It is apparently difficult to determine what version of ADO (not the .NET one) is installed on a machine.  I needed to do this for a client and can’t for the life of me find any easy way to do this outside of code so I wrote a little utility to do it.

Download it here (16 kb)

I’m rebuilding my Mac and shuffling a lot of data.  I have two 500GB external drives (one USB2 and one firewire).  Currently the firewire drive is being used for backups and spends most of its time unplugged from a computer.  I wanted to move my backup data from the firewire disk to the USB2 disk and use my firewire disk as a every-day-use drive.  Since my plan with the backup disk is to leave it at the office most of the time, I want it encrypted.

My first attempt was to use the built in DiskUtil in MacOSX to create a 400GB exncrypted DMG file on the drive.  This is clumsy looking and, it turns out, ridiculously slow (like 1.4 days slow).  Mike had the suggestion to use TrueCrypt and so I did.  This whole process tool about 10 minutes.

First I initialize the disk with TrueCrypt.  TrueCrypt doesn’t have built-in support for formatting HFS+ volumes so we initialize it with no file system first.

jsc@melmac 1~% /Applications/TrueCrypt.app/Contents/MacOS/TrueCrypt -t –quick -v –random-source=/dev/urandom -c /dev/disk4s1
Volume type:
1) Normal
2) Hidden
Select [1]:
Enter system administrator password:

Encryption algorithm:
1) AES
2) Serpent
3) Twofish
4) AES-Twofish
5) AES-Twofish-Serpent
6) Serpent-AES
7) Serpent-Twofish-AES
Twofish-Serpent
Select [1]:

Hash algorithm:
1) RIPEMD-160
2) SHA-512
3) Whirlpool
Select [1]:

Filesystem:
1) FAT
2) None
Select [1]: 2

Enter password:
Re-enter password:

Enter keyfile path [none]:

Done: 100.000%  Speed: 55.8 GB/s  Left: 0 s
The TrueCrypt volume has been successfully created.
jsc@melmac ~%

Now I map the drive (without attempting to mount it):

jsc@melmac 127~% /Applications/TrueCrypt.app/Contents/MacOS/TrueCrypt
                -t –filesystem=none /dev/disk4s1
Enter password for /dev/disk4s1:
Enter keyfile [none]:
Protect hidden volume? (y=Yes/n=No) [No]:
Enter system administrator password:

And now, finally, I can use diskutil to format it as HFS+.

jsc@melmac ~% diskutil eraseVolume "HFS+" "Jeff Clement Backup #1" /dev/disk5
Started erase on disk disk5
Erasing
[ \ 0%................................................... ]

From this point I can mount / unmount the TrueCrypt volume as normal.  It just works.   Way faster!  Now I just have to shuffle some data around

Thanks Mike!

Several of us drove up to Drumheller on Saturday morning.  We left Calgary at 4am and managed to arrive at Horseshoe Canyon pretty close to sunrise.  Unfortunately the sky was very overcast so we didn’t really get much of a sunrise.  Also, unfortunately, it rained (more unfortunate for Wes who rode his motorbike out there) so wander around in the canyon was a bit mucky.

Anyways, I got a few pictures I’m happy with so it was a success.

Apparently big, fancy, expensive, uber redundant colo facility "The Planet" suffered an electrical problem and had about 9,000 customer machines without power.

On Saturday, May 31st at 4:55pm CDT in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room. Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.

We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.

More information on their service update page.

Apparently their electrical equipment shorted and exploded.  Then when they cranked up the generators, those failed too.  So now they are physically moving machines to a new data center to get them up and running.

We understand the difficult situation this causes for our customers. As such, we are offering to move all H1 Phase 1 customers to our H2 data center here in Houston. This requires physically moving servers to our data center, which is approximately three miles away from the H1 data center. It also requires IP address changes for all servers relocated to H2.

This can not be good for the long term health of a company that prides itself in it’s failure proof services.

A few years ago I got a pass for the Petroleum Show as James Bond of Universal Exports.  This year I went one step cooler:

I just received this pass in the mail.  Good thing the people processing petroleum show guest registrations don’t watch a lot of Bond flicks.

If you don’t know who Ernst Stavro Blofeld is, he’s James Bond villain extraordinaire and head of the evil criminal organization SPECTRE.

I’m rather disappointed I just paid for a hair cut.  Otherwise, I seriously might have been tempted to shave my head, buy a monocle, and borrow a fluffy white cat for the show.  Oh well.  Maybe next time.

Telemarketers phoned with a "free" cruise.  So I told them I was Ernst Stavro Blofeld.  Sweet!