Date:           2007-10-28
Where:         Pacifica/Linda Mar
Time:           9:30am - 11:00am
Weather:      Sunny
Wind:           none
Crowds:       Emptyish (for Pacifica)
Tide:            Low tide, starting to change to incoming tide
Waves:         Flat.  Hardly anything worth paddling into.
                   A few 2-3'.

Date:            2007-10-23
Where:          Sunnyvale Skatepark / Fair Oaks & Wolfe
Time:            9:15 - 10:00am
Weather:       Sunny
Crowds:        empty - 7 or 8 people

Been at least 6 months, so just warming up, refreshing muscle memory.

Somewhat related: another reason why San Francisco sucks.

Date:           2007-10-21
Where:         Pacifica/Linda Mar
Time:           10:00am - 11:30am
Weather:      Sunny
Wind:           On-shore, brisk
Crowds:       Only few people out.  Parking lot almost empty.
Tide:            Low tide, starting to change to incoming tide
Waves:         Bumpy, choppy, blown out.
                   3-5', occasional 6',7', even some 8'+
                   Strong currents / rip tide towards south

The sea was angry that day, my friends.  Like an old man trying to
send back soup in a Deli.

Got my ass handed to me.  Caught only a handful of waves, mostly 
whitewater.  :-/

Apparently solaris pxebooting is usually done via pxegrub. Trying to use pxelinux, I ran into the same problems as outlined here.

That is, after using a pxelinux menu entry like the following:

LABEL solaris
MENU DEFAULT
        MENU LABEL Solaris Jumpstart
        KERNEL mboot.c32
        APPEND boot/multiboot kernel/unix -v install -B console=ttya --- boot/x86.miniroot
        IPAPPEND=3

the host would boot properly, but then not be able to determine its network configuration and drop into the shell.

After searching for a solution to the problem, I finally decided to just make use of pxelinux's IPAPPEND and change the install script in the miniroot. So, I did something along the following (on a FreeBSD 6.x system):

cp x86.miniroot x86.miniroot.not
gzip -d -c x86.miniroot > miniroot.img      # uncompress the miniroot
mdconfig -a -t vnode -u 0 -f  miniroot.img  # configure image as a memory disk
mount /dev/md0 /mnt                         # mount the memory disk
cd /mnt/sbin
patch </tmp/install-discovery.diff          # see changes below
umount /mnt
mdconfig -d -u 0
gzip -9 miniroot.img
mv miniroot.img.gz x86.miniroot

The changes to the install-discovery script are here; they are just small changes to extract the network information from the boot arguments passed in via IPAPPEND=3.

After this, the client appears to netboot and enter jumpstart normally.

On 2007-05-17, I gave a presentation on how we dealt with the new Daylight Saving Time in 2007 at Yahoo! at the monthly BayLISA meeting. The video of the presentation is now available on Yahoo! Video.