[chip@sumo ~]$ zpool status
  pool: storage
 state: DEGRADED
status: One or more devices could not be opened.  Sufficient replicas exist for
        the pool to continue functioning in a degraded state.
action: Attach the missing device and online it using 'zpool online'.
   see: http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-8000-2Q
 scrub: none requested
config:

        NAME                STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        storage             DEGRADED     0     0     0
          raidz1            DEGRADED     0     0     0
            label/2TBdisk1  UNAVAIL      0     0     0  cannot open
            label/2TBdisk2  ONLINE       0     0     0
            label/2TBdisk3  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

As you can see, 2TBdisk1 has failed and is unavailable. Since these SATA controllers support hot-swap, I just hooked up the new drive while the box was running. FreeBSD didn’t automatically detect the new drive, so I had to instruct it to rescan the SATA device. Normally I would expect atacontrol reinit to do this, but I ended up having to detach and attach the appropriate ata chain to get it to see the new drive.

[chip@sumo ~]$ sudo atacontrol detach ata2
[chip@sumo ~]$ sudo atacontrol attach ata2
Master:  ad4 < SAMSUNG HD204UI/1AQ10001 > SATA revision 2.x
Slave:       no device present

With the new drive now being recognized, I applied a GEOM label to it, then replaced the failed drive in the ZFS pool.

[chip@sumo ~]$ sudo glabel label 2TBdisk4 /dev/ad4
[chip@sumo ~]$ sudo zpool replace storage label/2TBdisk1 label/2TBdisk4
[chip@sumo ~]$ zpool status
  pool: storage
 state: DEGRADED
status: One or more devices is currently being resilvered.  The pool will
        continue to function, possibly in a degraded state.
action: Wait for the resilver to complete.
 scrub: resilver in progress for 0h0m, 0.12% done, 4h40m to go
config:

        NAME                  STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        storage               DEGRADED     0     0     0
          raidz1              DEGRADED     0     0     0
            replacing         DEGRADED     0     0     0
              label/2TBdisk1  UNAVAIL      0     0     0  cannot open
              label/2TBdisk4  ONLINE       0     0     0  554M resilvered
            label/2TBdisk2    ONLINE       0     0     0
            label/2TBdisk3    ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

Once the replacement process was finished, zpool status goes back to normal:

[chip@sumo ~]$ zpool status
  pool: storage
 state: ONLINE
 scrub: resilver completed after 5h49m with 0 errors on Fri Jul  1 23:23:08 2011
config:

	NAME                STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
	storage             ONLINE       0     0     0
	  raidz1            ONLINE       0     0     0
	    label/2TBdisk4  ONLINE       0     0     0  437G resilvered
	    label/2TBdisk2  ONLINE       0     0     0
	    label/2TBdisk3  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

Overall a remarkably painless process, all without taking the machine offline!

Most people end up using the same e-mail address everywhere, like chip@2bithacker.net. This is easy, it works, and it’s how e-mail was intended to be used in the first place. But you give it to some bad eggs and they sell it to some spammers and now you start getting junk to that address. So what do you do?

In the past, I’ve tried to use local-part extensions to identify who I gave the address to. These are usually things like chip+facebook@2bithacker.net, which many mail servers will treat just like mail sent to chip@2bithacker.net, but you can then filter on the +facebook part. Unfortunately, this is well understood by the spammers as well, so they can easily strip off the +facebook part and go about their business as usual. Also, there are websites out there that don’t think a + can be in an e-mail address, so they won’t accept it. There are various ways around this, of course. One could reconfigure their mail server to use a different characters, such as a dash or period, or even some letter if you wanted to be weird.

I’ve also seen people use virtual domain wildcarding to send any local-part at their domain to a default mailbox. In this case, you could just tell Facebook that your e-mail is facebook@2bithacker.net and it would still wind up in your inbox, and you’d know if Facebook gave your e-mail out to others if you start seeing non-Facebook e-mail coming in to facebook@2bithacker.net. This isn’t great though, as spammers regularly probe addresses trying to find common names to spam at, and with wildcarding, anything @2bithacker.net becomes a valid e-mail address to you.

So I had an idea, mostly building on the second use-case, but with some smarts added in. When signing up for a site, say Facebook, give them an e-mail address of facebook@2bithacker.net as above, but with your mail server configured such that mail to facebook@2bithacker.net is only accepted if facebook appears in the sender’s domain name. So mail to facebook@2bithacker.net is allowed from update@facebookmail.com, but mail from spammer@buystuffnow.com isn’t. In the latter case, the server will send back a 5xx error code just as if the address isn’t valid.

I’ve been trying to come up with a catchy name for this technique, something better than “semi-whitelisting” and I think Sender Domain Local-Part, or SDLP for short, might make sense.

It should be pretty trivial to implement as a Postfix policy server, and I’m working on a reference implementation there to try it out. I suspect it’d be pretty easy to do in Exim as well. I’ll try to remember to post again once I get it working.

I was a little out of it from the cold and being dosed up on DayQuil, but I think everyone had a good time. We’re considering having a Halloween party, but I’m not sure if we’ll be up for another party in just a month or not. See how we feel after recovering from these colds, I guess.

One pretty awesome thing that came out of the party was Tom talking Meg into letting me go to the Maker Faire in New York. He was just fishing for someone to drive Jason back up to NH so he wouldn’t have to, but I’m really glad I went, and it turned out that I didn’t even have to drive.

The Faire was held at the New York Hall of Science and had a wide array of crafters, makers, artists and tinkerers of pretty much every discipline. One tent was devoted entirely to home grown 3D printers, some made with parts produced by others. There was also a group from HoSARC, an amateur radio club based at the Hall of Science, attempting to communicate with amateur radio satellites as they passed overhead. Unfortunately, the attempt we were present for was unsuccessful, but it was pretty interesting all the same.

We also took some time to wander away from the Faire and check out the few remaining structures from the 1964 World’s Fair, including the Unisphere, the Tent of Tomorrow and the observation towers. I’m generally pretty interested in urban decay, but this site in particular is somewhat depressing. After seeing the state of the NY State Pavilion, I decided to do some scrounging online, and it appears that it was pretty impressive during the fair, but fell into disuse and disrepair almost immediately afterward. There was an effort a few years ago to preserve what was left of a NY road map that once covered the floor of the Tent, but I had little luck finding out the final status of that project, and the floor is now simply covered in gravel.

After wandering around that area and snapping a bunch of pictures, we headed back to the Maker Faire to catch ArcAttack and their musical Tesla coils. My spirits were suitably relifted by the arcs of musical plasma and my efforts to capture them on film (or in pixels, anyway.) Once that show was over we decided to pack up and head back to NH.

Another weekend packed to the gills with fun, friends, and fascinating stuff. I’d like to have a quiet weekend at home at some point, but it’s looking like that might be a ways off still.

We started off heading down to Boston for a Cake concert at the Orpherum Theater. It was Meg’s first time seeing Cake, and my second. She had giving me tickets to it for my birthday, and the timing just worked out such that we made it part of our anniversary. It was a great show, and we both had an awesome time. Our seats were on the mezzanine, near the front in the center, so we had a great view of the stage.

After the show we took the subway back to our hotel, Le Meridien in Cambridge. We stayed there on Valentine’s Day, and it’s a great hotel. Very comfortable and nicely decorated.

In the morning we woke up early and set out for the Flea at MIT, a monthly flea market of computer, electronic, and radio stuff. I didn’t find anything that compelled me to part with my money, but Meg found a gas mask for a steampunk project. Last month I picked up a rack mount APC UPS for my garage datacenter project, but I still need to pick up some new batteries for it. We also met up with the Coopers at the flea, and we carpooled down to King Richard’s Faire for the afternoon.

We had gone down there last year shortly after we started dating, and I had bought a necklace for Meg at the time. This year she got a pair or earings from Uncommon Adornments and a spinner ring. I also got to see one of the jousts for the first time this trip, and we generally acted silly for the afternoon and had a great time.

All in all, it was a great weekend, and I’m very much looking forward to spending another year with my Meggy-girl.

The configuration change on the Eye-Fi Manager side was easy enough, simply selecting FTP as the upload mechanism and filling in a few fields. For the server side of things, I decided to go with ProFTPD, largely because I’ve used it in the past and the configuration is pretty simple. I’d never used FTPS before, but it’s pretty easy to enable with ProFTPD, just a few configuration directives:

TLSEngine on
TLSLog /var/log/proftpd/tls.log
TLSProtocol SSLv3 TLSv1
TLSRequired on
TLSRSACertificateFile /usr/local/etc/kyzoku.2bithacker.net.cert
TLSRSACertificateKeyFile /usr/local/etc/kyzoku.2bithacker.net.key
TLSVerifyClient off
TLSRenegotiate none

However, this doesn’t appear to work. Based on the xferlog and tls.log, it appears the Eye-Fi client was connecting, but the data session was failing, but it did give the helpful message of “client did not reuse SSL session, rejecting data connection (see TLSOption NoSessionReuseRequired)”. This option is undocumented, and is actually “TLSOptions NoSessionReuseRequired” (note the plural), but it does solve the problem. Apparently clients are expected to reuse the TLS session between the control and data channels, but Eye-Fi doesn’t.

So, that’s working, but now my Eye-Fi card isn’t able to be read in either of our cameras or my laptop. Not sure what happened, but it appears the partition table became corrupt this evening. The card still had the only copy of a lot of our Comic-Con photos on it, and I really didn’t want to lose them. First, I decided to get a disk image of the SD card using Mac OS X’s Disk Utility. Then, I had remembered hearing about some open source software for recovering images from damaged cards, and after a quick Googling, I came up with PhotoRec.

PhotoRec is extremely easy to use. It opened up a terminal window with a curses interface, prompting through selecting a disk to scan, a place to save the found files, then initiating a scan of the Eye-Fi, turning up all of my missing images, along with a handful of other files that I didn’t realize were on the card (including an SQLite database, maybe used by Eye-Fi?) So happy I didn’t lose all those photos, and will have to work on getting them uploaded. Unfortunately, I think I’ve lost the ability to geotag those photos though…

The meeting itself was pretty casual, just some announcements and just general chatter for most of it. I’m hoping to have more organization for next month, perhaps with some discussion topics or a quick presentation. One person brought up the topic of media center computers, so maybe we can find someone to talk about their experience building such a thing with open source tech. I’ve taken a stab at it in the past with my MythTV box, but was never terribly happy with the results, and just use a WD HD TV Live to stream stuff from my storage server today.

Overall, I think everyone had a good time, and I’m hoping this will be a successful chapter.

We just received our first check for the first time homebuyer’s tax credit (we each claimed half) last week, so we rushed out to buy some items we were waiting on; some new chairs, a couple tables, and some much-needed lawn equipment. Being the proud owner of a brand new Troy-Bilt, I of course had to use it last weekend. The grass was nearly knee-high when I started, but after 5 hours of walking every inch of the lawn it was cut down to size and looking much more lawn-like. Last night we went out and picked up a string trimmer to get all the little places I couldn’t mow, a Black & Decker corded electric. I was on the fence between gas and electric, but we don’t have a lot to trim and I didn’t want to muck about mixing gas. It did an adequate job, and I’m overall rather pleased with the lawn at this point.

We also had our first plumbing related fun with the house this past week. The drain from the shower stall in the master bath was leaking into our kitchen ceiling. This is covered under our builder’s warranty though, so we just had to call up and he sent out a plumber, who just tightened up something in the drain, and so far it seems to be better.

Other than that, we’ve just been running around like headless chickens. Somehow we’ve found ourselves with a fairly full social calendar between movie nights and game nights and various cookouts. To help contribute to the chaos, we’ve decided to throw a housewarming party near the end of summer, currently scheduled for late September. If you haven’t already been invited, drop me a line so we can correct that.

The bugs are starting to come out now, so I think it’s time for me to get off the stoop and head indoors.

We set out on Thursday morning, catching a ride from Jason down to Boston’s Logan Airport to catch our early morning flight to San Diego. Since we were leaving home around two in the morning, we decided not to sleep beforehand. This turned out not to be the greatest idea, as we didn’t get a lot of sleep on the flight, and were dead tired by the end of the day. We still got a pretty full day in though. Once we landed and got our rental car, we found our hotel, a decent little place in San Ysidro. Then we went up to Qualcomm Stadium to take the trolly downtown for the con. We picked up our registration badges, made a feeble attempt at the vendor hall, then decided to grab some lunch. We took the trolly a few blocks north from the con and found Kansas City Barbeque which was okay. We then stumbled back to the hotel and collapsed.

The next morning we had to move to the hotel we booked for the rest of the weekend, the Sheraton Suites San Diego at Symphony Hall, which was considerably nicer than the place we stayed the night before, and was one of the hotels on the con shuttle routes. We dropped our bags and headed back to the vendor hall where we picked up some stuff from The Behemoth (makers of Castle Crashers) and Meg got a Firefly shirt from a pretty cool artist booth. After wandering around for a bit in the hall, we decided to head upstairs and ended up in one of the panel rooms and got to see comic legend Stan Lee give a talk on some of his experiences in the industry. It was pretty incredible to see him in person, and he gave a great presentation. After the session we decided to head back to the hotel, dump our stuff and find some food. I found a nice little hole-in-the-wall Mexican place, Maria’s Mexican Cocina, which turned out to be great. Over dinner, we decided we should return the car, as we didn’t need it with the shuttles, then crashed back at the hotel.

On Saturday, Meg decided she needed to get the Doctor Who bags that BBC America were giving away at their vendor booth, so we got up early and stood in line to get into the vendor hall as soon as it opened. We rushed to the BBCA booth just to find out they weren’t giving out the bags yet, so we continued around the hall for a while. There were a ton of exhibitors, including some giant booths for Aliens, the new Tron movie, The Expendables, LEGO, Warner Brothers, and of course Marvel and DC Comics. As we were winding our way back out, we happened to be at the BBCA booth just as they started giving away the bags and Meg managed to score one for herself and one for our friend Cole, who is a giant DW fan.

We grabbed lunch at an Irish pub near the hotel, Stout Public House, which was delicious, then went back to stake a claim in the session hall in anticipation of the Mythbusters panel later that day. Leading up to the main event were panels for Warehouse 13 and Eureka, which were both entertaining. Meg hadn’t seen Eureka before, and we’d only seen a few episodes of W13, but still really enjoyed the sessions. Then there was a preview of a new show, Nikita, loosely based on the French film of the same name and other derivative works of the film. It was okay, but I didn’t feel it really felt like something new, more just a rehash. I guess we’ll see how it does when it hits the air later this year. Human Target followed, a show that neither of us had seen, but it looked fairly entertaining, so we may check it out. Then came the panel we were waiting for, Mythbusters.

Apparently this was the first convention where the entire cast appeared together, so that was kindof cool. We had actually had a hard time taking photos of Adam, as he rarely stopped moving for more than a few seconds. Jamie on the other hand was the master of the two word answer, one of them generally being “umm”. It was a very entertaining panel, though I would have liked someone to have asked them if they ever felt they had too many explosions.

On the last day of the convention, we again wandered over early to try to get into the Castle panel. When we saw the line for it, Meg wanted to give up and just wander around again, but I convinced her to wait it out, which payed off. While we were waiting in line, we met a girl who had travelled over from Australia for the con. She’s a huge Harry Potter fan, and had tattoos of a golden snitch along with the Hogwart’s house crests down her spine. She’s also how we found out about the pen stabbing incident in one of the larger sessions the previous day. As we were heading into the Castle session they were handing out shwag boxes containing water bottles. Turns out some of them had passes for a special autograph session with the cast, and Meg had handed one of the boxes with a pass to the girl we met in line on the way in. Meg was a little annoyed that she had been so close to meeting one of her idols, but was happy that it went to someone who would appreciate it. Again it was a great panel, Fillion was hilarious, reading a passage from the book supposedly written by his character from the show. In general he was hamming it up the whole time and Meg could barely contain her drooling.

After Castle there was a panel for Merlin we decided to stay for, mostly for Anthony Stewart Head, who Meg liked from his role in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Afterward we decided to hit the vendors again, but the hall was so jam-packed with people that we could barely move. Apparently I was several feet from Danny DeVito at one point, but missed it due to being preoccupied trying to shovel people out of my path.

After calling it quits on the con, we met up with my friend Matt. He’s been living out in San Diego for a few years now, attending UCSD. He took up to El Zarape for dinner, where I had some delicious Mahi Mahi tacos, then off to see some of the sights in the area. We got to see a children’s beach that had been taken over by seals, then a rock outcropping covered in sea lions. We wandered around a beach for a bit, and the UCSD campus, seeing their impressive library and some of their outdoor art installations. Also an odd amount of nocturnal wildlife, including a number of rabbits, a raccoon, and a guy sleeping on a lawn. Eventually we called it a night, and settled back into the hotel for our last night in SD.

Overall we had a great time. It was an awesome 4 days, but exhausting as well. We’d like to go again, but probably not for a few years. We did learn a few lessons for next time though.

1. Bring a backpack stocked with water and snacks. Buying supplies at the con is way too expensive.
2. If we want to see anything in the large halls (H or 20), we need to be up way too early to get in line.
3. Buy anything we really want from the vendors before Sunday. Sure, the deals are to be had on Sunday, but you have to beat a path through the crowds with a cricket bat.
4. Skip the rental car, public transit is more than adequate for the convention.
5. Plan a longer trip so there’s time to relax before heading back to work.

Life in the house is going well. We’re mostly unpacked now and have most of the rooms mostly in order. We turned on of the bedrooms into a craft room to hold Meg’s yarn and my computer stuff, at least until I can get the basement set up the way I want with a server closet and workbench. Then I’ll be moving most of my computer stuff down there, and probably just have a workstation up here. I think our next steps will be getting some more furniture so the place doesn’t feel so empty. It’s time to finally get some real bedroom furniture, as we currently just have a mattress on the floor and the room looks really bare.

Work is good, I’ve been doing some IPv6 deployment, and it’s nice to finally see that getting some traction in the real world. Also been playing around with netdot, mostly for it’s IPAM features. A little hairy to get installed on FreeBSD, but once you get it on there, it seems to work out pretty well.

Meg and I are going to be heading out to San Diego tonight for Comic-Con this weekend. It’s out big vacation for the year and we’re really excited about it. Bunch of big names will be there, including Stan Lee and Ray Bradbury. Hoping to get some autographs and generally have a good time. Also, Geek Chic will be there, so we’re going to be checking out their Emissary table. We’re thinking about getting one for the dining room, but I want to see one in person before dropping that kind of money on furniture.

Time to go move laundry around. I’m sure we’ll be posting plenty of pictures from this weekend, and I’ll try to remember to post about it when we get back.

We bought a new construction two story colonial in a small development. It’s just over 2,000 square feet, 3 bedroom, 2 1/2 bath, 2 car garage on about a 1/4 acre. Hardwood floors on most of the downstairs, carpet upstairs for the bedroom. Small deck off the back.

Moved in last month and have been slowly settling in. We still have a lot of boxes in the garage to go through, but we’re making progress on that, as well as buying all the little things we’re finding we need, like shades and curtains and a fridge and a lawnmower. There’s an unused space in the garage under the stairs that I’m hoping to rig up for my router and home storage server and such. Big Dave has offered to help me pull Ethernet wiring to the bedrooms and living room, so that’ll be cool.

I’ll have to get some good pictures to post, the only ones I have at the moment are from the construction. I’m hoping to get a bit better about writing on here as well. My personal goal is to do at least one thing worth writing about each weekend, even if it’s just some small improvement to the house.

So, hopefully more posts to come in the near future, along with a house warming party sometime in the next few months.