Josef “Jeff” Sipek

Some time ago, I started helping with the maintainance of Galaxy — a Beowulf cluster right here at Stony Brook University. Up until two days ago, it consisted of:

That’s right, 176 nodes. Anyway, two days ago we took all the Athlons offline, because we got a shipment of nice 3400 MHz Xeons — about 50 of them. :)

I should get a copy of SPEC and see how it goes. ;)

(I’ll post some photos in near future.)

Rocky is thee, road to satisfaction. Fore two nights and one day I have traveled thee, and now I stand, look back, and see thy nature. Thou art twisted. O curse thee! Why wouldn’t you maketh my laptop’s filesystem that of good kind? O curse thee twice! Why must thee make me use a filesystem of bad kind? O curse thee thrice! Why must thee be so rocky? Is Hans responsible? O curse thee, Hans! Two nights and one day I have spent trying to move my data to a filesystem of good kind.

Finally! Approximately 28 hours after I started I finally got my laptop’s root filesystem to be XFS. Yay! Here’s a quick summary of what I did:

1. boot with init=/bin/bash
2. make sure that / is mounted read-only
3. mount my external firewire drive read-write
4. use dd to copy the entire root partition to a file on the external disk
5. run sha1sum on the disk image and the partition (just to make sure that I got everything exactly the way it is)
6. reboot into knoppix/other live CD (I happened to have a copy of SLAX)
7. mkfs.xfs the partition
8. mount the partition, and the disk image (using -o loop=/dev/loop9)
9. cp -a the files from the disk image to the partition
10. chroot to the new partition
11. edit /etc/fstab to reflect new filesystem type
12. run grub to install the new stage 1.5
13. reboot, and enjoy the new filesystem

It is rather simple procedure. The thing that made it take so long (instead of ~3-4 hours) was the fact that GRUB didn’t want to work. It took me more than a day to figure out that downgrading grub to 0.91-2 would do the trick.

So, I was quietly coding, minding my own business, when this crazy guy send me a message:

Crazy Guy: awwww yeah
Crazy Guy: -rw-r–r– 1 sean somegroup 4476447 Apr 11 15:51 tags

Apparently he decided to run ctags on the GCC source code. I couldn’t help but answer:

Jeff: that’s nothing

I ran “make tags” on the 2.6.16 kernel tree, and quickly replied with:

Jeff: -rw-r–r– 1 jsipek somegroup 50423236 Apr 11 15:54 tags

That’s right, the kernel tags file is 11.26 times larger! Or approximately 50% of the size of the GCC source tree! Mwhahaha. He underestimated the power of the kernel. He then went on to say:

Crazy Guy: ctags is my God
Jeff: ok..
Crazy Guy: I’m serious
Crazy Guy: I’m going to set up a little exuberant shrine
Crazy Guy: with a holy ] key suspended from a golden chain
Crazy Guy: and I will sacrifice source files to it every day

I came across an interesting project by the EFF: it is called Tor. In essence it is a program that selects a random path through a set of special Tor proxies to make your identity hard to determine. I have managed to painlessly configure Gaim to use it for ICQ. One thing I noticed is that it took a bit longer to authenticate with the ICQ server - not sure if it slower because of someone somewhere having bad/congested connection or it is Tor taking time to set up the several proxy hops long (quite possibly 30 or more router hops) route.

Oh yeah, I should have probably posted this earlier…the OLS paper is done. And it looks good :)