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I had a 2 gig iPod Nano (Generation 1) for over a year. During the time I really liked my iPod. Everything just worked. I subscribed to a bunch of podcasts and all was happy. At the end of 2006 it started getting a little screwy. I would get sound only on one headphone and ended up tossing it, as Apple told me it’d cost ~200 to fix it now that the warranty is over.

No worries, I figured. This was just the excuse i was looking for to buy the latest and greatest from Apple. I decided to go for the 8 gig 2nd Gen Nano, as it looked the nicest and the cost of the extra space seemed worth it.

Since then I have longed for my first generation Nano. This new Nano hangs just about every week. I still listen to a bunch of podcasts and I still like the Nano for the most part, but the Gen 2 Nano has issues. Every week or so I will attempt to play a podcast and the Nano will just hang. It’s never the same day or the same podcast, but pressing play causes the screen to get stuck in between redraws. The only way to get this to work again is to reset the Nano. Attempting to play the same podcast that caused the hang after the reset works just fine! And yes, I am finding the latest firmware. . .

Tonight I helped one of my buddies build an auto-attendant on Cisco CME + Unity. I was told that the auto-attendants were all controlled by tcl scripts, and figured I knew the language fairly well as I had experience writing tcl scripts for irc bots in the late 90’s. It wasn’t, I had to write the script using a silly Cisco GUI editor. To set a variable you have to drag an “equals” sign (=) labeled ’set’ from the left side onto the part of the script where the variable is used. As I moved the “equals” sign to the right side to put it in place, everything was expanded and I lost track of where I was supposed to put it. Once I finally put it in the correct place I had to right-click and properties it to set the variable. Regardless, we got the job done fairly quick, and his customer is happy.

Now I’m not anti GUI or anything, but the interface really slowed things down. It was both clumsy and cumbersome. As a person who writes scripts on a regular basis, I felt like I was tripping over the GUI over and over. I can’t imagine having to use this on a regular basis. Now I’m not an elitist or anything like that, there are many GUI’s which I use on a daily. I even use QmailAdmin GUI more often than the command line interface when dealing with my mail servers. All I am really saying is that I believe Cisco’s CUE Editor needs some serious usability work done. It is a horrid interface for creating scripts.

During the Christmas break I saw an HDNet Marathon of Arrested Development. During this time I saw almost all of Season 1 and was laughing through most of it. Afterwards I bought all 3 seasons on Amazon and really enjoyed watching all 3 seasons from beginning to end. I’d really recommend this series to all.

Hopefully this show can be resurrected, as many others had, based on the DVD sales. It’s a long shot, but it would be really cool

I’ve decided to go back to Windows XP, I’ll probably be spending part of my weekend re-installing my company laptop. Windows Vista is nice and I will miss certain features, but XP was just better for me. I’m sick of UAC bugging me. I’m sick of Vista forgetting whether my Wi-Fi network is public or private. I’m sick of compatibility issues. Most of all I’m sick of the BSOD, yes that’s right the BSOD! It’s back . . .

Vista installed and detected all of my hardware. It has the latest patches and updated drivers from Windows Update. The BSOD’s (that’s right plural) were probably an issue with some third party software, which will eventually be upgraded. However I will note that all of the software I am currently running is the “Windows Vista”-compatible version. I even had to dump PDFCreator in favor of CutePDF, and other such trade-ups in the hopes that Vista would just be stable, but no such luck.

Aside from that my laptop is running noticeably warmer and slower since I upgraded. Now this machine isn’t the latest and greatest, it’s a Pentium M 2.13 GHz w/ 1 GB of ram and plenty of disk space yet Vista feels like a slug. I’m going back to XP for the time being.

Today I was tasked with setting up a Solaris trunk to a Cisco switch. The documentation is very lacking, as most only shows one side or the other. Neither show a Solaris 10 machine talking to a Cisco switch, as though this is a very abnormal configuration. For kicks I am putting my configuration here. In this example I am making the switch active LACP and the Solaris box passive LACP.

On the Solaris side, just use good ol ‘dladm’ to create the trunk as specified below, adding more ‘-d INT’ as necessary. On my system the driver was e1000g.

# dladm create-aggr -P L2 -l passive -T short -d e1000g0 -d e1000g1 1

To view the LACP details follow the example below:

# dladm show-aggr -L
key: 1 (0x0001) policy: L2      address: X:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX (auto)
                LACP mode: passive      LACP timer: short
    device    activity timeout aggregatable sync  coll dist defaulted expired
    e1000g0   passive  long    yes          yes   yes  yes  no        no
    e1000g1   passive  long    yes          yes   yes  yes  no        no

To view aggregate statistics follow the example below:

# dladm show-aggr -s
key: 1  ipackets  rbytes      opackets   obytes          %ipkts %opkts
           Total        398054    41821394    278529    28661590
           e1000g0      282639    28945342    1365      171084          71.0    0.5
           e1000g1      23084     2724062     84099     8609560         5.8     30.2

This is what I did to configure the switch. Each port on the switch must be configured the same as GigabitEthernet1/1. Be sure to configure the ports first, before creating ‘interface port-channel 1′

port-channel per-module load-balance
port-channel load-balance dst-mac
!
interface Port-channel1
 switchport
 switchport mode access
 no ip address
!
interface GigabitEthernet1/1
 switchport
 switchport mode access
 no ip address
 lacp port-priority 4096
 lacp rate fast
 channel-group 1 mode active
!

* Update 2/25/2007: Certain versions of the IOS for the Cisco Catalyst 6509 do not suppport Etherchannel trunks faster than 1 Gigabit. This will require an IOS upgrade for the full bandwidth of the LACP trunk to be used.

* Update 4/06/2007: Solaris 10u3 requires reboots after aggregator changes. This is a known bug, without a current fix.