The ravens are looking a bit sluggish. Tell Malcolm they need new batteries.

Monday, December 31

Geek

Something Different

I just got a cease & desist letter from drive J.  One of my external drives has been a little balky lately, requiring me to turn it off and on (or unplug it an plug it back in) to get it going.  And just now it stopped working entirely.

So as a last resort, I pulled it from its enclosure and stuck it into the spare bay in Haruhi.

And...  It worked.  Came up first time, no errors, all data intact, just as the fireworks started going off in the distance.

Happy New Year everyone!  It's gotta be better than 2007. eek

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:04 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Saturday, December 29

Geek

Success!

Or a success-like event, anyway.

I've managed to boot Naga on the FC4-x86-64 Rescue CD, and after a bit of poking around with fdisk, managed to manually reconstruct one of the two 800GB arrays.  I'm copying data off that right now.

The other array is down because of a failed disk, so unless I can somehow coax that drive to life (or copy it onto another drive), that one is toast - it was RAID-0.  Several smaller RAID-1 arrays have also been brought back to temporary life.

Fortunately, while the missing array held the majority of my old anime, it's also the one that I have better backups of.  The other array, the one that I have managed to get working, only has about 300GB of anime, but it also has about 400GB of assorted stuff - backups of mu.nu, photos, files, music - hundreds of thousands of little files for which I don't even have a complete catalog. 

So at least I'll be getting that back: After finding the old /usr partition I got rysnc up and running and it's pushing 25MB a second across to Yurie.

At this point I'd given up hope of getting anything off that machine, so every byte is a bonus. smile

Update: For some reason, rsync will burp and die every few gigabytes.  But it's rsync, so I just send it on its way again.

Update: Oh look, Bleach.  Goody.  Of course, I have Bleach, on my external drive, on my new PC, on DVD-R, and on DVD now that it's been released here.  But I've also recovered it from Naga.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:21 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Tuesday, December 25

Life

Merry Christmas!

To all the munuvians and meenuvians and to everyone who got lost and just sort of ended up here somehow, a merry Christmas and a happy New Year type thingy!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:15 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Monday, December 24

Geek

What The Heck?

Minx just had a stroke.  Actually, it looks like MySql was at fault.  I just got five little "trouble at t'mill" emails, one from each of the Minx processes running, and when I checked in, my latest post was missing.

I bounced the MySql server, which made no difference.  Running a table repair on the database brought everything back, apparently intact.  And the last backup was only 45 minutes ago.  But still not very nice to see.

Nothing in the logfiles to indicate a hardware problem.  Bleh.

Update: Looks like Minx was going rogue and eating all the memory on the server.  Once all memory is gone, the next program to request some memory is summarily killed.  If that's Minx, no biggie; one of the other Minx processes will take up the slack and the dead process will be restarted automatically.  But if it's MySQL, bad things happen.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:47 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Sunday, December 23

Geek

UPS And Downs

So I went out and bought that UPS today.  Well, not that UPS, but a UPS.  Nice big 16-pound 700VA unit.  Runs Haruhi and Yurie and all their ducklings (the four external drives) just fine.

Except...  It's starting to look like the problem with my MyBook isn't the power supply.  It's on a UPS, and it will still spin down while in use.  Hell, it spun down during a chkdsk.  That's not a useful feature in a drive.

I'm copying everything off it (if I can find the space for that, since I'm copying everything off everything right now), and then I'll see if I can work out how to open it up and remove the drive itself.  I have a few Western Digital drives in use, and none of them except the MyBook have given me a moment's bother*, so if I can get it out of the crappy enclosure I'll at least have recovered the larger part of what I spent on it.

Oh, and with four USB drives attached, Haruhi won't boot.  Unplug them, boot up, and plug them in, and it's all fine.  The interesting thing - for BIOS programmer values of interesting - is that it freezes somewhere between identifying the CPU and testing the memory.  That's something of a WTF.

I could turn a couple of them into eSATA and see if that makes a difference.  Not until I have them backed up, though.  Not after what happened to the late lamented Goldie.

* Oh yeah.  Except for the NCQ bug that crops up under Linux.  Bleah.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:33 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Friday, December 21

Blog

Fixed!

That bug that was logging people out at random - the same bug that occasionally gave you someone else's name on a comments page - has been found and fixed.

It's a CherryPy bug and not a Minx bug, so I'm going to see if it's been fixed in the new beta of CherryPy, and if not, file a bug report.

The only problem is that I spent three hours looking for a bug in my code before I turned my gaze to CherryPy. neutral

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:23 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Thursday, December 20

Geek

Cool Tools

This is too cool.  Whack in your phone number, and it gives you a list of every ADSL2+ ISP available in your area and all of their plans and prices, which ones have ports available, and a map showing you where the exchange is.  Doesn't actually have an address lookup and distance calculator, but that's about the only thing missing.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:58 PM | Comments (33) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Cool

Nanotech Bakes A Better Battery

Scientists at Stanford university have come up with a new variant on the Lithium-ion battery that delivers ten times the capacity.

That's huge.  Assuming they don't run into engineering difficulties bringing it to market, it changes everything.  It makes electric cars practical.  Gives you a notebook that lasts all day without charging.  iPods and phones can use much smaller and lighter batteries, making them smaller and lighter themselves.

Scientists and engineers have been making gradual progress towards improved batteries for decades; this in a single leap outpaces all that effort put together.

Woohoo!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:44 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Wednesday, December 19

Geek

What I Like To See

Haruhi is running a virus scan and a mass uTorrent file check at the same time.  It's pulling 25MB/second across the network for the latter (the files are on Yurie).

My old Windows box would run like a slug when I did that.  With Haruhi, you'd hardly know it was doing anything... At least, until you got into your Minx blog and started typing, and noticed that the editor wasn't quite as snappy as usual.

Looks like I'll need that triple or quad core after all.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:27 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Tuesday, December 18

Geek

The M Matters

Because if you leave it off, you allocate 1024 bytes to the key buffer and 512 bytes to the query cache.

Which is not really all that useful.

Surprisingly, MySQL ran quite well even when so badly misconfigured.  It wasn't optimal, but it wasn't slow either.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:10 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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