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So a long haul between posts, I have lots of good ideas. Good ideas are easy to come by, its the execution that is the key. Its been a busy time for me these last 10 months or so. However I am very excited by whats to come. So for now I am just posting a count down timer until the BlackBerry Playbook is launched.

Launch is only: in 56 days, 10 hours, 48 minutes, 30 seconds away

Here are a few exciting demos that you can watch before you get in line.

Its an exciting time for all of us at QNX

So I manage a number of multi-node VMWare clusters running on Vmware, XEN etc. Recently some of the nodes have developed a problem of not wanting to switch nodes. The error message is always the same.
State change failed: (-12) Device is held open by someone.
The problem is that the application running in that volume has stopped. The volume also unmounts and remounts with no issues. lsof returns no matches, and looking through /dev /proc returned no clues.
Looking through the support forums always returned the same fix. The volume was not unmounted, or its an application that failed. The issue is that some of these hosts are running 16 other VM Hosts all of which are important, so a reboot is not really an option, particularly if its recurring.
The solution turned out to be simple. After feeling defeated by the problem I started thinking that whatever was holding open the resource was very low level. A kernel module for example. The fix was to stop the backup agent. /etc/init.d/VRTSralus.init stop. That was it. It seems that somehow the Symantec Veritas Backup agent can get into a state where it convinces DRBD that all of its resources are still in use even when they appear to be free. Once that has happens drbdadm secondary {resource} will always return state change failure message.
Simple fix for a simple problem.

Feeling motivated and having a little free time I thought I would embark on one of my OneDay challenges. Its a simple Idea. Start and finish and electronic project in a single day. This project was a Parking Garage detector using an ATMEL ATTINY45.

I did finish it and it so far its working great.

more here
On Day Garage Door Parking bumper

So I have been playing with my new OpenFiler NAS and one issue that I need to face is how to back up the server to a remote location. For this I looked around for a few options and thought that WebDav may be a good solution to try. The Caveat. Openfiler does not come with a WebDav client for mounting shares, It also does not come with a GCC enabled to build executable so you cannot install the compiler and build the client.

The fix after much looking around was to install a binary compiled version of davefs2 which matches the version of neon on OpenFiler after that it was off to the cloud for a backup

more here
Openfiler install on Dell 715n

Just posted some drive train updates to the section on building sumo robots.
Building a Sumo robot

As a youngster I made a few stop frame movies using 35mm cameras, Film cameras and later an actual video camera. Perhaps that is why I find ‘Tilt Shift’ videos so captivating. This is one in particular that I enjoy

Tilt Shift Monster Trucks

So this is my site. There are is a start of a document repository for various things that I have done as well as some ‘tools’ that I occasionally use.