The Wacky World of Chris Knight

While I believe whole heartedly in the fifth amendment’s protections for individuals against self incrimination in regards to their personal lives, I believe that it should not ever be needed when a government employee is called upon to describe their on-the-job duties. I expect members/employees of the government to adhere to the law while performing their duties, and there should not be anything criminal about their job; especially when the person in question works in the attorney general’s office. When a government employee pleads the fifth while being questioned by the Senate about the work they did as a government employee they are pretty much saying “You don’t get to hear how I spent my time while employed by the people of this country, and since I plead the fifth you can’t hold that lack of knowledge against me”. I think that any government employee who pleads the fifth in regards to their employment should be immediately fired and required to pay back every penny they earned during their employ. Everything they earned, including health and retirement benefits, should be returned so that the American people are not paying for this person’s unaccounted for activities. Right after the check clears charge them with treason, as they were obviously not working in the best interest of the People while employed by the People.

Why do we tolerate such abuses by our government workers and our politicians? They work for the people, and yet the American people seem incredibly willing to take the royal screwing we have been getting for as long as we can remember. Where was the turning point between George Washington who was afraid the people would treat him like a king and George W. Bush who demands to be treated like a king?

-Chris Knight

Gonzales Aide to Invoke Fifth Amendment
By LAURIE KELLMAN, Associated Press Writer
Monday, March 26, 2007
(03-26) 16:35 PDT WASHINGTON, (AP) –

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ liaison with the White House will refuse to answer questions at upcoming Senate hearings about the firings of eight U.S. attorneys, citing her Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, her lawyer says.

“I have decided to follow by lawyer’s advice and respectfully invoke my constitutional right,” Monica Goodling, Gonzales’ counsel and White House liaison, said in a statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The revelation complicated the outlook for Gonzales, who is traveling out of town this week even as he fights to keep his job and his agency’s investigatory power.

[Follow the link above to read the whole sordid story...]

We interrupt our regular programming with a bit of geek braggery. What? We don’t have regular programming here? Sheesh, what kind of blog is this? It’s not a blog? It’s a “Web Log”? Whatever… back to the topic at hand…

A year and a half ago the company where I was contracting decided to build a video site for gamers. It was all the rage, and they didn’t want to fall behind. The programming team was tasked with building the application, and I was tasked with designing the download systems. The manager at that time was very interested in reducing costs, and was more than happy to listen to my suggestions for a cluster of inexpensive commodity boxes that would each have a copy of the video repository on a large RAID volume and be kept in sync with rsync. I am a fan of the Google approach to colo hardware, where you build it cheap and easy to replace.

While I was out of town dealing with my father’s funeral my manager’s manager trashed all my ideas, said we were a Dell shop and were going to buy Dell gear, and he ordered two Dell servers and a cheap EMC SAN that he dictated would be our video download system. Managers who don’t know their tech should stay out of the server room. He spent $25k for an entry level SAN that couldn’t handle the sustained activity of our video download servers a mere two months after we went live. I wish he hadn’t moved on before then, because I am the sort of person to remind a manager of my original proposal and ask them to explain again why it was rejected.

Anyway… With the ‘big man’ out of the picture, and the system he mandated collapsing miserably under the load, I was able to once again pitch my idea. We did use Dell machines for the commodity boxes, but that’s becuase the Dell PowerEdge 1800 is a very un-Dell-like machine. Well, it was, before Dell dropped it. For around $1400 you could get a PowerEdge 1800 with dual processors, dual power supplies, and a CERC SATA RAID controller, all with a three year on-site warranty. It was a sweet deal, and unlike most Dell boxes the PowerEdge 1800 didn’t use special drive rails; so we could pack it with six Seagate 500G SATA drives fairly cheaply. Configured as RAID-5, that gave us a little under 2.5TG per server for storing videos. A simple rsync script keeps the video archives in sync after user and editor uploads. Apache 2.2 configured with the worker MPM lets me do about 600 simultaneous connections per machine before I start running out of memory. Six of these boxes behind a HAProxy load balancing system can completely saturate a 1Gbps fiber Cogent network drop with plenty of cycles to spare, and we’ve held that level of bandwidth for amazingly sustained periods of time.

For the HAProxy box I used a Dell PowerEdge 2850 with PCIe slots. In order to make the most of our bandwidth I used an Intel PCIe 4x Gigabit Fiber card for the cogent drop and Intel PCIe 4x Gigabit Copper card for the server side. The load balancer and six servers were connected via a Cisco Gig-E switch.

In the past 81 days we have served 200 Terabytes from this little server cluster that I designed and built on a tight budget. I think that is cool.

-Chris Knight

[ This page has been linked on the HAProxy website, so I will be revisiting it shortly and posting some more technical details including config files. 2007/06/20 ]

Stanley Milgram - Obedience to Authority - 1965 Experiment - Google Video

This is an old experiment, but a chilling one nonetheless. At around 43 minutes and 33 seconds in the video, right near the end, the experimenter laments “The results, as I observed them in the laboratory, are disturbing. They raise the possibility that human nature can not be counted on to insulate men from brutality and inhumane treatment at the direction of malevolent authority. A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act, and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority. If in this study, an anonymous experimenter could successfully command adults to subdue a fifty year old man, and force on him painful electric shocks against his protests one can only wonder what government, with its vastly greater authority and prestige can command of its subjects.”

I am willing to bet that the architects of Abu Ghraib know this movie by heart, as well as the complete published results of the study, the way my generation knows the dialog of the Breakfast Club…

-Chris Knight