The picture is an old office cube of mine taken with an iPhone, and has nothing to do with the post, other than it is about the office. But not “The Office”. I am a part of a large group that has been told that working Saturdays for the next 2 months is mandatory. Many have been working overtime for several months already.

So, why do people ever need to work overtime? Pretty simple really: it is perceived that there is more work to get done before the delivery date than managers think can get done within normal working hours. What I started to wonder, is if this will really get more done. If you do simple math, adding 8 hours to everyone’s day sounds like it gives you more time to get more done. Sounds like it, but you take human emotion out of the equation.

We can all do more for short periods of time, especially if we see the value in it. We see value sometimes when we feel like it is our responsibility to contribute to the company, or when we feel a sense of loyalty to a product, or group that will use the product. Or, we can see value to us in particular when we are given something in trade. This can be extra income, time off, or something else that is seen as a reward, and that our time was valued.

When this sense of value is missing, it becomes a very different equation. It is also why contractors (like myself) are not as annoyed by mandatory work. We get paid by the hour usually. We get paid more for coming in. On the other hand, when a salaried employee is forced to come in, they need to feel a sense of value. When the employee only sees the employment as a job, or starts to feel like they are being asked too much, management no longer get the extra they are looking for.

People want to feel valued, and feel like the effort they are putting in is compensated accordingly. When someone feels like one side of the equation has been altered, they change the other side. Sometimes this is even done subconsciously. People may not rush into work. Take longer lunches. Go for a longer coffee break. When someone would normally work an extra 15-30 min at the end of work to finish something, now they no longer start something new 30 min to an hour before end of work. Maybe they decide to use the sick days when they have a cold that before they would have worked through. That extra day, it isn’t an 8 hour day. In late, out early, going off site for lunch…

Don’t forget the lasting issues. Contractors come and go. Some might go early… Employees can look for other work. It is expensive to lose business knowledge. The feeling of loss of trust and being undervalued are very difficult to get back. You can loose it in a single email. It can take months to get back, if it ever does…

So what do you do as a project manager and your project is behind. You need the employees to feel invested in the extra effort. And you need to ask. You may be surprised at the effort you get when you ask. Trust me, whether it is telling kids or adults they have to do something, or giving them a choice, choice wins out every time. The other issue, is that people have lives outside of work. Saturdays may not work for some people. What if they would work 48 hours a week spread out over the week? What if they could squeeze more into the day than they do right now? What if you and the employee could agree on the extra work that needed to be done, and then let the employee get it done on their own schedule? What if they are offered something out front whether that is some time off, or even movie tickets. What do you think the response will be?

Which takes more work out of management? A mass email, or an individual meeting with each employee to discuss the situation that you are in? Pretty obvious, but the bigger problems will come if you take the easy way out.

First, to clarify, I don’t hate the two lovely girls in this picture, but they can be quite the pair. Second, my mother told me never to say hate, so maybe that was not a good title. How about “I detest pair programming.”

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to be stuck in a cave for a couple of months and then crawl out bleary eyed and pronounce that I have created the perfect piece of code. I love collaboration. I go to others for help, input, guidance,¬†or to reciprocate for someone else.

What I¬†don’t like, is sitting¬†in a cube with two people where one person types and the¬†other looks over their shoulder all day.¬†Maybe I haven’t had the right person to do this with. Maybe¬†that is why the pair of kids in the picture works. They have their issues, but they get along well, and have similar goals most of the time.

When I am paired with someone, and they have the keyboard, I just feel like one of two things occurs. I am sitting there bored wondering why they just don’t let me type, or they are whipping through some material I have never worked with, and I am lost when I don’t get to “drive”. When I have the keyboard, I just find it annoying to have someone asking if the code could be done differently every 5 minutes. I don’t mind getting feedback, and code reviews are great. I have no problem working on a task, checking for ideas, implementing my approach, then getting feedback, and maybe refactoring. I just don’t like it in real time.

I don’t see the benefit. Luckily it only looks like we are doing this while several of us are new. It won’t last forever. Have you ever had to work for an extended time period in a pair? Did it work?

This marks the end of a great summer. I was able to spend a lot of time with the girls, and I am grateful for the opportunity. I have mixed feeling about starting. I would like to be able to pick Kate up from the bus everyday, and get to spend time playing with them and doing things like going to the zoo. On the other hand, I miss the working with a group aspects of my java jobs, and the sitting down and coming up with a solution to a problem. Maybe I will get to do it again sometime…

Many years ago, I was out at what was then called West Publishing working on some of the back end mainframe code for the Westlaw search engine. Now I am back on a team that is doing some of the conversion to newer technologies.

One of the things that I am psyched about is that this is a team that is practicing Agile methodologies, which should be a lot of fun. I haven’t been on a true Agile team before, and I am looking forward to it.

Apple released some new hardware on Monday. I always get psyched when that happens. Well, sometimes it is just a speed bump, and a “what ever”, but Monday has some interesting things introduced.

The 13″ MacBook, the one with the aluminium case got promoted to a MacBookPro. They get to charge more for the laptops with a “Pro” at the end. You can compare the the different models¬†at Apple here. It did get firewire 800 and a new non removable battery that Apple claims to get up to 7 hours of life. Wow, that would be cool.

Right now I have a 15″ MacBookPro, and it can feel a little big and heavy to carry around. The 13″ is 4.5lbs, and the 15″ is 5.5lbs. I think mine is a little heavier than that. The question though, is does the 13.3″ screen at 1280×800 and only a NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor cut it for image editing. Granted, this wouldn’t be designed to be the main image processing machine, but still… how big a trade off is it. We will have to wait and see what people think of the 9400M and running Photoshop/Lightroom/Aperture on it.

So I headed over to the Apple store, and I configured a 13″ MacBookPro with the 2.53Ghz processor (faster one), 4gig of ram (default), and 256Gig of solid state hard drive. Total: $2299.¬†Yes, that’s right, a SSD. Living on the edge. You could get the 128Gig version and get the cost under $2000. I think that a SSD for travel would be a great option. No worry about moving parts, and they are generally a touch faster.

Still, $2000 for a laptop is still kind of expensive, but you could go with the regular 250Gig hard drive and the price is on $1499. Sounds much more palatable, but dang…. I want the SSD…

I won’t be rushing out to get one anyway. First of all, my current laptop keeps going and going and going. It is only a little over two years old, but I bought a refurbished model, so I was a bit behind the tech curve when I got. But the dang thing just works. I have installed Leopard, Aperture 2.1, Photoshop CS3, and it runs just fine. After a couple of years on a windows machine, I was¬†already cursing those laptops. This MacBookPro,¬†still works just fine. Sigh… no good compelling reason to upgrade.¬†

The other reason is that I always buy refurbished. I have an iPod, an iMac, and the MacBookPro that I have purchased refurbished. They have all worked out fabulously. I have saved quite a lot by doing that. So, if I was going to get one, I would wait for the next speed bump, and pick one up from the refurbished site. I wonder if any 13″ models with a SSD will show up there…

We are assuming that at this point you have Ubuntu installed. We are gong to install software raid in a moment. The first thing I want to do is make sure we have a static ip address. Usually Ubuntu will start up with a dynamic ip address. This can make it more difficult to transfer files to this box, so lets make it static.

Setting a static IP address

Type ifconfig eth0, and you will see your current address.

Lets make it static. Note, typing sudo in front of commands lets you assume the privileges of the administrator, or super user.

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

We will replace the text there with this text, which will assign 10.0.0.50 to our server, and assume the gateway is at 10.0.0.1:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 10.0.0.50
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 10.0.0.0
broadcast 10.0.0.255
gateway 10.0.0.1

restart the network to get the new settings :

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

ifconfig eth0 and you should see the new settings.

If you want to see a whole lot more networking commands, see here.

Finding out drives

Great. Now before we can put two drives into a RAID 1 array, we need to tell linux what drives we are going to use for this.

How do we know what disks? I just type dmesg. This will scroll lots of stuff down the screen. If you are in the GUI at a terminal you can scroll. Otherwise type dmesg | less which will let you move through the text with the cursor keys.

This is all the hardware that was found and initialized. You will first see the ataX with X being the number of the drive. You need to look for a section after this that has letters like hda or sda. The drives I am using are SATA drives and they are sda and sdb. I could tell by the size of the drives. (press Q to exit less if you need to)

Partition for Raid 1

Ok, lets tell Linux that we want those drives to be used for raid.

sudo fdisk /dev/sda

[p] will list the partitions. If you had one previously, you will see it. Remove them. Press d for delete, then give a partition number. (no need if you only had one)

Now add a [n]ew [p]rimary partition number [1] with default start and end (the whole disk)

n [enter] p [enter] 1 [enter][enter][enter]

Now [p] again to verify that the partition is there. Note the type: 83. Type [l] to see all the types. We need to set the type to fd for Linux software raid.

t [enter] fd [enter]

Now write the partition table and exit: w [enter]

Now we repeat the process with the other drive.

sudo fdisk /dev/sdb

And repeat the fdisk commands.

Setting up mdadm for Raid1

Ok, now for Linux software raid. First we need to install it.

sudo apt-get install mdadm

When I did this, I was prompted that citadel-server was being installed. This is what is used by default as the mail server. Mdadm is dependant on a mail server so it can mail you of failures. Pick an admin user and say no to external auth.

Once installed you can build an array. I am going to use two drives in a RAID 1, mirrored setup. This duplicates all the data on both drives. They are mirrored. This is the command with my drives used. You will substitute for your devices:

sudo mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1

This should tell you that the array /dev/md0 has started.

If you would like to see when the array is built:

cat /proc/mdstat

This will tell you how long it will take, or if it is done.

Ok, that’s it for now.¬† We will look at commands to manipulate the array in a later article in the series. Next up will be creating the resizable volumes on the array using LVM.

When I build my first NAS there were not the options we have today. Today, devices like the ReadyNAS, and the Drobo exist, but they still seem expensive for what you get. I did a survey of them in August. The pluses of those devices are lower power, and simplicity. The disadvantages seem to be cost and flexibility. So this series will be on building a NAS powered by Linux.

First, many people have a machine that could be used. For the purposes of this series, I will be looking for a machine that can use 4 drives. One CD-Rom to install the OS, one drive of any size or type (PATA, SATA) to hold the OS, and two more drives for the data. The data will be stored on a Linux software raid 1 array, forming a mirror. We will get into that much later.

Anyway, my current box had failed. At one point I had a box that could only take PATA drives, so I added a SATA card. That is one way to go with older hardware, but I will not need it this time. My case, power supply, CD-ROM (actually a DVD, but it doesn’t matter unless you want to try creating backups onto DVDs) all work fine. What I need is a new motherboard, CPU, and memory. You may not need all three, but I usually update all three at once. This way you know they all work. Notice I did not mention video card, network card, or sound card? I don’t need sound on this box, and I will just look for a motherboard with built in video and Ethernet (they usually come with sound anyway). After a little searching on New Egg, this is what I came up with:

• Foxconn A74MX-K AM2+/AM2 AMD 740G Micro ATX AMD Motherboard
• AMD Athlon X2 4850e 2.5GHz¬† AM2 45W Dual-Core Processor
• OCZ Platinum¬†(2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2¬†1066 (PC2 8500)¬†Desktop Memory

Total for the above: $140.97. Ok, I need to fess up. I kinda goofed on ordering the memory. I had a few different motherboards and memory kits in my saved list, and I picked the wrong one when I went to purchase. I don’t need the 1066 memory to go with this motherboard and CPU, but it won’t cause the box to catch fire and burn up at least I could have saved a little bit more with PC-800, but oh well.

This motherboard has on board video, on board Gigabit Ethernet, 4 SATA connections, and 1 PATA conector (that you can attach 2 devices), so I can use my old DVD and OS drive. The CPU is not the fastest on the planet, but I picket it because at 45 watts, it is one of the cooler running CPU’s I could buy new. The memory, like I said was a bit of a mix up, but I went with 2 gig. That is overkill for a NAS. Sort of. It depends what you intend to run. In the past, I have run a desktop, and MythTV on this box too. When they were running with Samba, NFS, CVS, and Apache, I was running out of free memory with 1 gig, so to be safe, I went with 2. It will only cost you $20-$30 for¬†2 gig. With this box and this series I am only looking at running the file serving services, but you never know…

Ok, one last purchase. The drives. I am going to mirror 2 terrabyte drives. I went with the green drives from Western Digital. I had been using Seagate drives because of their 3 year warranties, but the green drives sounded appealing. I bought them a few months ago. 2 for $200. It was a deal then, about average now.

Assembling this is pretty easy. There are lots of tutorials that will go into more details, but I found even the documentation that came with the CPU and the motherboard to be not too bad. Here is an article on building computers. A couple of things to note: First, don’t use too much conductive heat paste between the CPU and the fan. If you buy a retail AMD CPU like the one above, it actually comes with some stuff already applied to the fan, and you can just use that. I usually scrape that off and use arctic silver. Second, the CPU’s are in a metal case now, and you don’t need to be quite so paranoid about crushing them with the fan. I say this because it will seem like you need a lot of pressure with the little lever to lock it down. Don’t worry, it will be fine. (likely) Third, I would insert the CPU and memory into the motherboard before putting it in the case, but others don’t. I set the motherboard on the static bag it came with, then some of the cardboard packaging it came with. Fourth, don’t forget to use a static strap, or make sure you ground yourself before touching anything. Have fun.

I am excited to get the SB800. I have a SB400 right now, but I am looking forward to trying out the new flash wirelessly. That will be cool. Also, the head turns better, there is a pop up bounce card and it will be much easier to gel than the SB400.

The drives were needed. I discovered the other day that both of the raid 1 drives in my NAS were failing. It would appear that the cron job to run smartmon wasn’t working, and I didn’t get an email that the drives were failing. Yikes. Almost all of the properties were saying “old age”. The drives are only 1.5 years old too. I think part of the problem is that they never spin down. I need to figure out how to get that to happen. I don’t really need instantaneous access from my NAS, and it does sit idle (except for the drives unfortunately) most of the time.

More on the new toys as I get to use them…