Monthly Archives: April 2010

Apr 29

Xmind Is A Great Rapid Mind-Mapper And Diagram Tool

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I have used a ton of different mind-mapping, flow-charting and graphing applications on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X and they all have specific positives and negatives. The ones that are the most complex also tend to be the slowest to rapidly diagram with but have the most features to really enable complex rendering.

Xmind (http://www.xmind.net) is a great cross-platform solution for basic mapping of structures and data. It is a topic/sub-topic mapper so it is really useful for elaboration on database structures and single concept diagrams. Xmind is a very rapid tool with keyboard shortcuts to quickly add topics and sub-topics which allows you to get a structure up and going fast so then you can tweak after you get the data out there.

Apr 23

Wonderful Visit to The Fisher Art Gallery During PSPP 2010

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Was lucky enough to be able to view the Fisher Art Gallery at the Gap Headquarters in San Francisco during the opening session of the PSPP2010 Conference. I believe the art currently there will be moving to the SF MOMA and I believe this is just a small sampling of the larger collection they have. Really amazing and wonderful of the Fishers and Gap to have the conference opening session there. Very glad the collection will live on for everyone to see at the SF MOMA in the coming years. More information on the move to SF MOMA is here http://www.sfmoma.org/pages/about_news#two.

Here are a few shots. I missed photos of all the Roy Lictenstein works but there was a lot to take in. As one can tell, Calder and Chuck Close made the most impact to me.

Apr 17

Tree Planting in Miraloma Park and Sunnyside Today!

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FUF augered the holes and we have 35 trees going in. Less that I had hoped, but still okay I suppose. Still it will be 35 more trees in San Francisco than there were before.

Party @ the MPIC with the Spring BBQ after planting is done. We are bringing cupcakes and lots of wine.

Apr 12

Symantec BackupExec 2010, RALUS and Centos 5 Works

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Whew, what a pain this has been.

Always had a heck of a time with BackupExec 12.5 and below backing up CentOS versions. I think early versions of RALUS were operational and worked back in the BackupExec 8-10.5 days prior to Symantec’s acquistion of Veritas. But, it has never been really easy to get this going well and incorporating a RedHat-like but not RedHat system into the BackupExec remote client world. Bring in 64-bit CentOS, and it got even more of a pain.

Well, now it seems it is possible and repeatable with Symantec BackupExec 2010. The change in naming conventions off the versions to years (even though everyone else is going back to the versions and moving off of years now!) signifies some code investment from Symantec in what must be a cash-cow for them in BackupExec.

We have a few  Windows 2003 and 2008 servers along with some OS X 10.5.x servers and are backing them up to a LTO3 library on a 2008 server and made the move to BackupExec 2010 recently to try and shake some of the lingering issues with 12.5 rehashed code and makeshift RALUS client patches for Unix, Linux and Mac clients Symantec seems to have inherited and continued.

It seems you need to disable IPv6 to get the negotiation to happen correctly on top of the obvious IPTables and IPTables configurations to allow TCP ports 10000 and 6101 to communication between the BackupExec Server and your RALUS client.

Disabling IPv6 on CentOS (run all as root or you can sudo everything below)
- in /etc/sysconfig/network you need to add

NETWORKING_IPV6=no

- in /etc/modprobe.conf add:

alias ipv6 off
alias net-pf-10 off

- make sure IPTablesv6 is disabled at startup

/sbin/chkconfig ip6tables off

After all of that, give your network a restart

/etc/init.d/network restart

Then run the RALUS install from the Symantec BE 2010 download. If you have issues here during the install and possibly have multiple network interfaces straddling different networks, try ip addresses in lieu of hostnames. Also, on the BE 2010 server, restart all the services. Starting the RALUS client on CentOS 5 is

/etc/init.d/VRTSralus.init start

or

/etc/init.d/VRTSralus.init restart