[12:42:54] Phil: Man, I fell asleep to this lecture by Charles Bailyn
[12:43:14] Phil: And I had a dream that he was actually Bill Mayes and he was trying to sell me WIMPs
[12:43:33] Courtney: BILLY MAYS HERE FOR MISSING MASS
[12:44:33] Phil: Haha, yeah, that’s what it practically was
[12:47:39] Phil: It was quite possibly the weirdest dream I’ve had in a while

As it stands, you will have to use the text mode installer to configure a zfs root pool, neither the old nor the new graphical installers  support it. If you have multiple disks the installer will automatically configure them as mirrors. Both swap and dump space are configured as zvols, which are basically incredibly  flexible block containers. Ben Rockwood has two excellent writeups on working with zvols. There are currently some limitations however, as you can’t setup RAID-Z stripe sets yet and I’m unclear on the state of liveupgrade integration. (updated below) Also note that if you are moving from an older build, luactivate will require you to upgrade to the new findroot enabled version of GRUB.

Update 8/24: ZFS root was the topic of Thursday’s DFW OpenSolaris User Group meeting. It turns out that liveupgrade is fully aware of zfs and will use zfs specific features like cloning during the upgrade process, which makes things like lucreate, luupgrade, and lucopy MUCH faster. Indeed, creating a new boot environment with zfs is as simple as lucreate -n be-name, and the current environment is cloned in the existing pool. The other neat thing about using a zfs clone is that only changes from the original are recorded, which means a huge space savings during upgrades. The lucreate in the image on the right took all of 10 seconds which is mind blowing.

My alternate (Paul Gomez) and I got to Austin at about 4pm Thursday and checked into our hotel. Thanks to my usual procrastination, I had booked the room at the last minute and the only place with a room was a Travelodge 7 miles away from the convention center. After checking in we had dinner at the Iron Cactus with other members from Senate District 9 (which is so impressively gerrymandered shaped that it  covers 3 counties). After that one had the option of exploring 6th Street or attending the various parties organized by Democratic candidates and organizations. Protip: button up shirt +undershirt + 95 degree weather = not cool, not cool at all.

Friday we got up at 6am for the long day ahead. After a minor snafu with credentials check in (Louisiana license), I got my delegate lanyard. The  problem I quickly found is that there are a lot of caucuses you want to go to, but very few that don’t have overlapping schedules.

Issue caucuses I wanted to go to vs caucuses that I actually went to in bold:

The caucuses themselves were pretty uneventful, though most of the speakers at the Energy Policy caucus had a rather anti-nuclear stance which I strongly disagree with. Fun fact, Texas currently produces the most wind power of any state and by next year will be the leading wind power producer on the planet.

At  3:00pm the Senate District Caucus started, and we began the arduous process of electing people for positions like national delegate and electoral college elector. Obviously for some positions there were a lot of candidates, so we had to do run-offs, voting took quite a while. At 5pm we adjourned for the general session in the main ballroom. For which there were

about 12,000 people.

Position	Name	County	Pres. Pref
Presidential Elector	Michael Reynolds	Tarrant	Obama
National Delegate	Katy Hubener	Dallas	Clinton
National Delegate	Fatema Biviji	Dallas	Obama
National Delegate	Marvin Sutton	Tarrant	Obama
National Delegate (At-Large)	Windolyn Mosely	Tarrant	Obama
State Democratic Executive Committeeman	Kennedy Barnes	Denton	Obama
State Democratic Executive Committeewoman	Susan Culp	Dallas	Obama
Nominations Committee	Gerald Johnson	Tarrant	Obama
Nominations Committee (At-Large)	Julie Allen	Dallas	Obama
Credentials Committee	Dexter Rhodes	Dallas	Obama
Rules Committee	Issac Brown	Denton	Obama
Resolutions Committee	Robert Lackey	Dallas	Obama
Platfrom Committee	Timothy Skaggs	Dallas	Obama

What happened at the general session? Speeches, lots of speeches, most of them emphasizing the need for party unity. Highlights:

Texas By The Numbers

Virginia Governor Tim Kaine

Chelsea Clinton

Rick Noriega

This went on till about 11pm, at which point we returned to Senate District caucuses to finish voting which took till about 3am. The next day (Saturday) was spent on procedural stuff in general session, interrupted by a simulcast of Hillary Clinton’s concession speech. But frankly Paul and I left that morning and got back to Dallas at about 11am.

Update 3/5 1:45pm - Apparently Denton county had a number of issues with delegate counts, I just got off the phone with our Chair, Gary, who said that our precinct was actually an exception in that we got nearly the right number of allotted delegates. The number assigned per precinct is based on turnout in the previous gubernatorial election. Right now, it appears that Denton county will just be dropping delegates from precincts that allocated too many in the order they were calculated in. This will actually change our precint Results to 16 for Obama 2 for Clinton, since the EZ Math sheet drops the person with the lowest remainder. Apparently 8% of Clinton’s votes came from Republicans. We still have the most votes, most states, and most delegates. cheer up

1:20 am - Wow, MSNBC shouldn’t let Chris Matthews and Pat Buchanan stay up this late. looks like Texas was very close in popular vote and Obama will likely win the caucus vote. Though El Paso should prove interesting since its in Mountain Time. One last note:  I would do all of this again.

1:00 am - I get home to find that Obama has lost Texas and Ohio. It will be interesting to see whether he gets more delegates than Clinton in the caucus however. Sigh, is 1am too late to open a bottle of wine?

12:30 am – Done, I’m exhausted, and when we called the automated state Democratic party reporting system to enter the delegate count, we receive quite the shock: It claims our precinct only has 9 delegates. A few panicked calls later, we confirmed that our original number was correct; someone must have made a data entry error, as several other Denton county precincts had similar issues.

Midnight – We have elected and allocated our convention delegates, 16 for Obama, 3 for Clinton. I am one of them. The building manager boots us and one other precinct out of the building, the officers head over to the What-A-Burger to finish up the various sheets we have to sign and verify.

11:30 pm - Gary Page, our Precinct Convention Chair has some resolutions he wants voted on, they pass with near universal margins.

11:00 pm – We elect Convention Chair and Secretary. I am initially elected chair because of the work I did coralling people and getting lines setup to work the role sheets, I decline and endorse Gary, who has run for Senate twice and done the caucus 2 or 3 times before.  Work begins on the delegate allocation math sheets.

10:00 pm - The other captains and I are getting people lined up and verified and getting their preference declared on the roles.

9:30ish - Last voters have voted, we finally start trying to begin preparing to prepare for beginning caucusing ;-> IT IS UTTER CHAOS. We have well over a thousand people in the parking lot.

8:00 pm - The crowds gathered for caucusing are getting impatience

7:00 pm - Line cutoff reached, there are still more than a hundred people in line, caucusing cant begin for another 2 hours at least.

6:30 pm – Ohio polls closed. I get back to our precinct to find that it is absolutely slammed, people are everywhere, parking in all the nearby businesses.

6:00 pm - Returning to polling place to monitor close of polls and ensure everyone in line at 7pm gets a chance to vote. We already have isolated reports of HRC shenanigans in some places. MSNBC and CNN just called Vermont for Obama.

5:40 pm - Without individual precinct numbers we can’t tell which precincts over and under performed, which will make caucusing tonight difficult. But on the bright side, based on just conversations from this morning, we will have so many people returning for caucusing tonight that we will have to have the actual caucus out in a nearby parking lot. Certainly a very good problem to have.

4:00 pm - I’m going to veg out in front of MSNBC for a bit. I’M CHRIS MATTHEWS AND I CAN”T MODULATE THE TONE OF MY VOICE. Conversation with my friend and former housemate Chris:

[03:59:59:PM] Chrisbenar: your live blogging is hilarious
[04:00:04:PM] Chrisbenar: chris [different chris] said “just get a twitter”
[04:00:21:PM] me: im convinced no one outside of sf uses twitter
[04:00:57:PM] Chrisbenar: i’m convinced that you are gay for obama
[04:01:06:PM] Chrisbenar: and your delicious + your blog is proof of that
[04:01:10:PM] Chrisbenar: and now i can’t talk to you about politics

[04:01:18:PM] me: lol, why not
[04:01:46:PM] me: he’s not a god, i dont agree with him on everything, but i do firmly believe he is this best opportunity this country has had
[04:01:52:PM] me: in my lifetime at the very least
[04:02:11:PM] Chrisbenar: for what
[04:02:16:PM] Chrisbenar: he can’t change anything
[04:02:28:PM] Chrisbenar: i’m completely apathetic
[04:02:39:PM] Chrisbenar: Dr. Paul infected me with apathy
[04:02:42:PM] me: rofl

3:40 pm  – We now have 2 Obama supporters waving signs outside and a lone Clinton supporter has shown up. The polls are still busy, but much so less than this morning, I can actually get a parking space. Good news, Reuters says that Obama is up in Texas and has even developed a small lead in Ohio.

3:20 pm – Shift two poll check: Total number of Democrat ballots cast for precincts 205, 207, 210, 220 and 223: 668 (598 Optical Scan, 70 via eSlate)  There are substantially more poll workers now.

1:30 – 3:00 pm - Finished two more apartment complexes,and a couple of residential blocks. I am now out of both the nice door hangers and the rubber band tied collections of leaflets.

1:00 – 1:30 pm - Lunch (Jimmy John’s is awesome)

12:30 pm – Finished the second, much larger apartment complex, a surprising number of older people were home, most of whom had early voted, and voted for Senator Obama at that! Hrm, my.barackobama.com is overloaded apparently, but texasprecinctcaptains.com is still up.

Noon - Phoned County Coordinator with latest Democrat vote count. The polling station was still incredibly busy and the Election Judge was out to lunch, so they did not have precinct-by-precinct breakdowns. Our 2 poll workers were so busy I felt bad about bugging them for numbers. Total number of Democrat ballots cast for precincts 205, 207, 210, 220 and 223: 313 (275 Optical Scan, 38 via eSlate)

11:20 am – The next apartment complex is right next to mine, so I pop in to update this blog post; heading out to finish knocking on that complex.

11:00 am – Just finished door hangars/ door knocking in a nearby apartment complex. At this time of day few people are home, talked to an awesome elderly guy who voted early for Obama and says he will come to the caucus tonight. I have climbed 24 flights of stairs and I am by no means physically fit.

10:20 am – On my way out to do door knocking in my precinct I notice someone across the intersection from our polling place waving an Obama sign and the sidewalk next to her is lined with them, excellent, I pull over to talk, her name is Shirlyce, and she is fired up and ready to go.

8:00 – 9:45 am – Arrive at the staging office in Lewisville, where I phonebank with the other volunteers for bit. Something odd struck me; EVERY other volunteer there is female, and the scene is hilariously similar to a diversity poster, we have white, black, Indian, Hispanic, and Asian.

7:30 am – I got to cast my ballot (I didn’t vote early), then chuck it into the escan optical reader. By the time I leave, the line has stretched outside and has wrapped halfway around the building.

7:00 am – Polls open, I phone into to our County Campaign Coordinator, to let her know that the polls opened on time and everything seems ok.

6:45 am – Arrived at the polling station for our precinct and 4 others, there are already 15 people in line.

6:00 am – Get up, shower, get dressed. Apparently my storage server decided to kernel panic while I was asleep. It freaking snowed last night and now everything is covered in ice.

Background
LiveUpgrade was originally introduced in Solaris 8 10/01 (update 6), LiveUpgrade 2.0 is available for all versions of Solaris from 2.6 onward. The idea behind LiveUpgrade or lu is to be able to upgrade the os and rollout patches without affecting the running system. It also provides an incredibly effective failsafe if an upgrade or patch screws up something unexpectedly.

Preparation
One of the key parts of using lu is to plan for it when you first layout your filesystems during system install (you are following good fs layout practices right?). The simplest layout would be 4 slices, /, /export/home, swap, and an alternate root. In this layout, /export/home and swap are shared between both boot environments. The machine I’m using for this demo has a single 80gb ide disk with the following layout.

device           mountpoint      size   type
/dev/dsk/c0d0s1                  1GB    swap
/dev/dsk/c0d0s0  / (root)        14GB   ufs
/dev/dsk/c0d0s3    (alternate)   14GB   ufs
/dev/dsk/c0d0s7  /export/home    44GB   ufs

Obviously, in practice you will have a more fine-grained filesystem to slice ratio. Additionally, lu is smart enough to make the distinction between filesystems that hold os data like /usr and /var and filesystems that don’t like /export. It is also smart enough to deal with Solaris Volume Manager/Solstice Disksuite volumes and will usually cope with Veritas Volume Manager/Storage Foundation volumes too.

Use
When you first install Solaris, there aren’t any boot environments configured by default, although the snazzy new Caimain installer in OpenSolaris will automatically set aside an extra slice with the same size as /. If you have never used lu before, lustatus will look something like this:

[root@internal]~# lustatus
ERROR: No boot environments are configured on this system
ERROR: cannot determine list of all boot environment names


Initial state The system I’m using already has a boot environment named snv75 containing (surprise) OpenSolaris build 75.

Output of lucreateThe first step is to create the new boot environment. The first time you use LiveUpgrade, you will want to specify -c name to assign current environment. The most basic form of the lucreate command takes the form lucreate -n new environment name -m mountpoint:device:fs type . By default, the source for the new boot environment is the current enviroment, but this can be changed with the -s option. In this example, the new environment will be called snv77, and we want / (which is ufs) to be on /dev/dsk/c0d0s3.

[root@internal]~# lucreate -n snv77 -m /:/dev/dsk/c0d0s3:ufs
snip
Creation of boot environment successful.

UpgradingThe next step is upgrading the new boot environment, this can be done from a physical cd/dvd, a cd/dvd image (using lofiadm), tape or a Flash archive. On this machine I’m using the OpenSolaris build 77 dvd image, mounted with lofiadm (this is the Solaris equivalent of loopback mounting using losetup or mount -o loop for linux users).

[root@internal]~# lofiadm -a /shared/sol-nv-b77-x86-dvd.iso
/dev/lofi/1
[root@internal]~# mount -F hsfs /dev/lofi/1 /cdrom

After mounting the image, luupgrade is invoked with the -u option (upgrade) -n new environment name -s path to install:

[root@internal]~# luupgrade -u -n snv77 -s /cdrom

As you can see in the screenshot, 2 packages failed to upgrade, in this instance they were packages from the blastwave repository, so not a critical issue. The failure of those packages is actually a good case for using LiveUpgrade. Had this been a traditional upgrade, we would not have known till we rebooted the system and something didn’t work, then we would have to figure out what was broken and get it fixed, all while users are probably unhappy; and of course the system would be down during the entire upgrade process.

luactivateOnce the upgrade/patching/package manipulation is complete, we want to activate the new boot environment. Easy as pie:
[root@internal]~# luactivate snv77

After luactivate luactivate adds the entries to grub and changes the default boot slice. Should something go wrong after reboot, all you have to do is reboot and choose the old boot environment in grub.

lu gui The Easy Way(tm)
Now that you’ve seen how to do LiveUpgrade manually, you should know that there is a much simpler (but less flexible) gui for it. The command to invoke it is simply lu.

Limitations
LiveUpgrade doesn’t support systems with non-global zones on installations older than OpenSolaris build 53, and doesnt support ZFS bootable data sets, at least not yet. On a related note, Al Hopper (all around Solaris guru and former member of the OpenSolaris Governing Board) of the DFW OpenSolaris User’s Group has written a quick howto on setting up ZFS boot. Xen/XVM was recently integrated into the main OpenSolaris builds, and as far as I can tell, there are no plans to support lu in guest domains on systems that aren’t fully virtualized (ie systems with cpus that don’t support Vanderpool/VT-x or Pacifica)

1) Can’t install the software.
After the Zune 1.3 software found and downloaded the update, I launched it and the progress bar goes to 100% only to be greeted by this:

Installation Failed
Setup must stop because the required package ‘Zune’ failed to install.
DIFXAPP: Rollback failed with error 0×2
Error code:0×80070035

The progress bar literally went backwards from 100% while the Windows Installer service rolled back the changes. It took more than an hour and a half of messing with stuff and perusing the Zune forums before someone realized that you have to have the Windows Firewall service turned on for installation to complete. That makes no sense whatsoever, but after enabling the service, I managed to finish the software installation.

2) Folder watching is broken, at least for podcasts.

No Loveline for you! The fact that the new software has an integrated podcast client is great. However, I often listen to stuff which doesn’t have an associated RSS feed like shows from the Loveline Archive. One would think this wouldn’t be a big deal, just add the folder that the files are stored in to the podcast watch list and they should show up right? Wrong; no matter what I do, manual podcasts refuse to show up.
Update: I’m an idiot; in order to make an unmanaged mp3 file show up as a podcast, you set its genre to podcast. Though you can’t change the genre in the Zune software because it lacks tag editing (That would make waaay too much sense). And no matter what you do, you can’t set album art for podcasts without it being in the xml feed, even if the mp3 itself has an image embedded in it.

3) Nearly useless media center support.
One of the features I most looked forward to was support and automatic conversion of dvr-ms files recorded from media center machines. I was hoping to just point the Zune software to the recorded tv folder on the media center and they would get added to videos. What Microsoft failed to tell us was that the Zune software does not support Dolby Digital audio. Now you might think this isn’t a big deal, but the vast majority of my recordings come from high definition channels, and all high definition broadcasts use Dolby Digtal audio (surprise!). I have no idea what Microsoft was thinking, the type of person that goes through the expense of buying (or in my case building) a media center PC is the type of person who will have high def content. You can’t even say its a codec licensing issue, since half the versions of Vista have media center (and thus a Dolby Digital decoder) BUILT-IN. I don’t expect the Zune itself to support AC3/DD audio, but it would be trivial for MS to have the software convert it to stereo.

Ratings 4) Reduced granularity rating system.
I wasn’t a huge user of star ratings in media player or the old software, but the system in the new version is far less flexible. Rather than offering 5 stars, you have 3 levels: empty, broken or full heart.

5) Drag and drop.
There is no drag and drop from outside apps in anything other than the music browse view.

6) Poor metadata editing
You can’t batch edit metadata, and you cant edit any info other than artist or title.

All that being said, some of the new features are nice:

Wifi sync settings
1) Wifi sync.
I’m not sure if this is actually useful as of yet, but it does work flawlessly if slowly

Go to artist feature
2) Show artist feature.
This a minor thing, but its a feature that I really wanted. When playing a track, you can hit the menu button and you get the option to see other tracks from that artist.

Podcast Feeds
3) Finally, built in podcast support.
For people who use mp3 players primarily for podcasts, this update is great. No more “watched folders” + seperate app required.

This entire update is a disaster, things that worked well before are now crippled, newly implemented features aren’t really integrated or complete, and the software prevents you from manually fixing things when they go awry. I hated the old Zune software about as much as I hated iTunes, but this is a new level of crappiness. While the Zune device itself is excellent, Microsoft has blown any opportunity to be taken seriously in the mp3 player market with such a half baked mess of desktop software that clearly never saw a single round of quality assurance testing.

Most unexpected

The culprit…I think A quick search turned up others who were having this problem and it appears that no one had a solution yet, as a matter of fact, the issue appears to have really gained widespread attention only last weekend. Further research turned up Mark Russinovich’s excellent 3 part series on Vista kernel architecture. Upon reading about the Multimedia Class Scheduler Service it seemed like that would be culprit. Indeed Mark wrote a blog post on it just today.

These are not the keys
you are looking for… After reading this msdn article, I and many others thought that the answer lay in the MMCSS keys in the registry. Suffice to say it doesn’t. Tweaking the values in the 7 multimedia classes doesnt appear to have any effect.

Not cool
At this point you are thinking “Ok Courtney, just stop and disable the service”. Well, this is what happens when you try. Hrm, Windows Audio huh…might need that.

Dependency ListIt seems unlikely that Windows Audio Service has a legitimate dependency on MMCS, so I opted to manually modify the dependency list for the service in the registry.

Editing key Just double-click on “DependOnService” and delete the line that says MMCSS. Hit ok, return to the services, and set Multimedia Class Scheduler Service to disabled (but do not try to stop it), then reboot.

excellent Once Vista restarts, you should be able to check services and see that Multimedia Class Scheduler is disabled, and when you scroll down, Windows Audio is still running.

Success!To give it a test, play some audio while copying a large file. Your performance should increase dramatically.

38 mb/s, not great, but much much better.



Update: A lot of people have told me that this works for them, however I have had one or two reports of people having popping audio. Popping audio due to missed interrupts is exactly one of the things MMCSS is intended for. The beauty of the workaround is that you can still re-enable the MMCS service independently of Windows Audio, so all you would have to do is set it back to Manual or Automatic and hit start. Some people have indicated that they think this is some fundamental flaw of Windows, and I must disagree; having the ability to prioritize I/O, paging and memory blocks is an incredibly useful feature and a worthwhile addition to Vista. I just think Microsoft may have chosen some poor weighting parameters for it initially.

If disabling MMCSS doesnt solve the issue for you, you may want to try playing with the various parameters in the subkeys under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile\Tasks, though I had no luck with this method. You may also want to try using netsh to fiddle with Vista’s autotuning parameters too.

Also, looks like Larry Osterman (Windows Media team) has written a blog post on the issue.

Update 2: The Vista team put up a whitepaper on Service Pack 1 over at their blog. I noticed these two points:

“Improves the speed of copying and extracting files.”

“Addresses an issue in the current version of Windows Vista that makes browsing network file shares consume significant bandwidth and not perform as fast as expected.”

Hopefully they will change the defaults, and provide a user mechanism to adjust the weighting of I/O priorites.

Update 3 (3/18/8) : SP1(x86 x64) is officially available and Mark Russinovich has a post up explaining the file copy improvements.  From the release notes:

In SP1, PC administrators are able to modify the network throttling index value for the MMCSS (Multimedia Class Scheduling Service), allowing them to determine the appropriate balance between network performance and audio/video playback quality.

My network copy speed has risen dramatically to ~75mb/s on smb/cifs shares.