This screwdriver is crap!

The Mac world is abuzz with an article about how crappy the Dell Mini 9 is as a “hackbook”. Basically, the article reads like this:

I bought me a nifty new screwdriver. It doesn’t drive in nails very well. I’ve not really tried it on screws, but because of it’s shortcomings as a hammer, I declare it’s crap.

Please. If you’re going to write an article about how crappy the Dell Mini 9 is, write about how crappy the Dell Mini 9 is. You took a modestly priced netbook, shoehorned Mac OS X onto it, and now you’re complaining about how poor the experience is.

I have a Lenovo IdeaPad S10. I bought it for a specific reason. I knew when I purchased it exactly what I wanted to do with it: write emails, surf the net, chat. Does it work for that? Exceedingly well. Did it meet my expectations? Very much so, especially here in Viet Nam where I spent over a week having to rely on wifi in coffee shops to get any work done.

I have two computer bags. One is a laptop backpack that houses my ThinkPad T61, it’s brick and a few “necessessities” for computing on the go. It weighs 25 lbs and looks like I’m carrying a data centre on my back. The other is a small leather pouch, looking like a typical purse. It has my S10, it’s brick and a few “necessessities” for computing on the go. It weighs 10 lbs. Which do you think gets hauled around to more coffee shops?

Can I do all of my job on the S10? No. But I can keep in touch with clients and friends on those days when DSL to the house doesn’t quite make it the last mile. That’s what I bought the S10 for, and that’s what it excels at: driving screws. Not hammering nails. Had I wanted to hammer nails, I’d have bought a hammer.

The argument that the Mini 9 was turned into a hackbook because Apple doesn’t make such a beast is specious. If Apple doesn’t make a netbook and you must have Apple, you can’t have a netbook. Figure out where your priorities lie.

Finally, addressing the keyboard, which seemed to be the largest part of the complaint: I don’t have direct experience with the Mini 9 keyboard, but the Lenovo keyboard works very well for me. It’s pretty close to full size and I can hit pretty close to my full speed on it. Keep in mind, though, I didn’t buy a tiny laptop with a tiny keyboard, shoehorn an OS it wasn’t meant to have on it, and then try to write a novel! Were I a novelist, I’d have a dedicated keyboard to attach to whatever computer I was working on–for a novelist, the keyboard is the ultimate interface and no corners can be cut there. I don’t write system documentation on my S10–I save that for when I’m on the ThinkPad. I’m saving up quite a bit of it for when my desktop arrives with my wonderful Logitech G15 keyboard.

For those who are curious, my S10 dual boots into Windows XP and Ubuntu Netbook Remix. 98% of the time, it’s in Windows. 98% of the time, I’m surfing the net (Chrome), reading email (Chrome) or chatting (Pidgin and Skype). Windows XP is a seamless experience for this. The right tool for the job, folks. The right tool for the job.

Jaunty Jackalope

The latest version of Ubuntu has hit, and lucky for me FTP Telecom in Viet Nam is mirroring. This means I was able to download and install in a pretty reasonable time.

How’s it look? So far, it’s rock solid. It recognized all of my hardware (Thinkpad T61 with nVIDIA card) out of the box. The install was painless–even resizing my Windows 7 partition worked. I’ve changed my Appearance settings to Dust as I prefer the darker widget look. It tends to focus my attention on the large fields I need to fill out… The look and feel are typical Ubuntu–very polished and smooth.

Of course, I did have to do a bunch of things like install the Adobe Flash plugin and decoders for MP3. Silly that, in this day, we still need to do this. I understand the reasoning but surely there’s some detente that can be reached.

Anyway, it’s great to be back in a pure Linux environment. When administering Linux systems, a Linux desktop really is the best tool for the job, at least for me. As good as tools like PuTTY are, they can’t compete with the efficiency I gain from just running at the command line.

Two big thumbs up to the Ubuntu crew for getting yet another release out the door.

Disk Space or DNS

Whenever I have a client call me up to tell me that a service that’s been working fine for ages has suddenly stopped, two prime culprits immediately spring to mind. One is very subtle, the other not so much.

When first logging in to the afflicted system, I do `df -h` to check available disk space on all volumes. It’s amazing how many of these incidents come down to a disk running out of space. Usually, a monitoring system warns when disk space hits 90%. Sometimes, though, that last 10% can be churned through very quickly, catching even the monitoring service off guard. In a number of cases, I’ve had monitoring systems miss full disk conditions because the full disk condition stopped the agent from accurately reporting the current state (a topic for another entry). Bottom line: check your disk space.

DNS issues are much more subtle and can manifest themselves in different ways. Often, you’ll see a sudden decrease in performance for some inexplicable reason. Things that used to work suddenly break. In many cases, this is because systems that refer to hosts by name can either no longer find those hosts or there’s a sudden delay in the process.

The `host` command is your friend here:

chris@utc-pdc1:~$ host www.dollmont.net
www.dollmont.net is an alias for dollmont.net.
dollmont.net has address 216.86.156.11

This tells me that www.dollmont.net points to dollmont.net, which in turn has an ip address of 216.86.156.11.

chris@utc-pdc1:~$ host 216.86.156.11
11.156.86.216.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer server1.fusednetwork.com.

Doing a `host` command on the IP address will tell me if reverse DNS is working. In this case, it’s pointing me at a Fused Network server, which is correct—Fused Networks does my site hosting. In a perfect world, I would have a DNS PTR record for the IP address that pointed back to dollmont.net, but this is more than good enough. Forward and reverse DNS both resolve.

If there’s an error in either one of these checks, it means that DNS is broken somewhere down the line. Trouble shooting that can be a nightmare, and is beyond the scope of this article.

Disk space and DNS are the first two things you should look at whenever things start behaving in a wildly different manner. Often the problem will be one or the other and usually involves a quick fix.

Posting from in country…

Every sysadmin, at some point in their career, thinks the same thing: given the proper net access and the proper automation tools, I can do this job from anywhere. We’ve all had that thought, including me. I wonder how many have acted on it?

I’ve taken my freelancing on the road. The reasons are many and varied. This is my first posting from Viet Nam, where I’m setting up an office to continue my consultancy.

From time to time, I expect to post a little about what it’s like freelancing in a country like Viet Nam. For now, though, I’m working on a couple more of those boring technical posts…