atprintd likes CPUs
March 31, 2006 by Eric Richardson
Here at the office we have a dual 2.3gig G5 XServe 1U as sort of the office file server. It's a shame, really, because literally all it's been doing has been just that: acting as network storage.
I've gotten fed up with the crappy little Netgear router that's running NAT, so I'm finally going to give the Xserve a little more responsibility and let it do NAT, DHCP and some traffic shaping.
The one thing that scares me a little, though, is that the server also has a couple printers connected to it and these seem to give it some periodic stability issues. For instance, I ssh'ed in just now, ran top and saw:
PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS
82 atprintd 54.4% 120 hrs 1 15
81 atprintd 54.2% 120 hrs 1 15
80 atprintd 53.3% 120 hrs 1 15
So basically a dual-G5 is sitting at a load average of 3 running printer spools. Yuck. Googling for atprintd doesn't give me a whole lot on where to look for this one.
CUPS on Apple has in my experience been no more fun than CUPS on Linux. There I ditched CUPS for lprng.
Cable Management
March 23, 2006 by Eric Richardson
From the network cabinet at the office. Before...
The Office Isn't Cold, But...
March 23, 2006 by Eric Richardson
I just dropped back by work to take care of a few things and filled up a Coke bottle with water from the water cooler. I set it down by my computer and a couple minutes later went to take a sip only to find ice floating in it. It's not possible for it to come out of the cooler as ice, so the only explanation is that it came out so cold that it froze sitting in the bottle. Weird.
Fun With Disappearing Daemons
March 23, 2006 by Eric Richardson
Apparently I didn't heed the warning at the bottom of the configuration page for the NTP pool that mentioned a bug with RHEL's ntpd. My score suffered greatly when ntpd disappeared around midnight.
The SRPM linked in the bugzilla post wouldn't compile cleanly for me, so I'm now running a self-compiled ntpd. Hopefully that'll stay up and happy.
Looking at Highway Ramps
March 22, 2006 by Eric Richardson
This evening I set out to write a blog post on how different online mapping applications draw highway ramps. It turned into something longer than a normal post, so I've put it on my regular site: Looking at Highway Ramps.
Like I mention in the piece, I think ramps are a really important thing to look at in a map because they're something that's really hard to do right. I know that the code I've been working on recently doesn't solve any of the problems I list, mainly because of the data I'm working with. Always remember: your output will never be any better than your data.
Mostly unrelated: I think this is the first time I've put content on ericrichardson.com in about a year. I would say the web interface of the blog has drawn me in, but the frequency (or lack thereof) of posting here might dispute that.