Tom at 16

Week of September 30th, 2002

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Friday October 4, 2002

Yee Gads it's been a long week... I put in three 14 hour days since Monday, and frankly, I'm not holding up well. Not as well as I used to 10 years ago, that is. Ah, the aches and pains of growing old ;-)

I did four complete RH 8 installs today. No, not because I need practise installing RH, and no, nothing to do with RH itself. RH just happens to be my development OS of choice, cuz I can install it and have a fully functional system running in under an hour. Plus it's stable, and useable. My problems today were DB2-based. I'm trying to track down and isolate some bugs in the product, and every time I installed it I got a different result. So I ended up doing a series of installs with the base setup identical in every case -- then I installed DB2 and monitored the results. Strangeness abounds. One installation installed DB2, but left out Java (and in case you weren't aware, DB2 is very reliant on Java for most of its system tools and utilities). I'm still scratching my head as to how the install even completed without Java. Whatever. I believe I've finally isolated the problems. They're not DB2 per se, but more documentation errors/omissions. The documentation supplied with DB2 V8.1 needs some work, and some holes filled. If I follow my own notes, I can install the product without fuss or muss, but if I rely on the supplied doco... well... the result is definately a surprise every time.

It's a beautiful fall evening here. Crisp and clear. I believe I'll go sit on the porch for a spell, sip some tea, and ponder both the week behind me, and what I'll do with the knowledge I've gained from it in the days to come.

I won't promise much in the way of updates here this weekend. I plan to avoid computers as much as possible this weekend, and spend some time cooking "comfort food" and spending time with the family.

Cheers...

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Thursday October 3, 2002

Good grief. Is it Friday yet? Sorry for my lack of effort yesterday, but it's been one very long week. I was in bed at 8pm, and asleep at 8:05...

Tuesday I needed to extract some information from a DB2 "sample" database. I quickly discovered that DB2 (V 8.1 beta) was no installed correctly. So I installed it again, held my mouth differently, and this time got everything aligned properly. I also ended up with TWO DB2 installations on the system. It didn't take long to discover DB2 does not play with itself very well ;-). The good Mr. Bilbrey was kind enough to upload fresh shiny RH 8.0 ISOs to my server Monday, so I decided to kill two birds with a single stone -- scrape the system down to bare metal (it was running "Null" beta 2), and do a clean install of DB2 8.

RH 8 installed cleanly, but when I tried to install DB2 8.1 the setup script hung. Bah. Thinking it was a RH 8 issue, I did a clean install of RH 7.3 on my second dev box. The DB2 installer hung under 7.3 as well. Double Bah. Long story short, I didn't have Java configured correctly. IBM relies heavily on Java for numerous facets of their product line-up; without Java, the installer script went into a deep sleep rather than exit gracefully with an error. Once I got the Java end of things in order, DB2 installed as advertised. Getting DB2 to actually run was another kettle of fish altogether.

The documentation for DB2 8.1 is, er... well... incomplete. Lots of place-holders, hasty notes, etc. Normal stuff for a beta product. After playing hide-n-go-seek for several hours, I switched horses and set off in another direction entirely. I finally closed the barn door just after midnight. Yesterday I put my best game face on, and set out to slay the DB2 dragon. As noted in several previous posts, DB2 8.1 is one complex piece of software. It's designed -- at an entry level POV -- to support 10,000+ clients, 24/7. In short, high-level enterprise stuff. Unfortunatley, the documentation is written for an enterprise admin with a strong background in DB2, who's probably been to two or three training courses. Let me give you some idea just how complex DB2 8.1 is. The full documentation in PDF is available for download. The file is zipped. The zipped file is 50MB's!! Unzipping the file produces 53 PDFs. Each PDF varies in length from about 50 pages to over 400... Sigh.

Three or four hours of scanning PDFs left me about as enlightened as when I first began, so I switched to plan B: Brute force. By using the principles of attrition, I finally found the secret to the golden temple -- login as the owner of the DB2 instance (user=db2inst1). Pretty intuitive, eh?

On a positive note, RH 8 is the polished, stable update I anticipated it would be. It's now installed on both my dev boxes (my notebook will remain on Gentoo), and as far as I can tell, everything is working exactly as advertised. Over the course of the next few days I plan to set up a chroot'd CVS server on one, and put CommuniGate Pro's latest beta (b8) through its paces on another. Onward into the abyss...

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Tuesday October 1, 2002

It's late. I've had a very long day. The northern lights are putting on a show here tonight. So rather than bore you with the trials and tribulations I've hacked through for the past 15 or 16 hours, I'm going to get a nice hot cup of tea and watch the "lights dance" for awhile. Be good. I'll catch up tomorrow.

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Monday September 30, 2002

Dark, cold, damp, and blustery today. And the forecast calls for snow tonight. Yes, you read that right. Snow. Bleh. So much for transitional seasons.

I didn't spend a whole lot of time at the keyboard this weekend, but the time I did was spent trying to get an openMosix kernel running on my notebook. Turns out this was not as trivial as I anticipated. The first rule of clustering is all participating machines must be running the same kernel. Both my development boxes are running RH 8 with the openmosix4-2.4.18 kernel. Which meant I had to install the same kernel on my notebook. This seemingly simple task did not go well a-tall, a-tall. Phaedrus runs Gentoo Linux 1.4, which is a GCC 3.2-based distribution, and I quickly discovered that GCC 3.2 does not play nice with 2.4.18. As the saying goes, hindsight is 20-20. If I had been smart, I would have given up after a couple tries and simply updated my two RH boxes to openmosix4-2.4.19 (I could get openmosix-2.4.19 to build without error on Phaedrus, but not 2.4.18). Unfortunately, my persistence eventually bit me in the ass and I wound up thoroughly trashing my Gentoo installation (too many kernel variants, in conjunction with mis-matched libraries me-thinks). Silly ole bear. So today Phaedrus is sitting off to the side of my desk, busily rebuilding Gentoo from the ground up with a openmosix4-2.4.19 kernel and KDE-CVS-20020929. I updated my two RH boxes to openmosix4-2.4.19, and everyone's clustering with everyone else as advertised. See Brian? I can break Gentoo just as well as you can ;-) Na-nah na-nah nah-nah...

In case you haven't heard, the Mozilla Project has a new browser out. It's been dubbed "Phoenix" and is perhaps best described as "Mozilla-light". Think Gecko engine surrounded by only the basics -- no mail, news, or chat components. Tabbed browsing, forward and reverse buttons, basic menus, bookmarks, etc. The goal of the Phoenix project is to develop a small, cross-platform, no frills, FAST, browser. They've succeeded. Phoenix loads in half the time Moz does, and pages render instantly. I've been using Phoenix all morning to research a work-related project, and so far it's performed admirably. Considering it's a '0.1' release, I'm more than a tad impressed with the product's stability. Details are available from the Phoenix Project page; there's a link at the top of the page for download and install instructions.

My motivation quotient is running in the negative numbers today; time to grab another cup of Joe and search under my desk for some enthusiasm.

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