SirSpanky.com - The Secret Diary of James Pearce Aged 20-Something

Well, I finally got around to moving this site (and the other test sites) off the old K6-2 300 and into a VM on a Core 2 Duo. There should be less downtime now, as it’s easier to manage!

The main delay was getting the import / export procedure for a domain in ISPCP correct. I now have a Perl script that will successfully export the mail and web files, and the SQL data for a domain from an ISPCP setup to a portable format that can be reimported on the other end. Yay!

I have posted the files on the ISPCP Forum if anyone wants to take a look. Actually, I’ve already made some minor bug fixes that I noticed after I released those versions, but I’m not going to bother updating them unless someone gives some feedback. If no one gives feedback, I’ll assume no one actually used them, and I’m not going to waste effort messing around with talking to myself on the internet - I do that enough here already

Back when I was finishing high school, the TEE English subject required the demonstration of oral delivery capabilities of students. This was true oral delivery, not presentations with power point, although there is much overlap in the principles. Our teacher at the time gave us a handout that summarised these good principles. The handout was taken from a book, but the handout doesn’t have any indication as to the book it was taken from (it doesn’t even have page numbers!), and Google doesn’t pickup the text fragments. I tried to find another summary out that included such a good overview, but was surprised when I couldn’t. I’m sure if I altered my keywords and moved off the first couple of pages I could, but I type in excess of 100wpm when I want to, so it’s probably quicker to retype this. Here it is.

Manner of Speech

Our manner of delivery or the way we use speech may also affect how the message we send is received - it can either enhance the effectiveness of our speech or inhibit it. Our manner of speech is affected by the following:

• Tone, or the emotional message of our speech. This reflects our attitide to and feelings about the subject.
• Pitch, or the highness or lowness of speech sounds. he pitch of our voice affects its pleasnt appeal and therefore the listener’s willingness and ability to pay attention.
• Intonation, or pattern or variations of pitch in speech. By varying intonation patterns we give certain aspects of what we say greater importance over others.
• Pace, or the speed at which a person speaks. Well-paced speech is easy to listen to. By varying the pace we can control the degree of excitement we wish to communicate.
• Loudness, or volume of seech. By altering the volume of what we say we can manipulate the audience’s attention.
• Stress, or emphasis is given to syllables or words in a sentence. This helps our listener to sort out what is the most important idea or the most relevant evidence.
• Rhythm, or pattern of a group of stresses. Creating rhythm gives empasis to what is being said and helps the listener to remember what is said, especially if the rhythm is pleasant.
• Length, or time speech sounds last. If the length of speech sounds are well modified they are easy to listen to. By varying them we can affect the level of stress certain word and phrases carry and this can alter the over all meaning of what we have to say.
• Body language, or non-verbal language, such as facial expressions (e.g. smiling to show agreement; frowning to show disagreement), gesture (e.g. use of the hands to mock or question), posture (e.g. way of standing to show confidence; leaning forward to stress a point), eye contact (e.g. winking to convey approval). Non-verbal language helps to provide an emotional context for what we have to say so that the listener can interpret the emotional significance of our message.
• Word choice affects our manner of speech and often reflects our knowledge of our intended audience. We can alter the level of language or degree of formality by varying our vocabulary and choice of words. Words may be emotive if we wish to persuade, factual if we wish to inform or argue, imaginative and personal if we wish to create, technical if we wish to address an audience in a specialist field. Word choice is closely linked to a speaker’s purpose. Careful word choice will allow the speaker to convey their message as effectively as possible.
• Structure of sentences: Sentences affect the clarity and coherence of our ideas. The presentation of our ideas can be made more or less effective by our choice of sentence structure. Our depth of meaning, degree of detail and the emotional impact of what we have to say can be altered by changing the way words are arranged in a sentence.
• Sequencing of ideas: The order in which ideas are presented in our formal speech often reflects their importance to us. They may flow from the most to the least important or build up to a climax, usually with a closing summary at the end. If ideas are ordered logically they will create a succussful line of argument rather than merely state an opinion.

Making A Speech

Most people are afraid of public speaking. However, this fear and nervousness can be overcome by thorough preparation, taking control of the situation and by practice.

Preparation

First you need to be clear about the purpose of your speech. Most speeches aim to inform, persuade or entertain. Often speeches combine purposes.

Second, you need to know your audience. Ask yourself:

• Who are they?
• What are their backgrounds, abilities and education level?
• What do they know?
• What don’t they know?
• What do they want to know?
• What is their mood?
• What are their biases, prejudices and interests?
• How do they feel about an issue?

Third, think about the content of the speech. Ask yourself what it is you want to communicate. Collect as much detail as possible and other related material including pictures, anecdotes and examples. Consider the topic carefully and get your facts straight. Sequence your ideas logically, in a step-by-step or date / time order. Write your main points on cue cards with a brief summary of supporting details. It will help if you find a central theme for your speec.

Structure

Speeches usually follow the structure of an introduction, body and conclusion.

Introduction

• Address the audience appropriately.
• Give the audience a clear understanding of what you are going to talk about and why.
• Make your opening concise and arresting. This can be achieved by a question for the audience to think about, visual aids, impressive facts and statistics, a personal anecdote or story, or a joke.

Body

• Provide the audience with important factual material. Don’t be afraid to remind them of what they already know.
• State the main points and provide support from either evidence, a well-reasoned argument, or an appeal to authority such as a member of parliament or an expert in a related field (e.g. a leading genetics engineer if your speech is about an hereditary illness).
• Order your points in a way which will suit your audience’s knowledge and interests.
• Points must have a logical structure (e.g. organised from the least to the most important).
• Restate the points to ensure your autdience will remember them.
• Use brief notes as memory checks for your main points and supporting details. Summary notes are best written on cue cards and should only contain one point per card.

Conclusion

• Your conclusion must be memorable. Make it so by summarising the main points of your speech and finishing strongly by using a forceful tone of voice, a call for action, a quotation or an anecdote. For example, the conclusion of a successful persuassive speech should leave the audience with the blief that that is indeed the only conclusion which can be drawn.

Delivery

• Stand quietly before an audience and pause before starting your speech. This helps to create tension by letting them wait and anticipate what is going to happen. (Hint: Make sure you have checked the microphone before you begin to speak).
• Be aware of your body language. About 90 percent of your confidence in yourself and your task will be conveyed by non-verbal communication. Try to project an image of confidence, competence and enthusiasm. Use your eyes - the windows of your souls - to establish contact with your audience. Try to make each individual feel important and recognised. Use your hands to convey enthusiasm. If your are nervous, grip something.
• Speak directly and fluently. You should aim to sound energetic, enthusaistic, friendly, and sincere. Vary your voice to keep the audience’s interest: by dropping the volume you can force the audience to listen intently; by raising it you can renew their interest. Slow down to make a point: by varying your tone and pace you will help your audience distinguish between points. Use pauses for emphasis.
• Vary your standing position. Lean forward to be close to the audience. Assert your authority by standing up straight.
• Smile - it will help you an your audience feel comfortable.
• Give your speech emotional appeal by using emotive words which will engage the audience in a personal and positive way. This will enable you to communicate with your audience at both the feeling and thinking level.
• Use humour to lighten your speech and make it more entertaining.
• Enliven your speech with human interest details. By relating anecdotes based on personal experience you can make them real to the audience.
• Keep your speech short to avoid over-taxing the audience’s attention span and letting boredom set in.
• Rehearse your speech two or three times before you deliver it. Practise in front of friends or family using the video or tape recorder. Keep a close check on your timing. (While walking or jogging you could pactise creative visualisations of yourself successfully performing before your audience).
• Use your intuition if you want to do something spontaeous like telling a story or joke. If it feels right, do it.
• Before giving your speech anticipate any questions you may be asked. Always be polite to the person asking the question. If you do not have the detailed information that is requested (such as statistics), agree to provide it at a later date. Feedack is important to help you develop skills and confidence. Choose someone that you can trust to give you an honest appraisal. Don’t listen to feedback that is not constructive. If someone asks you to provide feedback praise the speaker in a few areas and then suggest one area that needs improvement.

I recently had an experience with a Canon LBP-3500 printer where we were sharing the printer on the network, and one of the laptops that needed to use it was using 64 bit Vista. Canon don’t provide 64 bit drivers for their CAPT range of printers it seems, so there was no driver for the 3500, nor any compatible driver. In fact, the driver setup program even refused to run.

The solution that I found was to use GhostScript and Redmon to create a normal Postscript printer for a printer that wasn’t actually there, share that printer, and  rediect the rendered output to the real printer. Of course, it means that the remote computer won’t have the fancy utilities and options available in the real Canon driver, but at least it would enable printing.

The problem was, during the installation of RedMon, I messed it up and had to uninstall. The uninstall failed, and reinstallation kept failing with:

“Error Copying DLL. Error = 5. Access is denied”

The error is actually correct. Something goes wrong with the permissions when installing the RedMon files into C:\Windows\System32, and those files cannot be overwritten. The solution is to manually  remove the RedMon files from that directory. I think the files are redmonnt.dll and unredmon.exe (after you fix the DLL error, it complains about another file). Alternatively, just do a search for “*redmon*” and delete the files located in the system32 directory. Installation should then succeed.

As part of my job, I manage virtual machines on both of these networks. With rolling out Hyperic as a new monitoring solution, I’m now able to see some of the inventory that gets picked up by the agent automatically. This includes the amount of memory on the box.

When I installed the agent onto a Slicehost VM, all was good. The CPU is showing 2×2, which means 2 dual cores, which is interesting, it means they are not using native quad cores. At least, not in the box I’m in. Investigation on the actual box shows that they are using Dual-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2214 series processors. The memory from Hyperic shows as 512MB, which is what that VM has.

On the Linode box, it shows 1×4. They are using quads. The VM reads this as Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5420  @ 2.50GHz. For some reason though, the memory was showing as 704MB. My first reaction was: That’s an odd number, did they allocate it wrong? However, checking the specs, it is supposed to be 720MB. Checking on the actual box shows 720,000kb or there abouts.

It was pretty obvious then that Linode are advertising their memory based on 1MB = 1000kb, like hard drive manufacturers do. That’s why when you buy a 500GB drive, it doesn’t format as 500GB, but it will format as 500,000MB (which is about 420GB). Slicehost are selling the memory as what the OS sees.

The actual RAM readings from the OS are.

Slicehost = 523008k total for a 512MB slice

Linode =  721740k total for a 720MB slice

It doesn’t bother me very much because I usually leave capacity margins when I provision servers, but it is annoying that Linode don’t tell people that is what they are doing.

I’ve been playing with a variety of network management systems for a month or so now and I’ve decided that Hyperic is the best for my use. It might not be the most detailed / configurable, but it’s “good enough” and sports the ability to install the agent and have the agent automatically detect most of the monitoring metrics I want. Anyway, I added my 5th server to it once I’d figured out the configuration that I was going to use for everything, only to find that this 5th server wasn’t appearing on my Dashboard metrics. About 4 hours later, it also stopped reporting metrics in the indicator panel of the platform. This was weird, given that the host was still up, I could see everything on it, and the Hyperic agent reported that it was working just fine (through the status command).

I went to the live metrics, and when I ran top it ran. Except then I noticed the time on it was 30 minutes out. My first thought was that the server was being stupid and caching the data before putting it into the the database ready for extraction and display. But then when I ran top on the host that the agent was installed on, the time was the same — the host actually had the wrong time. I realised that I hadn’t set NTP to run on that machine. As soon as I ran it and upated the time, the platform appeared in the dashboard metrics and the indicators started going green again. There was, however, 6 periods which are blank in the indicators as the time jumped. So, the lesson is, Hyperic will use the time that the Agent reports from the host it is installed upon, it does not time conversion. This also affects what is displayed on the dashboard metrics — it must only display what is happening “now”, so that if one of the platforms that a metric is on is reporting that it is a different time, it is not included as being “now” and thus is not shown. Good to know, even if I did find out by being frustrated (what’s new in system administration).

I downloaded Splunk 4 a couple of months ago when it came out because I decommissioned the box that my original Splunk version was on (and changed OS’s - see my battle with FreeBSD and Splunk in earlier posts) and I needed to download the package again. At the time, there was no free license available. Actually, I didn’t realise that when I downloaded it, and I wound up with a 60 day enterprise trial license. I didn’t do anything with it that I didn’t do with the old 3.x free license, as in, I didn’t index any more data and the authentication actually just annoyed me (I’m the only user).

Anyway, it expired after 60 days a the beginning of October, and there was still no free license available, so I stopped using it. At the end of October (27th), Splunk released a free license verison. Unfortunately, they provided no instructions on going from the trial to the free license version. The marketing release mentioned that 3.x enterprise users should contact sales for upgrades, and 3.x free users should read the documentation. Unfortunately, all the documentation said was that the 3.x license wouldn’t work with 4.x, and the rest of the documentation referred to the old Splunk version. Nothing indicating how to upgrade from 3.x to 4.x free license, or trial to free license conversion.

I sent sales an email and got a response back saying “Hey, thanks for using Splunk, go read our marketing release”. I’m thinking, yeah, I did that already, that’s kind of why I emailed you… Oh well. Anyway, I’ve been trying to move all these beta monitoring servers into production,so I wanted to get Splunk working. I poked around in the directories and discovered /opt/splunk/etc/splunk.license. Renaming it so that the program couldn’t find it didn’t really work; Splunk stil said my license had expired. I wound up being ready to ditch my existing database and just install a fresh copy if necessary, but first I was going to see if I could install the new version, rip the free license file out of it manually now I knew where to find it, and put it in my old directory. Because I’m using Debian / Ubuntu, when I installed the new package version, it automatically deteted an upgrade. Ok, there goes my idea of manually copying the file, I should have gone with the tarball..however, because I’d renamed the license (or maybe it does this anyway, I’m too lazy to reinstall it now it works), the upgrade installed all of the licenses and upon the first run prompted me to agree to the license agreement for a free license. Woohoo! Working Splunk. And it kept all my data that had been indexing from the Enterprise trial.

After deciding not to use VMWare if I could find a working alternate solution, I went back and decided to actually test VirtualBox 3.0.2 on a Ubuntu 8.04 headless server. I installed FreeBSD 7.2 as a guest because it was the only ISO I had available at the time, and I will be wanting to use it in production.

My questions were:

• Does it work (i.e. the VM runs, the management interface gives me visibility and I can connect to the console)
• What is the performance like
• What is the resource hit (or “how VM’s at a time can I run on my server”)

Throughout all of this I had configured the VM with bridged networking (once I eventually got the commands for it right!) and an IDE controller for the virtual HDD.

The answer to the 1st question is yes, but the bridged networking didn’t work at first. By default, VirtualBox gave me an AMD PCNet 79C973 (it’s even present in the XML config file). FreeBSD detected this, but wouldn’t DHCP off it. The problem was that FreeBSD didn’t see the media being connected (i.e. it thought the cable was unplugged).

media: Ethernet none

I checked and rechecked (reset) all the VM settings form VirtualBox, but it looked all ok. Because VirtualBox allows different types of NIC’s, I decided to try my luck with one of the Intel NIC’s. It worked; the interface came up right away and the media was detected by FreeBSD correctly. Obviously I had to reconfigure the NIC because it was a new device, but once I’d done that, it was successfully bridged to the network. The exact command I used was:

VBoxManage modifyvm ftest -nictype1 82540EM

Which changes the NIC to an Intel Pro 1000. I really don’t care about the speed, I know it’s virtual anyway, but I do care that this one works and the AMD does not!

I think this might be a bug in FreeBSD 7+. Looking at a thread where someone is trying to get bridged mode working in the FreeNAS LiveCD, it doesn’t work in the 0.7 liveCD which is FreeBSD 7 based, but it works in the FreeNAS 0.69 CD, which is FreeBSD 6 based. Hrmm. Oh well, at least now there is a solution listed on Google somewhere!

By the way, the performance hit on a Dual P3 733 with 1.5G of RAM and nothing (I mean nothing, it was a complete fresh install of Ubuntu Server 8.04 w/ SSH enabled and VirtualBox 3.0.2 over the top) is 40% of one CPU when the VM is idle. It quickly jumps to 100% of one CPU when any disk work is done, even if the work inside the VM is not CPU intensive, so obviously virtual HDD I/O is still slow (PIO style woooooo!!).

It is, however, fast inside the VM. I’d say between 2/3 and 3/4 of native speed, depending on how much disk work is involved (disk work is about 20% of native speed). An I *really* like the VRDP facility. That is the winner for me, and the final straw which made me switch from VMWare (plus the fact that it works!