BlackBerry Curve WiFi on Belkin router

A tip for anyone trying to get this combination to work: you must disable 802.11e QoS or the BlackBerry will be unable to authenticate.

This setting can be changed within the router's built-in web setup. Once connected, go to the Channel and SSID entry in the side menu (under the Wireless heading). On the page that comes up, it's the very last setting: 802.11e QoS.

Finding the umask of a running process in Solaris…

…is inordinately difficult. This seemingly basic piece of information is not available through /proc, nor through dtrace, nor any other supported way. It can only be retrieved by crawling through the kernel's data structures, either with mdb(1) or through using libkvm, an even uglier way to do it.

Chad Mynhier provides the way to do it on his blog, as well as pointing to a thread on comp.unix.solaris about the same topic, showing how to do it in C using libkvm.

Today's boneheaded Solaris admin move

I converted the /var filesystem of a host I was installing to be a DiskSuite mirror, but forgot that I shouldn't attach the other side of the mirror until the filesystem was mounted through the metadevice.

Further compounding the problem, I didn't restart the system until after the mirror had resynced and I'd done a bunch of other work. After the reboot, a flood of errors from fsck; unsurprisingly, since everything I'd done to the system since I added the mirror had only been written to one half, but DiskSuite (Solaris Volume Manager, I guess, to give it its modern term) thought both mirrors were good, and was randomly reading from the good side or the bad side …

What makes it even more stupid is that I know better.

Given that I'd just installed the system, it was quicker to just re-jumpstart …

New Macbook Pro ...

My 2-year-old 17" MacBook Pro was getting a little old and tired and flaky, especially recently — the dark spot on the screen it had had since new, and the dark screen pretty much the same, and the problems waking and sleeping had been there from the beginning, but the instability, the crashes and hangs — those were new. As were the occasional USB problems in the right-hand port and the issues recognizing the external screen when connected.

It's been a great computer, overall — one of the best systems I've ever used — but it was from the third week of production of the MBP 17" and had the issues expected on an early production model. Time for a new one.

Got it on Thursday and transferred my stuff. I do have to say that using Time Machine as the transfer medium works really well. The only problem is once you're done and try to do a Time Machine backup; you can't, because there's no space left. Time Machine will not recognize the old system's backups as being in the same set; it must embed the serial number or MAC in the backup set. I basically had to prune my backups down manually to give some space for the new system to back up.

It is way faster — faster than the 2.1 GHz to 2.6 GHz processor speed bump would suggest. For one thing, I think the improvement from Core Duo to Core 2 Duo is actually fairly substantial. Moreover, I think the memory boost (2 GB to 4 GB) makes a big difference, and the video card is quite substantially faster, with twice the VRAM. I suspect having more space free on disk makes a difference to filesystem performance too; this also got a doubling, from 100 GB to 200 GB.

Aperture, in particular, is substantially faster. I've had the system less than a week and I couldn't go back.

Odd Solaris DiskSuite problem, and solution

One of the systems I admin had a failed disk that was in use by two DiskSuite RAID 5 volumes (IMO insane, given the performance hit, but not my decision). After the disk was replaced, any attempt to run DiskSuite programs such as 'metastat' gave the following error:

Assertion failed: mdrcp->colnamep->start_blk <= rcp->un_orig_devstart, file ../common/meta_raid.c, line 151
metastat: Abort
Abort (core dumped)

No documentation about this error available anywhere, and a Google only found 3 or 4 hits, none of them helpful (one of them involved using LD_PRELOAD to replace the abort() function to allow 'metaclear' to delete the RAID, recreate it, and reload from backups.

I worked out why the error occurred, though. When the disk was replaced, it of course came with a label/TOC with partitions defined. If these partitions don't match the pre-existing RAID setup, the metadisk tools die a death.

All that was required was to build up the proper partitioning, and then everything worked fine.