JT's Blog

While monkeying around with my little test lab, I swapped one NFS server out and put a new one in. I expected mounts to be flaky and need to be reconnected. However, when I got on the Linux machines that had the swapped filesystems mounted, I got all kinds of errors like “cannot stat” etc.

The key to fixing this is first and foremost to cd /. and get out of that folder. Then run lsof. You might want to try lsof |grep foldername of the mount point. Then you can kill -HUP the process ID and voila! Done!

I struggled with this issue for the millionth time and figured I’d document it myself rather than having to troll the internet to find the answer (which I found here).

I’m both excited and sad.  BSG has become a part of my end-of-week fun.  I watch so little TV these days (there’s so little of value to see) that I have really grown used to the weekly ritual of BSG.  Alas!  After this week, no more.

*snif*

Now, to cue up the DVR 🙂

OK, so I feel a little weird / geeky / nerdy writing a post about a TV show. After all, who writes about TV (without actually being paid to do so?)

It should come as no surprise to my friends that I’m a sci-fi buff. I thought the Star Trecks were ok. I thought Babylon5 was an incredible saga. I thought Farscape was tremendous and I was pissed off at that show being canceled (I still think that was the network’s fault for constantly shifting the time slot, but I digress.)

All these shows pale in comparison to BSG. In every respect (plot, soundtrack, characters, overall story line) this is probably the best show ever in the Sci-Fi genre. And it would probably do pretty well against any prime time show on TV.

I felt compelled to write a post because I’m going nuts waiting for next week’s episode, and this is very out-of-character for me. I am usually apathetic to all things on TV… probably because so few things on TV deserve the energy.

So a few days ago, I wrote a long diatribe about Vonage, Verizon and babbled on a bit about telephones.  I basically started writing because I wanted to slam Vonage, and as I researched links to add to my post, I realized that they really aren’t that bad.  They have their ups and downs like any organization, but they don’t consistently suck like countless horror stories about Verizon support (oxymoron) and shady practices and they’re also not consistently incredible like T-Mobile.

New(er) Vonage Router

Old Vonage Router

So I moved one telephone line (my personal home number) from Vonage to T-Mobile last week.  And I decided that I wanted to move my second Vonage line (home-office) to the now vacated device.  This, because the device that was vacated is newer and the audio quality is much better than the ancient router that I’ve had since 2006 when I first signed up with Vonage.  (Hard to believe that 3 years ago qualifies as “ancient”, but I digress.

The point here is that I called support, got some dude (who spoke very good English) and in 5 minutes it was done!   I can’t believe it!  I expected this to be like pulling teeth or something, but it was actually not bad at all.  Now I feel badly about wanted to say bad things about them.  That being said, I still think Verizon is crap.  If nothing else, it would be the way Verizon sued Vonage for Patent Infringement because of a squatters patent Verizon had on “using the internet to carry telephone service” and billing systems and other stuff.  Clearly, Verizon wanted to put Vonage out of business for doing something that they were either unwilling or incapable of doing.

Here’s an example of a patent squatter being a parasite in our society: Leader Technologies, an Ohio-based “intellectual capital company”, has filed a lawsuit against Facebook. The company claims that Facebook has infringed on one of their patents which relates generally “to a method and system for the management and storage of electronic information.” Sounds like a fairly broad patent which the company simply uses to obtain recurring revenue from large digital companies.

*sigh*