The Observable Inn

adidas miCoach is telling me my current pair of running shoes have reached the 480km mark and it’s time to think about changing them. Here are the old adiZero Adios (left) and new adiZero Boston 2 (right) together:

For the avoidance of doubt (and to assist the colour-blind) the old pair are red and the new pair are green!

Michael Thompson has been fined £175 (and ordered to pay £250 costs) for flashing his lights to warn other motorists of a mobile Police speed gun. His crime? Wilfully obstructing a police officer in the course of her duties. Speeding is a criminal offence. Crimewatch, Crime Stoppers and Neighborhood Watch tell us to do everything we can, safely, to prevent crime. However, it would appear in this case that preventing a crime being commited and a fine being imposed is in itself a crime. To add insult to injury, Mr Thompson also had to pay a £15 victim surcharge! Who is the victim here?

The Crown Prosecution Service has defended its decision to prosecute. A spokesperson said that in addition to assessing if there was, “a realistic prospect of conviction” they also had to consider, “whether a prosecution is in the public interest.” Public interest? Which public is that? Sounds like the same nation the Government means when they refer to, “the national interest.”

Whether you call it them number plates, registration plates or, (for the benefit of our trans-Atlantic cousins) license plates, we see them every day. For those of us wanting that individual touch there is the world of cherished numbers, aka personalised number plates.

I’ve looked but, haven’t even been able to find “ROB 1N” so it would seem that an “RV” plate would be best. However, I’ve thought that this seemingly uncommon letter combination appears to to carry some sort of price premium. I think I may have found the reason; last night BBC’s Inside Out East carried an article about county councils and the unusual assets they have. You’ve guessed, it’s personalised number plates.

Originally, councils were responsible for issuing number plates and managed to keep some exclusive ones to themselves. When the donor car was scrapped Essex County Council took back “F1″ which was the first registration in the county issued in 1904. We’ll come back to this in a minute. The programme introduced a number plate dealer to value some of the councils’ plates. He is Rakesh Verma so I don’t think he’s going to sell any “RV” plates cheap! He could learn to not say, “On the open market” at the start of every sentence though!

Anyway, back to Essex County Council and their personal “F1.” They decided to sell this treasure and made £375,000. The buyer was Afzal Kahn who runs Project Kahn. If you want, for example, a Land Rover Discovery Sport but, think it is a bit common, they are the people to sort you out. Or, as their web-site states, “Our studio tailors luxury bespoke vehicles for individuals that refuse to submit to a life of monotonous uniformity and that will only accept perfection.” All from Bradford. Maybe that’s why he’s reputed to have turned down a £5 million offer for the number plate?

As a footnote, don’t feel too sorry for Essex County Council; the Mayoral car now sports the very fine “ECC 1″ plate.

When creating filesystems for Oracle databases, I have always used separate ones for datafiles and mounted these with the cio option (on JFS2, dio on older JFS). Recently I was sent the Oracle document, “Recommendations For using CIO/DIO for Oracle Files on AIX” which shows that this is not necessary:

From 10g onwards, if you set filesystemio_options=setall then Oracle by default uses the CIO option to perform I/O on the Oracle files. There is no need to specify the cio flag explicitly to mount the disk used for the Oracle Files.

The IBM AIX documentation for the mount command says this about the ‘-o cio’ option:

Specifies the file system to be mounted for concurrent readers and writers. I/O on files in this file system will behave as if they had been opened with O_CIO specified in the open() system call.

The corresponding documentation for the system open() call says this about the O_CIO option:

This flag specifies that concurrent I/O (CIO) will be used for the file while it is opened.

The upshot is that if you mount the filesystem with the cio option ALL files will be accessed using concurrent I/O but, if you mount the filesystem normally you can selectively open files for concurrent I/O. There is no need to unmount/mount a filesystem to activate concurrent I/O. It also means that normal files and datafiles can be mixed in a filesystem; Oracle “knows” which ones it needs to open O_CIO. However, the restrictions on certain command-line tools (e.g. cp) accessing files opened O_CIO still apply.

Let’s get this clear from the start; this post has nothing to do with underwear for poultry (does it actually exist? DON’T tell me!), or superficial cooking utensils. It is, however, about a Thursday Club favorite, Delia Smith’s Chicken Basque.

I bought my wife a Le Creuset Shallow Casserole for her birthday. It wasn’t her main present and if anything, you might call it the Homer Simpson Bowling Ball. Anyway, the first dish she cooked in it was (as you may have already guessed) Delia’s Chicken Basque:

I’d never actually seen the recipe in Delia’s book, so imagine my surprise when I saw the picture on the web-site showing the dish in her Shallow Casserole. As my wife said, “ours looks better!” If anyone has any doubts, my picture shows it before the “cook in a pre-heated oven at gas mark 4, 350°F (180°C), for 1 hour” step.

If there are any non-ioscli commands (i.e. OS commands or your own scripts) that you need to run as the user padmin on your VIO server, you can make use of the directory /usr/ios/utils. This is present in padmin’s $PATH and allows you access to just about any command you want. Prefer using ‘pg’ to ‘more’? This is how to add it to the available commands:

$ oem_setup_env
# cd /usr/ios/utils
# ln -fs /usr/bin/pg pg
# exit
$

Scripts can be placed in this directory or linked to from any other directory. Just make sure the permissions allow execute access.

The adidas Silverstone Half Marathon isn’t until 6 March 2011 but, I have received my Breakthrough Breast Cancer running vest already!

So, now it’s official. And that means it’s time to start raising money for Breakthrough Breast Cancer. Please visit my JustGiving page and donate as much as you can. Every donation counts, helping saving lives and changing futures and removing the fear of breast cancer for good.

Breakthrough Breast Cancer is a charity registered in England & Wales (No. 1062636) & Scotland (No. SC039058)

Having installed TSM 6.2.1 I ran the “Create Server Instance” wizard in the Administration Center. When attempting to run a database backup I got the following in the activity log:

ANR2017I Administrator ADMIN issued command: BACKUP DB dev=lto4 s=y (SESSION: 4)
ANR4559I Backup DB is in progress. (SESSION: 4)
ANR0984I Process 2 for DATABASE BACKUP started in the BACKGROUND at 15:37:37. (SESSION: 4, PROCESS: 2)
ANR2281I Incremental database backup started as process 2. (SESSION: 4, PROCESS: 2)
ANR0406I Session 6 started for node CCBKUAPPSP001 (DB2/AIX64) (Tcp/Ip loopback(57066)). (SESSION: 6)
ANR0422W Session 6 for node CCBKUAPPSP001 (DB2/AIX64) refused - node name not registered. (SESSION: 6)

It appears that TSM uses hard-coded values for the servername (TSMDBMGR_TSMINST1) and nodename ($$_TSMDBMGR_$$). The following lines were added to /usr/tivoli/tsm/client/api/bin64/dsm.sys but, not as the 1st (default) stanza:

servername TSMDBMGR_TSMINST1
commmethod tcpip
tcpserveraddr localhost
tcpport 1500
passwordaccess generate
passworddir /home/tsminst1/tsminst1
errorlogname /home/tsminst1/tsminst1/tsmdbmgr.log
nodename $$_TSMDBMGR_$$

The API password was reset by logging in as root and running the following:

# . /home/tsminst1/sqllib/db2profile
# /home/tsminst1/sqllib/adsm/dsmapipw

Specify TSMDBMGR as both the old and new password and restart the instance. Running the database backup now works as expected:

ANR2017I Administrator ADMIN issued command: BACKUP DB dev=lto4 s=y
ANR4559I Backup DB is in progress.
ANR0984I Process 6 for DATABASE BACKUP started in the BACKGROUND at 08:11:52.
ANR2281I Incremental database backup started as process 6.
ANR0406I Session 11 started for node $$_TSMDBMGR_$$ (DB2/AIX64) (Tcp/Ip loopback(64775)).
ANR8337I LTO volume C01000 mounted in drive RMT4 (/dev/rmt4).
ANR0511I Session 11 opened output volume C01000.
ANR1360I Output volume C01000 opened (sequence number 1).
ANR1361I Output volume C01000 closed.
ANR0514I Session 11 closed volume C01000.
ANR0403I Session 11 ended for node $$_TSMDBMGR_$$ (DB2/AIX64).
ANR0406I Session 12 started for node $$_TSMDBMGR_$$ (DB2/AIX64) (Tcp/Ip loopback(64784)).
ANR0511I Session 12 opened output volume C01000.
ANR1360I Output volume C01000 opened (sequence number 1).
ANR1361I Output volume C01000 closed.
ANR0514I Session 12 closed volume C01000.
ANR0403I Session 12 ended for node $$_TSMDBMGR_$$ (DB2/AIX64).
ANR4551I Incremental database backup (process 6) completed.
ANR0985I Process 6 for DATABASE BACKUP running in the BACKGROUND completed with completion state SUCCESS at 08:12:53.

During a recent network test, the both network switches in the primary computer-room were powered off. However, the PowerHA nodes (running as VIO clients) failed to detect a local adapter down event and the resource groups continued running on the active node.

This problem is explained more fully in the PowerHA for AIX Cookbook but, it is because the traffic being passed between the VIO clients looks like normal external traffic from the point of view of the LPAR’s OS. We were using the following netmon.cf (/usr/es/sbin/cluster/netmon.cf):

10.252.33.1
10.253.49.1
10.254.33.1
10.255.33.1

The solution is to use the new, intermediate, enhanced netmon.cf syntax:

!REQD owner target

!REQD is an explicit string that must be at the begining of the line, owner is the interface that uses this line and target is the IP address or hostname that the owner should try to ping. In a VIO configuration this should be an address outside of the VIO environment – our’s are the default gateways for the relevant networks. The example netmon.cf thus transforms into:

!REQD en0 10.252.33.1
!REQD en3 10.252.49.1
!REQD en2 10.254.33.1
!REQD en1 10.255.33.1

You may have noticed my use of the word, “intermediate” when describing this solution; the Cookbook was written for PowerHA v5.5 but, it appears to still apply for v6.2.1.

I spent a great Wednesday evening with my friends Dean and Marc who is Dean’s brother-in-law, American and also half-Hungarian. Marc Lives in Arlington, VA and has been over for a family wedding in Italy and the British Formula 1 Grand Prix. Dean lives about 1 mile from me (as the crow flies) in the West Midlands but, because of our work commitments, we see more of each other in London than anywhere else!

After a couple of pints we moved on to The Gay Hussar, an Hungarian restaurant in Greek Street, Soho. Marc had been before and a return trip can only be a good sign. The Maître’d (¼ Hungarian, ¾ Polish) suggested the Hungarian Hors d’Oeuvres would be a good choice to share. It turned out to be a very good recommendation, with a good mix of sausage, fish and salad. Whilst selecting our main courses, Marc chose a Pinot Noir from the wine list based purely on the fact that he recognised the name from a visit to Budapest 3 years ago!

Very soon we were tucking into healthy portions of Duck Livers Sautéed with Onions, Bacon and Paprika, Crispy Roast Duck with Red Cabbage, Hungarian Potatoes and Apple Sauce and Gypsy Quick Dish – Pork Medallions with Bacon, Onions, Potatoes and Paprika. The food went down very well. As did a second bottle of the wine. And, after a short break, so did dessert, although Dean needed a little help finishing his.

I’m not quite sure what had I expected of Hungarian cuisine but, I was was pleasantly surprised by the variety of choice, the generous portions and the excellent preparation of the food. You’d find it very hard to not find something you like.