Tag Archives: fail

Failed Retro emulation attempts

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For reasons that should escape everybody, I went back and looked at some old Operating Systems a little while ago: OS/2 Warp, Windows 3.11 and Microsoft Chicago. So, I went on a little adventure this weekend, largely in failure though.

Windows NT 3.51

This was the first version (err… no, second I think) of Windows NT that I ever used.

Lesson 1: qemu doesn’t expose a SCSI adapter that isn’t virtio-scsi (and I have a feeling there aren’t Windows NT 3.51 installer driver floppies for virtio-scsi)

screenshot_winnt3-1_2016-10-29_191707Lesson 2: OMG I’m so glad I don’t have to wait for things to be read off floppy disks anymore:

screenshot_winnt3-51_2016-10-29_193833Lesson 3: I’d forgotten that the Windows directory on NT 3.51 was different to every other Windows NT version, being \WINNT35

screenshot_winnt3-51_2016-10-29_194040screenshot_winnt3-51_2016-10-29_194139Lesson 3: Yeah, sometimes there’s just fail.

screenshot_winnt3-51_2016-10-29_194147

Windows NT 4.0

This brought the UI of Windows 95 to Windows NT. It was a thing. It required a fairly beefy PC for the day, but it could use two CPUs if you were that amazingly rich (dual Pentium Pro was a thing)

Lesson 1: Windows NT 4 does not like 8GB disks. My idea of “creating a small disk for a VM for an old OS as it probably won’t work well with a 20GB disk” needs to be adjusted. I’m writing this on a system with 8 times more RAM than what I ended up using for a disk for Windows NT 4.

screenshot_winnt4-0_2016-10-29_192840But hey, back to \WINNT rather than \WINNT35 or \WINDOWS

screenshot_winnt4-0_2016-10-29_192937

Lesson 2: Sometimes, full system emulation turns out to be a better idea:

screenshot_winnt4-0_2016-10-29_192418screenshot_winnt4-0_2016-10-29_192304Lesson 3: Remember when Windows couldn’t actually format NTFS in the installer and it installed to FAT and then converted to NTFS? No? Well, aren’t you lucky.

screenshot_winnt4-0_2016-10-29_193102screenshot_winnt4-0_2016-10-29_193235Apple Rhapsody DR2

Before there was MacOS X, there was a project called Rhapsody. This was to take NeXTStep (from NeXT, which Apple bought to get both NeXTStep and Steve Jobs as every internal “let’s replace the aging MacOS” project had utterly failed for the past ten years). Rhapsody was not going to be backwards compatible until everybody said that was a terrible idea and the Blue Box was added (known as Classic) – basically, a para-virtualized VM running the old MacOS 9.

Anyway, for the first two developer releases, it was also available on x86 (not just PowerPC). This was probably because a PowerPC port to Macs was a lot newer than the x86 port.

So, I dusted off the (virtual) Boot and Driver floppies and fired up qemu…..

screenshot_rhapsodydr2_2016-10-29_172732Yeah, MacOS X got a better installer…

screenshot_rhapsodydr2_2016-10-29_173227Hopeful!

screenshot_rhapsodydr2_2016-10-29_182218This was after I decided that using KVM was a bad Idea:

screenshot_rhapsodydr2_2016-10-29_172143

screenshot_rhapsodydr2_2016-10-29_173333Nope… and this is where we stop. There seems to be some issue with ATA drivers? I honestly can’t be bothered to debug it (although… for the PowerPC version… maybe).

MacOS 9.2

Well.. this goes a lot better now thanks to a whole bunch of patches hitting upstream Qemu recently (thanks Ben!)

screenshot-from-2016-10-29-20-37-24screenshot-from-2016-10-29-20-42-10Yeah, I was kind of tempted to set up Outlook Express to read my email…. But running MacOS 9 was way too successful, so I had to stop there :)

desktop-couch has been nothing but suck

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$ du -sh /home/stewart/.cache/desktop-couch/desktop-couchdb.*
746M	/home/stewart/.cache/desktop-couch/desktop-couchdb.log
4.0K	/home/stewart/.cache/desktop-couch/desktop-couchdb.pid
16K	/home/stewart/.cache/desktop-couch/desktop-couchdb.stderr
653M	/home/stewart/.cache/desktop-couch/desktop-couchdb.stdout

$ du -sh /home/stewart/.local/share/desktop-couch/.gwibber_messages_design/2f3267703246f5e02533e59714915b7d.view 
436M	/home/stewart/.local/share/desktop-couch/.gwibber_messages_design/2f3267703246f5e02533e59714915b7d.view

I feel better already. I think the log files irritate me the most.

Bullshit Tiger. bullshit.

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Screenshot-3

It also took them over an hour to make the announcement that the flight had been delayed. The screens just flashed “Boarding” for an hour (and they still are).

Delays are fine. Complete and total lack of any communication whatsoever is not.

Simply jumping on a microphone and saying “we’re experiencing a delay, we’ll have more information for you in half an hour” would be better. We seriously heard nothing for a whole hour after “Boarding” had started.

Just a closed door.

Somehow I feel this will be the last time I fly this airline.

Drizzle progress… (testing can be good)

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We’ve been working on fixing up the remaining test cases so that they run with Drizzle. We’ve found: bugs in Drizzle, bugs in MySQL (one that seems to have been there for at least 10 years), bugs in the tests, tests that no longer apply and occationally, something like this:


/* Please god, will someone rewrite this to be readable :( */
if (to->pack_length() == from->pack_length() &&
!(to->flags & UNSIGNED_FLAG && !(from->flags & UNSIGNED_FLAG)) &&
to->real_type() != DRIZZLE_TYPE_ENUM &&
(to->real_type() != DRIZZLE_TYPE_NEWDECIMAL || (to->field_length == from->field_length && (((Field_num*)to)->dec == ((Field_num*)from)->dec))) &&
from->charset() == to->charset() &&
to->table->s->db_low_byte_first == from->table->s->db_low_byte_first &&
(!(to->table->in_use->variables.sql_mode & (MODE_NO_ZERO_DATE | MODE_INVALID_DATES)) || (to->type() != DRIZZLE_TYPE_DATE && to->type() != DRIZZLE_TYPE_DATETIME)) &&
(from->real_type() != DRIZZLE_TYPE_VARCHAR || ((Field_varstring*)from)->length_bytes == ((Field_varstring*)to)->length_bytes))
{ // Identical fields
/* This may happen if one does 'UPDATE ... SET x=x' */
if (to->ptr != from->ptr)
memcpy(to->ptr,from->ptr,to->pack_length());
return 0;
}

and no, I haven’t really changed the formatting.

The passing of a faithful bottle opener….

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Sadly, after many years of service (over 5), my Microsoft VisualStudio.net bottle opener is no longer functional enough to keep on my keyring. See image below for the arrow pointing to where too much metal has chipped off that it no longer can open all beer.

It is a sad day.

Luckily, I have another one I can quickly add to my keyring to facilitate beer opening when needed.

The Drizzle Snowman – PlanetMySQL fail

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If you went “wtf” at The Drizzle Snowman – WIN! – Jay Pipes on PlanetMySQL suddenly ending at “create table”, you should click through and see the unicode character for a snowman.

In other fun, we’ve also created tables with the name of cloud symbol, umbrella symbol and umbrella with rain drops symbol. All of these seem rather appropriate for Drizzle.

Scaling MySQL on a 256-way T5440 server using Solaris ZFS and Java 1.7

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Scaling MySQL on a 256-way T5440 server using Solaris ZFS and Java 1.7

*cough*

(and then wipe coffee off the computer)

of course the real aim should be to scale with one instance on the machine as scaling with multiple instances on the one machine isn’t scaling at all – it’s scale out, but with more problems (now when one machine goes down, so do 1110202434 database instances).

libmallocfail

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Bazaar branches of libmallocfail

Simple LD_PRELOAD library that will take parameters via environment variables and cause malloc() to occationally fail.

Aim was to use this to test bits of MySQL/Drizzle although since their libtool based stuf, the binary in tree is a libtool shell script, and I haven’t found a way to LD_PRELOAD only for mysqld and not the shell script and the other processes spawned by it.

I have found a bug in libc though :)

evolution-data-server even worse (is that possible?)

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Just caught it using 713MB of resident memory. What the fuck? I don’t even have Evolution running! There’s only the clock applet (which does pull things out of calendar i guess…).

Does Evolution win the prize for worst piece of free software yet?

new NetworkManager VPNC not better at all (in fact, much worse)

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I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 the other day, NetworkManager promptly forgot my wireless LAN key (grr… lucky I keep a copy in a text file) as well as my VPN configuration. It’s also changed the UI for entering what specific networks to route over the VPN (’cause the last thing you want is putting all your traffic through VPN when you have a perfectly good internet connection here… or even worse, I do *not* need to go via Sydney or the US to access the machine 2ft from me thank you very much).

Generally not happy with the new NetworkManager.

the power dongles come to ruin our way of life

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I recently moved.

I found enough of the power supplies for USB disk enclosures to power on the most crucial disks (read: the ones attached to mythtv).

However, I have a disk I use for offsite backups. I need to find the dongle for it. Can I find it? No, of course not. I’m user it’s one of these 5 boxes of misc office crap (including *lots* of cables).

Why can’t we just have a standard USB disk enclosure power cable?

Please, pretty please.

jetlag fail is starting…

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stayed awake, good lunch. even been spending afternoon sending paperwork for bank for home loan (requiring lots of it now.. is just the way it is now). but now it’s starting to hit me (the jetlag thing). feeling tired, a bit hungry, not wanting to move enough to make food (or rather going out to get food to then make food). so now feeling down, everything sucks and cold and hungry. I miss the summer time of Portland. no doubt feel better in morning, but the few hours of going “need to stay awake or tz fucked”… gah. i hate the first day back from travel.

Adventures with OpenSolaris

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So… some colleagues have been experimenting with DTrace a bit, and I’ve been (for a while now) wanting to experiment with it.

The challenge now, instead of in the past, is that I’m setting up a Solaris based system – not getting one premade.

I chose OpenSolaris as I’d previously tried Solaris 10 and just sunk too much time trying to get updates and a development environment installed (another colleague could get the opposite to me going: he got devtools but no updates. at least mine was up to date and secure… but without a compiler).

So… OpenSolaris. It isn’t 100% open, there’s binary only drivers and such… but compared to previous Solaris, a whole lot better. Now, if only it was GPL licensed so we could have cross-pollination with Linux.

I grabbed the 2008.05 ISO as soon (in fact, slightly before) it was released and installed it in VirtualBox.

The installation was shiny – one of the best OS installs I’ve seen in a while. It set up nice things (zfs, X) and (an improvement on the previous release) even managed to get all the hardware going (not sound though).

However, on first reboot, nasty surprise. DNS isn’t enabled by default.

I found out why DNS isn’t enabled by default – and (as usual) this comes down to hysterical raisins. Back in what we laughingly call the past, during install Solaris would ask you what services you wanted to use for name resolution (which I guess made sense when people used yp/NIS more often than DNS). The default didn’t include DNS.

In the graphical installer, it just chose the default without asking… which is no DNS. So my mother would be able to install OpenSolaris, but once done, she’d have to know to type in 150.101.98.214 instead of www.google.com.au into Firefox. However, I swallowed my pride, edited /etc/nsswitch.conf and went along my business (I wonder the percentage of users who would actually go from “hrrm, internet not working” to editing /etc/nsswitch.conf without intense googling).

The UI did look nice though. Nice looking GDM, GNOME desktop looked nice. You could tell that whoever did the theme had spent too much time near MacOS X, but I’ll forgive them for that. The default shell is remotely sane and even though the bash completions aren’t as funky as on Ubuntu, I managed (unlike sitting at cmd.exe, where somebody is likely to die each time my keystrokes end up there).

I even had a look at the graphical package management tool – which looked quite nice. I even tried to do an update via it… which ended in what seemed to be a locked package manager and general amounts of fail. To see if it had just stopped or was chewing up my CPU or memory, I opened a terminal and ran ‘top’.

I then found out that top isn’t installed by default. It’s 57kb on my Ubuntu 8.04 laptop so disk space couldn’t be the reason why it’s not installed. It’s certainly not a “it’s a minimal install” argument, there’s lots of other things there by default.

Next step, let’s get updates (some time had elapsed between first install and now).

Seeing as I hadn’t met too much success with the graphical utility (it was at version 0.0000001 or something, so I don’t lay blame there). I find out that ‘pkg image-update’ is what you want to run. So I do.

It chugs for a while and says there’s 1GB of updates. That’s okay, I (where I=Sun) pay for what here on the arse end of the Internet is considered a decent link to my home office. About 20-30minutes later, having downloaded about 600MB, it goes “url timedout error” and aborts. Oh well I think, that’s easy – i’ll run it again and it’ll just resume downloading (remember the revolution when that started working, you know, in 1997).

I then discovered that pkg doesn’t resume downloads. It creates a snapshot using ZFS and puts the updates in it. If anything goes wrong, it just deletes the snapshot. This is a huge benefit over (say) dpkg, which if you press the reset button at the right time will leave your system very, very fucked (magic incantations can revive it, but it’s not fun – and the dpkg developers don’t think it’s a problem – come to my “Eat My Data” talk at OSCON to find out the full story). So OpenSolaris pkg wins on the “don’t ruin my working OS install already” front, but fails on resuming downloads.

I try again. Same story.

It’s now wasted a bit over 1GB of downloads… which equates to a couple of dollars.

I wait a few days, a week, and try again. Same story. I even try with a few hints found online that should fix things (well.. they did let another 100MB on average download before dying with the same story).

I then decided to just try and do the minimal – I wanted a development environment so I could build a MySQL Server with NDB and then play with DTrace to help nut out a performance problem or two.

So i tell pkg to install SunStudio Express. I’m even using instructions off sun.com, so it has to work.

It’s only ~500MB now (IIRC). Fails with exactly the same error as before (url timedout). Gah!

So, this brings us to today. I head into the Sun office.

I figure “this just has to work from a Sun office… ” and I was right!

It got through the (now) 1500MB download of updates!

It even applied them!

Success!

Win!

Well, no, – FAIL.

It now refused to boot with the updates. Or rather, it just rebooted soon after having started booting. No panic, no error screen, no “will reboot in 120 seconds” or anything useful. Instead, you just saw a flicker of the error message before it rebooted.

So… with some very careful pause/unpause of the VM (thanks VirtualBox… I also have a feature request now – pause before reboot :) I got this:

Aparrently the successful update, not so much.

Hrrm… perhaps select the known good one from the GRUB menu? It did actually boot! But this wasn’t just the old kernel, it was the whole older system. I guess that’s a possible upside of ZFS snapshots…. but oh my, that could be sooooo subtle and lead to data loss that it’s really quite dangerous.

I was still no closer to getting an up to date opensolaris system with enough developer tools to build a MySQL Server and use dtrace.

And this was enough. It’s now gone and I get my 10GB of disk back.

Maybe I’ll try again later… but I’m finding the google-perftools to be rather exciting and they’re really satisfying shiny thing urges at the moment.