• 1/2 cup apricot preserves
• 1/2 cup cider vinegar
• 1/2 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
• 3/4 teaspoon curry powder
• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
• cheesecloth bag w/ 6 whole cloves + 3″ cinnamon stick
• 1 lime, blanched in boiling water for 2 minutes, seeded and chopped
• 1 firm pear, peeled and diced
• 1 apple, peeled and diced
• 3 cups cranberries, washed and picked over
• 1/2 cup raisins
• 1/2 cup walnuts, chopped

Combine preserves, vinegar, sugar, curry powder, ginger, spice bag and 1 1/2 cups water in a non-reactive pan. Bring to a boil and stir until the sugar dissolves.

Add lime, pear and apple. Simmer for 10 minutes.

Add cranberries and raisins. Simmer 20-25 minutes, or until thick, stirring occasionally.

Remove from heat and remove spice bag. Add walnuts.

Put in a non-reactive bowl. Let cool and cover, chill overnight.

This is best if made a few days in advance, so the flavors can all come out and blend together. It will keep easily for a couple of weeks if you store it divided into multiple containers.

Faced with such a challenge, I opted to punt for the time being and focus on other items. Priorities were able to allow for more thinking on the matter, and I decided that instead of banging my head against the table to figure out why things were not working when they should I would make this work using something other than MegaCli.

mfiutil was added to FreeBSD with the release of 8.0 and later on back ported to 7.3 as well. It doesn’t provide as great of detail about the RAID status or as much control as MegaCli does, but it works simply and hopefully should have more consistent performance and compatibility with the system. Using mfiutil (and my usual Perl) I have written a Nagios plugin to monitor the status of all physical drives and volumes recognized by the mfi driver.

The plugin takes output from commands like:
#mfiutil -u0 show volumes
mfi0 Volumes:
Id Size Level Stripe State Cache Name
mfid0 ( 136G) RAID-1 64K OPTIMAL Enabled
#mfiutil -u0 show drives
mfi0 Physical Drives:
( 137G) ONLINE <SEAGATE ST3146855SS S515 serial=3LN2BBYV> SAS enclosure 1, slot 0
( 137G) ONLINE <SEAGATE ST3146855SS S515 serial=3LN2BAVQ> SAS enclosure 1, slot 1
#mfiutil -u1 show volumes
mfi1 Volumes:
Id Size Level Stripe State Cache Name
mfid1 ( 9076G) RAID-5 64K OPTIMAL Disabled
#mfiutil -u1 show drives
mfi1 Physical Drives:
( 699G) ONLINE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD2B1M3> SATA enclosure 1, slot 14
( 699G) ONLINE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD2A3BC> SATA enclosure 1, slot 13
( 699G) ONLINE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD2AC4F> SATA enclosure 1, slot 12
( 699G) ONLINE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD2B37L> SATA enclosure 1, slot 11
( 699G) ONLINE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD2ATGW> SATA enclosure 1, slot 10
( 699G) ONLINE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD2B1ZT> SATA enclosure 1, slot 9
( 699G) ONLINE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD2A943> SATA enclosure 1, slot 8
( 699G) ONLINE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD255TA> SATA enclosure 1, slot 7
( 699G) ONLINE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD2B39K> SATA enclosure 1, slot 6
( 699G) HOT SPARE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD2ATQB> SATA enclosure 1, slot 5
( 699G) ONLINE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD2B1HZ> SATA enclosure 1, slot 4
( 699G) ONLINE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD2A370> SATA enclosure 1, slot 3
( 699G) ONLINE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD2AZT0> SATA enclosure 1, slot 2
( 699G) ONLINE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD2AT64> SATA enclosure 1, slot 1
( 699G) ONLINE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD285NY> SATA enclosure 1, slot 0

and generates a Nagios status report like:

#check_mfi -u2 -s1
OK: mfid0:136G:RAID-1:OPTIMAL mfid1:9076G:RAID-5:OPTIMAL Drives:17 Hotspare(s):1

The -u flag is to specify how many mfi devices it should be looking for (and defaults to 1, i.e. mfi0, id unspecified) and -s is optional for how many hot spares to be looking for (0 if unspecified).

mfiutil needs to be run with root privs to work properly, but your Nagios process (or NRPE if you are checking on a remote system) is usually running as the nagios user, so the check_mfi plugin calls mfiutil via sudo. In order for this to work properly you should have a line like the following in your sudoers file:

nagios ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/mfiutil


You can download the check_mfi plugin directly from my site here. It has also been uploaded to Nagios Exchange (not yet properly listed) and Monitoring Exchange (I still can’t sort out why the world needs both of these, but I won’t be the one to choose which).

I pay best attention to questions and comments posted here on my blog and don’t typically look at what is on either of the other two sites except for when I upload a newer revision. That said, those sites may well have the most recent revision of my code.

Some things only change a little, so the sense of Nostalgia is more like a haze that lingers over the current reality. Coney Island Hotdog in Worcester is sort of like that for me. The place is close enough to being the same as when I was a kid that I can picture the ghosts of waitresses that would call you “hun” and banana cream pies, just an old layer that has been peeled off or faded away.

Nantasket Beach / Paragon Park is one of those more painful incidents of nostalgia. All you see is the dirty broken ghost of a layer left. The heart of things is long gone. There is little reminder of what once was, leaving you doubting that it ever really was at all.

I used to got to Nantasket Beach and Paragon Park every now and then when I was a kid. Late seventies to mid eighties. I think I went the most in my mid-teens. My father and I would drive down in the evening. Convertible top down. Play some pinball or video games. Get a box of salt water taffy and eat most if it on the drive back.

Arcades lined the whole strip there in front of the park. There were tons of games. Lots of them were pretty beat up, but the depth in time that they represented was amazing. There was just so much going on and it was teaming with life.

I would go again just after Paragon Park had been shut down. Rode out there with my dad and other friends on our motorcycles. I think my girlfriend (now wife) was on the back. Things were shutdown, but it was all there still at least.

This past weekend I made a trip down to Nantasket Beach on Sunday morning to see what it was like. And this is basically all that there was to it:

Nantasket Beach strip in 2010

Now admittedly I had been here before in the past years, but I always made excuses like “Oh, maybe I am just here too early in the season, it will be much more active later on.” But this is the start of August, and all there is to show for it here is one limp arcade, a food stand, a crappy gift shop and a boarded up arcade home to who-knows what. It is basically what it was when I went there over four years ago.

Same photo from 2006

The only good thing is that nothing has changed in these last four years. The bad thing is it is all just as depressing now as it was then. I can only hope that it was a case that the old amusement park and arcades were just losing money hand over fist and couldn’t survive in the times, not that someone with a bit more money decided that the world would be better served by yet another big ugly condo complex. Perhaps the residents of Hull like it better this way. Their town is quieter now and it can be a little sleepy seaside town with a few shops, some ice cream and hot dogs and a carousel. That bit of nostalgia in me hates them for it either way.

There is an appropriately titled “check_raid_amrstat – Dell AMR PERC4 FreeBSD” plugin already on Nagios Exchange and Monitoring Exchange, but as usual I can’t seem to be content with some other people’s code.

I cleaned up the code a bit. It is a bit more in sticking with the plugin writing guidelines. Presents a bit more info than the original in a more compact format, with output similar to my MegaRAID SAS plugin. Nothing radical at all, but I like it better and present it here in case you want to see an alternative.

So today we had a meeting at work and it was my big chance to show off how well this plan was work. I hook the iPad up to our projector with the VGA adapter. Oddly, I don’t get any mirrored display.

Change around inputs on the projector looking for signals. Still nada.

Go into iPad settings to see if any new option has popped up recognizing the attached bit of hardware. Also nada.

Google around a bit and… oh damn. According to Apple (Article HT4108):

The iPad Dock Connector to VGA Adapter can play content to a VGA display when using the following apps:

• Videos
• Photos—Slideshow playback only
• YouTube
• Keynote
• Safari—Video content on webpages

So until I actually start playing a video, photos, etc. I get no output at all from the VGA. I can’t browse websites in Safari over VGA, so I can’t, for example, use the iPad to go through our help desk ticketing system during the weekly group meeting. Can’t demonstrate application configuration on the big screen, etc etc. I generally like Apple hardware, and I really want to like this and for it to work, but it has just turned into a big failure and disappointment.

I understand that Apple might want to, under some circumstances, restrict your video output so you aren’t arbitrarily dumping licensed content out over a digital connection. Instead with this they are limiting you so tightly over what they will allow you to output, for no real explainable reason. Wouldn’t it be easier to just have the VGA output be universal and then restrict certain flagged content (which they already do) if you try to push it out over the adapter?

I can only come up with two possible explanations for why this is done this way:

1. The iPad is running an OS that is still fundamentally thinking it is dealing with something more along the lines of an iPod Touch, and that all that there really is worth displaying on a big screen is videos and photos.
2. If you were able to hook up the iPad to an external display and use a Bluetooth keyboard on it, you would pretty much kill some large percentage (lets just say 20%) of the market for notebooks like the MacBook Air. So cripple the iPad to force consumers to move further up the foodchain to get full video out capability.

Hopefully this is just the first case and things will improve with the next OS release. I really do like my iPad, but this feature has pretty much killed a large part of its intended functionality.