from Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04 LTS. I will leave it to you to decide whether this was such a good idea: But now it's done.

Somewhere in the process the system stalled (X-windows froze and there was also no way to ssh in from outside). The hard restart cause mdadm to see both my RAID10 and RIAD5 arrays as missing two of the four drives. The array wouldn't assemble. Then I may have done something stupid. I have in the past been able to recreate the array using mdadm --create. It's almost certainly not the right way to deal with the problem but experience as March notes, can be a bad teacher, and is has worked on several occasions.

When the arrays restarted the ext3 file systems on both /dev/md0 (Raid10) and /dev/md1 (Raid5) were completely destroyed.

I have three takeaways from this episode:
1) I should probably have tried to learn about mdadm recovery procedures, but there's not enough time in the world to do everything one ought, and I doubt that I will do so even now.
2) What is the weakest link in the system? The hardware (specifically the disks which haven't failed in 3 years) or the software of which mdadm is a part which has failed so many times I've lost count. If the goal is not just the illusion of security RAID offers but actual security, one has to wonder whether it's really such a panacea for somewhat naive end users like me.
3) When choosing a backup service, ask not how fast it can back stuff up but rather how quickly and easily you can restore your data.