Moving forward at last!

It's not always finding the big bugs that lead to breakthroughs on research. Sometimes it's the little ones that trail into different problems and at long last the real cause of all those headaches is found. Last semester the scripts gave a strange error during one of the test runs to collect data. Killall had nothing to kill. Strange, according to the machine collecting data the machine under test was suppose to be in the middle of running the disk at a particular frequency and collecting the AC measurements once every minute. Curious, I was sent off to comb the logs.

The logs revealed a bit of oversight and assumption coming back to bite us squarely you know where. The two computers time stamps were not in sync. Not just the hour was off but the minute, second, they had drifted apart by several minutes. Ubuntu checks the time of a computer against an external server only on boot up. We leave rickroll and lolcat running all the time. Not a problem, server administrators the world over solve this problem of time drifting before. Google to the rescue and help from the lovely folks on the Ubuntu community forums later, we had a quick fix. Thankfully this fix was quick and easy, add a line to the chron.daily directory. Chron is a unix utility that runs the scrips inside its directories at a set interval like daily, hourly etc.

Wait overnight. Come to find the timestamps don't match the next day. Move the fix to the chron.hourly directory. Repeat waiting. No dice the next day. Discover the network time protocol daemon hadn't be installed! Install ntp, wait over night. I did a little dance the next morning to see rickroll and lolcat's timestamps. They actually stayed in sync!

Now once Vince finishes off his script to parse our data logs into a format easier to read, we'll be able to take data from a run and actually analyse it. Of course the first model we create with testZulu will be ugly, but at least then we'll be moving forward!