The Mandelbear's Musings

08:27 pm - OK, well, that took longer than I'd planned...

Upgraded my ancient (IBM i series) laptop from DeMuDi (Debian Sarge-based) to Etch. Involved an hour or two resolving dependencies, and then another couple of hours re-hacking my config files to make them tiny-screen-friendly. I've been using wide screens both at home and at work for a while; it takes a bit of squeezing to fit things back onto 800x600. But I remembered how I'd done it, back when that was a big screen...

There are still a couple of bugs, but they're manageable.

08:43 am - That's better

Finally found the time this morning to reboot Nova, the main household fileserver -- it needed doing now because I'd just upgraded the kernel yesterday. While it was down, I moved it onto the APC SmartUPS 420 that had been sitting around since I bought the 1300 for the bedroom, and swapped cables accordingly. This gets me from an uptime of 30 minutes for the rack, to 53 minutes for Nova and 70 minutes for everything else, including the routers and switches. This makes me a happy geek.

05:40 pm - Puttering about

After a nice walk this morning (Rose Garden) and a short shopping trip with the Cat and Wolfling (BevMo, Barefoot Coffee Roasters, and the bank), I've spent most of the afternoon puttering around the house, mostly in the office. This is basically what I do when the list of things that ought to get done is totally overwhelming. I can either sit around admiring the problem, or nibble away at the edges. It's marginally more productive to nibble.

The main task for the weekend is getting all of last year's banking and investment records put away, along with tracking down a couple of missing pieces that Colleen will find useful. This will eventually result in substantially less clutter, and a nearly-full paper recycling bin.

There are system administration tasks in the queue, too, but those will mostly wait until tomorrow when the main WiFi users are out of the house, or at least otherwise occupied.

08:35 am - To Fry's, or not to Fry's?

Fry's has a combination CPU, Abit motherboard, and Antec Aria cube case on sale this weekend. $160; figure about $200 with RAM. I could move Dorsai (the bedroom/recording box) into the case, which would be a better fit with the cart it's on, and use the MB/CPU in the office. It would be quieter, and I could use the current box (Harmony) as the guest machine.

OTOH, that's $200 I don't really have right now -- the finances are pretty marginal, and we haven't done a proper budget yet. I'm trying to set a good example here. For that matter, it's time I ought to be spending on more productive things, and there's already a lot to do this weekend. I should wait for the deal to come around again, or buy it in pieces.

Grump.

08:38 pm - Note to residents of Grand Central Starport

The household network is likely to be unreliable, if not outright down, most of the morning and afternoon of Sunday, April 20. Consider reading a book.

Scheduled, long-overdue maintenance includes:

• moving the wireless access point onto the DMZ port on the router, and hopefully fixing the perennial connection problems.
• Putting Nova on its own UPS, which should improve network uptime during power outages.
• Moving the mirror drive out of the external case; possibly back into Nova.
• Installing ejabberd and icecast. Possibly asterisk. Adjusting the firewall to handle them.
• Setting up a collaboration environment for books and CDs. This will probably also include a household calendar and address book, if I can manage them.

Note that egroupware probably will not get installed; it's having baffling setup problems with the database. There's a reason why I prefer not to use databases: they don't like me. I'll probably use TWiki instead: I understand how that works.

07:18 pm - A moderately productive morning

Got up at some ungodly hour with a brain that wouldn't shut up about my financial problems -- I'll get to that somewhere downwhen. Spent a moderately productive morning troubleshooting the subdomains of savitzky.net, finally resolved by moving my DNS hosting from GoDaddy to DreamHost (where the actual HTML resides). Subdomains for Kat and Colleen are up, but currently content-free. steve.savitzky.net is, of course, alive and well.

Spent some time last night setting up rsyncd on my fileserver and poking a tunnel through the firewall so I could upload from DH via a CGI script without requiring an ssh connection. That's essential if I want other people besides me to work on websites. The CGI remains to be written but should be straightforward.

Dreamhost's DNS control panel isn't as good as GoDaddy's: no AAAA records for one thing, and not as much control generally. Plus it's tied to their hosting, so it does clever things like make a web directory when you add a subdomain. And the main entry for the zone is always one of their servers, so I had to move savitzky.net off the DSL line and make an A record for dsl.savitzky.net. Darn. Needed doing anyway. It's just a lot less hassle when you can set up the web server configuration at the same time as the DNS; well worth it for a domain that really isn't going to be used for anything but web and eventually email.

09:08 am - Weekend wrap-up

It's been a moderately productive weekend, though not in the ways I'd originally had in mind. The bedroom computer workstation is up and running. I found an old but mostly-servicable office chair in the garage yesterday (it had been sitting under a box of old lighting fixtures and swing-arm lamps for a decade or two), and audio is up and running as well. Kat's kitchen-gadget box is done except for the latches. She put on the hinges yesterday

Our drive yesterday took us about halfway to Gilroy (some 40 miles south along US101), so Colleen decided to go the rest of the way and hit the outlet mall. Didn't find everything we needed, but got some additional Corelle bowls in the Corning store to replace the ones that have gotten broken over the years, plus a couple more of the medium and large serving bowls. We opted for plain white 20 years ago (when we remodeled the kitchen and discovered that our stoneware didn't fit the new cabinets) figuring that plain white would never go out of style. I'm glad we did. They're elegant enough for company, practically indestructable (though it can be done), and light enough that Colleen can easily handle them even when feeling arthritic.

In addition, I've finally gotten around to fixing my daily mirroring script so that it works even if, as in the current setup, the mirror drive is on another machine from the fileserver. This requires calling it from a login session with ssh-agent running; since I usually stay permanently logged-in on one workstation or the other, that's rarely a problem. I'll add the upload to my hosting service later today, since it's easy now.

09:56 pm - Shai Dorsai!

In this case, of course, Dorsai is the computer in the bedroom. (This being thestarport.org, all the machines are named after places that could plausibly have starports. The machines that are used for recording and editing music are, naturally, places mentioned in filksongs: the laptop is Argo, and the other workstation is Harmony.) Anyway, it works: I'm posting from it.

The little rolling desk isn't terribly solid, and because it overlaps the bookshelves on the left there isn't room for anything but my Lenovo Thinkpad keyboard. Which is pretty good, and has pointing devices that there otherwise wouldn't be room for, but it's not a Model M.

In addition, it's running Ubuntu Studio instead of Etch; not all my usual fonts are installed (so windows come out the wrong size and don't quite fit properly), (added 02-24: the font problem turned out to be a bad line in .Xdefaults) and it's running Emacs 22.1. I'm not quite ready to make the transition to the new Gnus. OTOH it's fast as a bat. I'd forgotten just how fast it is...

There are still a few piles of stuff scattered around the bedroom that were pulled out of the corner, and the chair isn't particularly comfortable. The recording rig hasn't been reconfigured yet; I'm not sure where the microphones and preamps belong, and there are no monitor speakers (so, basically, I don't have sound on this machine yet).

But, Colleen really likes having me in the bedroom with her, even though she can't see me from where she's sitting. And it does feel comfortable. Moving back and forth between the two systems is slightly painful: I have to kill the browser, and move my IM presence. Not a full solution. It'll take me a while to make the transition smooth; it will probably involve switching to Ubuntu or Lenny on all the clients.

Current Mood: happy

11:16 pm - Collaboration environments

This afternoon I had the opportunity to sit in on a technical presentation by Peter Thoeny of TWiki.net. Their product is an enterprise (i.e. supported) version of TWiki, a flat-file-based, structured wiki. Had some interesting conversations afterward.

TWiki is a good match for a lot of what I'm looking for in a collaboration environment: flat files, efficient, highly configurable, written in Perl... The support for forms and page templates is surperb. The latest version has a WYSIWYG editor, too, based on TinyMCE. On the other hand it doesn't match my existing directory structure or preferred version control system (it uses its own, based on RCS -- for excellent reasons, I might add, but RCS is lousy at handling large binary files, and I have lots of 'em). Ikiwiki's a better match for those, but has far fewer plugins and isn't so good at templating. Neither can handle publishing to multiple blog sites or compiling a frozen version onto CD or paper.

So I'm definitely going to deploy it internally -- it's a good enough database replacement to work for my minimal business bookkeeping and contact-management needs. It will make a good household phonebook, calendar, and message center, too. The page templates make it a shoe-in for the cookbook project, except that the WYSIWYG editor isn't in Debian or Ubuntu yet.

Meanwhile, I'll continue to evolve my own system aimed at mixed electronic and hard-copy media, multi-site publishing (including multi-platform blogging), and collaborative recording projects. While using it on my next album. Right. That one might very well start with Ikiwiki as it's web front-end.

10:10 pm - Better yet

The Wolfling is getting tutoring in math now. Hopefully that will get her through the two classes she needs to graduate. Since her tutor (a family friend) lives most of the way to Palo Alto, the Cat and I proceeded from dropping her off to dinner at Chef Chu's in honor of Chinese New Year. We decided going in that a whole fish, while tempting, wouldn't have given us enough variety, so we had hot and sour soup, tangerine peel chicken, eggplant in garlic sauce, and fried bananas for desert. Yum!

Chef Chu's was my intro to Szechuan cooking when I first came out to California for grad school, 29 years ago.

Coming home, I found that the VIA board had successfully started up X, after the various network-dependent processes timed out. Thus encouraged, I hacked on it for a while and discovered that the onboard ethernet was now eth2. Go figure. I think it has something to do with the hotplug code that I stopped using because it seemed flaky. But it works now: not super fast, but more useable than its predecessor, and totally silent.

The runtime on my UPS is now down from somewhere north of 45 minutes to 39; not too bad, considering.

Hopefully I'll be able to get back to actual (music) work soon.

06:06 pm - Well, that was comparatively easy

Went to Fry's and bought a new CPU/Motherboard bundle for the fileserver: it's a comparatively crappy ECS MB with an AMD X2 BE-2330 processor. Under $90 with tax. Not terribly fast, but I don't need fast. Only one IDE connector, but 4 SATA, so that's OK. 100MB Ethernet, but it has two PCI slots, so that's OK. NVidia video, but it's a server, so I'm not using X. Swapped boards with the old one, and it just fscking worked.

Only thing that really needs fixing is the kernel -- the default kernel doesn't recognize the second core. (And of course it's in 32-bit mode -- fixing that would require a complete re-install, so I'm going to wait.)

The nice, quiet 1GHz VIA board that it replaced is, for some reason, not working particularly well: newer kernels don't seem to recognize the ethernet controller, and older ones don't see the mouse. Grump. May have to add an ethernet adapter and use it as a NAS box. Or maybe try Ubuntu.

08:57 pm - On the list for this weekend

The weekend's to-do list is already getting slightly full.

• Fry's run: selkit wants some stuff, and I need a new MB/CPU to replace the one in the fileserver.
• Record a scratch track of The Toolmakers, in the right key this time (Bm), and incorporating the changes I made this morning to the last verse. It said what I wanted to say, but I was dissatisfied with the wording.
• Start setting up the album collaboration area so I can start selling preorder/subscriptions, and so that cflute and others can start working on arrangements. Should have done it a month ago...

Meanwhile, tibicina should be arriving in an hour or so, having finally made it over the snowy passes of southern Oregon. So there may also be music in the offing.

11:41 am - Hmmm.

I don't think it's a coincidence that my fileserver stayed up happily all week, and has frozen twice since I got my workstation back on line. Not at all. I'm guessing something odd in either the memory or the networking.

Fry's has an AMD CPU/MB combo for under $80 this weekend. It'll eat more power, but it'll be worth it for both reliability and print speed.

13:09 Hmmm indeed. Let's see: problems with SATA, problems when the fast workstation with GigE is online, wimpy 1GHz C7 CPU... I/O bandwidth. In many ways I'm relieved to know that it's simply not fixable without replacing the MB. I can do that.

10:42 am - Rough morning

First setback was discovering that the workstation I wanted to use to replace the possibly-flaky fileserver didn't appear able to find either of its ethernet ports when booted from the server's disk. Something in the boot-time kernel config, I suppose, but I didn't have time to diagnose it. If it goes down over the weekend, it goes down. The mirror's reasonably current, but I didn't have time to get it back in operation; the workstation is still in pieces and will stay that way until I get back.

Next (well, actually, while still hassling with recalcitrant boxen) came the FedEx guy knocking on the door to say that he remembers leaving the box of ribbons on the porch. Must have been stolen, then. So that's a loss, and all my fault for having it shipped to the house instead of work; just bad luck that Colleen was out taking the Y.D. home from school when it arrived. I'd figured that, if it was delayed, at least Colleen wouldn't have to go in to the lab to chase after it when she had a con and an engagement party to worry about.

They included my "Coffee, Computers & Song" ribbons, so it may be a business expense I can write off. But I came close to losing it, and drove the Cat nuts as usual by apologizing repeatedly. Glad I have her.

And I missed breakfast, but a protein bar and a bottle of chocolate milk are helping. And did I mention that the airport doesn't have free wi-fi. Paid through Boingo; about the same price but I already have the account, so no credit card needed. At least the airport has plenty of outlets; it's been substantially remodeled.

Spoons: low; Cope: low.

Current Mood: annoyed

09:23 pm - Grump

Nova (the fileserver) fell over on its nose while I was printing some business cards. No damned reason for it; top shows that the rasterizer hardly uses any resources at all. (That's no explanation for why it's so slow, especially when printing to the inkjet, but...) It handled backups just fine.

So it's either memory, or something weird on the MB (possibly involving writing the disk). In either case, I don't have time to track it down. Sometime between now and Wednesday I'll swap disks with Harmony (my workstation) and worry about building a new workstation when I get back from Conflikt. One more fscking expense I don't need...

In other news, my XO still hasn't arrived, and I got an email from them saying they didn't have my complete shipping address. More likely their cobbled-together software thinks that "suite 115" refers to a mailbox and not a connected set of offices. (I almost wrote "office suite", but that would be something else again.)

10:51 am - I can haz uptime?

So far the fileserver has been up a little over 3.5 days. That's less of a sample than I'd like, but if it stays up through Wednesday I'll probably have to take it as an indication that it's finished with intermittant crashes. Grumf. The last thing I need to be wasting my time on, between now and when I leave for Conflikt Thursday morning, is putting together a new server.

The contingency plan, if Nova does crash, is to move its drive over to my current workstation, Harmony. It's a little old, but it's been very reliable so far, and nobody's likely to be using it while I'm gone.

In other news, the chaoswolf seems to be turning into a genuine geek-girl. I got her a KVM switch yesterday; her Windows box (which is USB-only, no PS2 ports) was having serious keyboard problems, but she figured out that she could hang a USB keyboard on the Windows box and use the PS2 for actuating the switch and talking to the Linux box, which seems perfectly happy with it. I'm guessing it's some kind of power problem. I'm particularly proud of her for figuring it out herself.

The Wolfling has also been having fun playing with Photoshop; she's taking a class in it this quarter, but she's already at the point where she can figure out how to do things she hasn't been taught yet. More than anything else, this is what distinguishes a geek from a non-geek.

Proud bear.

09:48 am - Better?

When last we met the Starport's harried local BOFH system administrator household hacker, he was trying to figure out why Nova, the household fileserver, kept locking up. It looked very like a software or memory problem.

Running top continuously from home and work revealed that the memory usage never got up to the point where it would cause problems -- heck, it hasn't used swap space in three days. On the other hand, it has been up for three days.

About the only thing I've done differently in that time was to kill off Big Brother, the system-monitoring program I've been using for several years now. My copy is decidedly obsolete, and because it was free but not open source, it never got automatically upgraded like the rest of my software. The last few months it had been crashing, and I didn't use it enough to bother tracking down the problem.

I'm now looking for a good system monitor that's well-supported in Debian. I'll probably end up with either nagios or monit -- any recommendations?

03:00 pm - Headdesk - it appears to be a software problem

... so Nova, my fileserver, has been up since about 6:30am this morning. This afternoon I noticed that SpamAssassin's daemon wasn't running, so spam wasn't getting filtered. I started it. A few seconds thereafter, Nova crashed.

I'm guessing either a corrupt application file, corrupt database, or something running out of memory. Possibly some combination. Running out of memory (or some other resource) could be a problem; the others may be fixable by purging and reinstalling spamassassin. Could conceivably be some other weirdness, up to and including a bug in Perl, but the fact that problems have been occurring with increasing frequency is highly suggestive of a problem with spamassassin itself.

15:40 Could also be flaky memory, of course. SA is big, so it could have pushed it over the edge into a bad block. I'll run memtest, though that's no guarantee.

20:11 Spamd is pretty small, and top shows plenty of space: 1G of RAM, about 1/3 full, and 2G of empty swap. I'll watch it for a while.

Current Mood: annoyed

10:15 am - So far...

Nova was down again when I got up this morning; I took it as an excuse to disconnect the SATA drives (which I should have done yesterday, but it was getting late). If that fixes it, it's probably a controller issue. If not, it's probably memory. Worst case, I can replace it with Harmony (my current workstation), which has been absolutely solid since I bought it. In fact, that MB/CPU used to be in Nova. Would use more power, but a faster CPU would help for printing and some file operations.

Spent some good time this morning talking with the chaoswolf about upcoming web projects and setting her up with an Ubuntu box. We'll use her old HP Windows box with the new 320GB IDE drive that I originally intended for a USB drive.

11:41 pm - That's better

Nova (the fileserver) hung again this morning; it was hosed when I checked on it from work. So when I got home I turned off email (didn't want it ending up in the wrong place), brought up nova just long enough to update the mirror and take down the workstation that had the external drives hung off it, and moved the new 500GB IDE drive from the external box to nova.

After that, I installed a clean copy of Lenny on the small rescue partition, and spent the entire damned rest of the evening copying files off the mirror. Amused myself while tar was doing its thing by seeing if I could configure a working fileserver out of Lenny, and almost succeeded. Still something wrong with nfs. It may just be something I didn't restart properly. I also had time to eat dinner, do the dishes, and move the boxes of Christmas stuff (including tree) back into the garage. Which in turn involved cleaning out the little closet between the bedroom and the garage, tossing out no less than three huge boxes that once held monitors that we no longer own.

I was a little surprised at how long it stayed up. I suspect that the problem has to do with writing to a SATA drive, and I wasn't doing much of that. But it's back.

Bear fall over now.

Current Mood: accomplished

08:59 am - Foo

The fileserver froze again last night -- this is getting old. I remain convinced that it's some kind of driver race condition: it's not happening with the near-identical drive on the recording box. It could also be due to lurking disk corruption causing it to hang on a read. In that case, a fsck might fix it. It might not.

In either case, I'm tired of fighting it. I'm dropping the fileserver back to a single IDE drive, and moving the (SATA) mirror to another machine. Hopefully by the time I need it, SATA support will be better.

Meanwhile, I have lots of other work to do, and I don't want to have to deal with random fileserver hangs on top of it all.

10:48 It's even having trouble staying up long enough to copy a partition to the new drive. So here's the plan:

( plans within plans; wheels within wheels. Nothing to see here )

Current Mood: grumpy

04:41 pm - Time for some upgrades?

Upgrading the workstations, and possibly the fileserver, to Lenny (Debian Testing) is starting to look attractive. It's running 2.6.22, which is the one I need to support my Seagate SATA-II drives, and it has Audacity 1.3.4, which is the latest and matches the version in UbuntuStudio.

It's usually safe to upgrade the fileserver, since it's inside the firewall. The only reason to hold off is that every once in a while you get a major upheaval and something breaks, usually in one of my local scripts; when that happens it's handy to have the previous version around somewhere. I'll probably wait a couple of months. There's no reason not to upgrade the workstations now.

I'll keep UbuntuStudio around, too, especially since 64Studio is still based on Etch, so the kernels aren't up to date.

12:53 pm - Hmm. Not Seagate's fault.

The new disk, in an external USB/eSATA enclosure, wouldn't stay up more than a couple of minutes at a time. And it wasn't spinning, down, either: just locking up. OK, that's not a hardware problem; it's probably the kernel not dealing properly with something in SATA II. Installed 2.6.22 from backports, and it seems to have worked. USB was horribly slow, and it doesn't seem to handle hotplugging an eSATA drive, but after a reboot it seems perfectly happy. The same kernel in the fileserver has been up ever since I installed it, and my Ubuntu-based recording studio hasn't had any problems.

So I'll have a couple of 400GB SATA drives free pretty soon. Three once I upgrade the mirror drive, but I want to wait for the price to come down a little. RAID box?

1/14 I may have spoken too soon -- there may also be some kind of controller issue. Or something. I'm dropping back to IDE on the fileserver.

Current Mood: awake

11:49 pm - Saturday wrap-up

This morning after my walk I went to Fry's and found that the drives they have on sale were Seagate rather than the Maxtors they had piled up yesterday. Those were still $160, and had a 3-year warranty instead of Seagate's 5-year. Then I made the interesting discovery that the Maxtor's and some of the Seagates were made in Thailand, while the otherwise-identical Seagates in the big piles were made in China.

Hmm.

A quick trip home confirmed that the flaky Seagate drive I removed a couple of months ago was Chinese, and I seemed to recall that the failing one is, too. The Maxtor I've been using as the mirror drive is Thai. Drove back to Fry's and bought a Thai Seagate.

After that, we went to Dave and Joyce's to bring them lunch: barbecued chicken, cole slaw, and baked beans from Emil Villa's. Much appreciated; Joyce isn't especially mobile due to health problems (which, however, should be fixed fairly soon). From there we went to Kathy Mar's bash. Good stone soup.

I did a little singing at Kathy's: "Ship of Stone", "Cicero in the 21st Century", "Desolation -- Oh, No!", and "Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts". I'm impressed with how much nose-watering has helped my voice: singing is less painful and doesn't dry me out nearly as quickly as it used to.

09:09 am - Just what I !@#$% need

Disconnecting the mirror drive -- the Maxtor, with errors -- had no effect on the main problem, which still appears to be the Seagate sticking its fingers in its ears and going "la, la, la" while the kernel sulks in a corner because nobody will talk to it.

I'm really unclear as to whether this is a problem with the Seagate drive itself, (there's another one, only slightly bigger, over in the recording box that still works fine), with file corruption of some sort (hard reset after a crash could easily have left some lingering problems on the disk), with SATA drives in general (highly unlikely -- they're working fine on my system at work), or with this particular BIOS (also unlikely).

I'm also wondering to myself whether I should drop back to PATA, or get a 500GB SATA drive. I'm leaning toward the latter, if only because I put my shiny new 500GB PATA drive in an external box and the magic smoke went out. Grump, indeed. Smelled like the magic smoke in the box, so the drive is probably still ok. One hopes.

Plus the fact that I have a pretty full schedule today, so I'm not going to have time to do much work on this, no matter how urgent.

 ...

My inclination is to start by reconnecting the mirror drive, fsck it, and see if I can get a clean backup. Then go to Fry's and get one of the Maxtor 500 SATA's they have on sale. Then we'll see.

10:17 fsck done -- errors on both mirror/ and mirror/home, no doubt due to crashes while writing. Backing up now.

Current Mood: grumpy

09:16 am - Headdesk - Seagate SATA drives are Windows-only crap

So, of course, after picking up a 500GB IDE drive at Fry's on Wednesday that I turned out not to need as urgently as I feared, it's $50 cheaper in today's flier.

13:14 ... and after having made plans for the damned thing, the fileserver is down again. Did I mention that this is getting tiresome? Did I mention that it only happens with recent Seagate drives? My Maxtor and Western Digital SATA drives work just fine, thank you. I see another trip to Fry's in my near future.

13:51 ... comments to this article have suggestions for the Seagate "FreeAgent" external USB drives; these probably won't work for internal SATA (I know for a fact that sdparm doesn't believe that they're SCSI drives) but I might be able to do it using an external USB enclosure. It's not a satisfactory solution, however.

14:56 ... it may be possible to turn off the offending features by running (get this) a DOS program. Fortunately it boots from a CD using a copy of FreeDOS included in the ISO.

Basically, Seagate does not support anything but Windows and wishes all other OSs would go away. The drive is, nevertheless, listed as Linux-compatible. Their FreeAgent Pro external drives, which have a FireWire port, aren't particularly well-supported for Mac, either. Apparently the only supported way to fix some problems with these drives is to plug them into a Windows machine. Feh!

I really wish my OLPC would arrive.

07:41 am - Many are cold,...

... but the fileserver still isn't frozen. I'm going to take this as a hopeful sign. If it works, it would also mean that the other 400GB drive I was having trouble with is also usable. I have a pretty good idea what I could do with, for example, a 400GB eSATA drive.

In other cold-related news, some anonymous person sent me a virtual gift of a polar bear cub with the note "Spread More Joy" attached. Um... Thank you very much, whoever you are!

(The cynic in me wonders whether this might actually be a random freebie intended to promote the giving of virtual gifts, but... It's cute anyway. Anyone else get one? Anyone out there giving virtual gifts?)

11:57 pm - Grumbles

The fileserver froze on me this morning, and again this afternoon. Best guess has always been drive spin-down; this is apparently a known problem with some newer SATA drives and some older kernel and possibly BIOS configurations. Various attempts to fix it with hdparm failed miserably. Installing acpid, while clearly necessary, didn't help either.

The current attempt uses a newer kernel (2.6.21) from 64studio.com. It certainly improves the results back from hdparm -i, but it's not clear that I was able to keep the drive from powering down. We'll see. The fact that a similar drive has been happy under UbuntuStudio (2.6.22) is encouraging. I can go that route if I have to; Ubuntu's not that far off of Debian.

If it stays up for a day or two, I'll start thinking of other places to use the 500GB IDE drive I bought at Fry's on my way home from work. If it doesn't, I get to start thinking of other places to put a couple of 400GB SATA drives. Preferably someplace where I don't mind running a bleeding-edge kernel.

08:54 am - Grrr

Apparently an updated kernel is not enough to keep the fileserver from occasionally freezing. Memory or disk problems? Grumble. Wasn't planning to buy either just yet.

11:01 pm - Making it

"If you want something to get done, ask a busy person to do it."

I haven't been accomplishing much lately, so obviously I'm not busy enough.

There are several seemingly-unrelated projects going on in the household at the moment: I'm starting my next album, the chaoswolf is starting an HTML class, the servers are getting re-organized, and people have been after the flower_cat to write a cookbook. Meanwhile I've been thinking about writing my blog locally and mirroring it up to LJ.

They're all more closely related than one might think.

You see, I'm a geek. I think nothing of writing a big pile of Makefile templates and Perl scripts to cobble an album, a songbook, and multiple websites together from the same set of sources. The Cat is emphatically not a geek, she wants to be able to type recipes in, maybe to a text editor or a blog client, and have them magically assembled into a cookbook. And a website, of course. Hmmm.

... So that's the plan: to refactor my CD, concert, and web tools so that they work for assembling books and blogs as well, publish to hardcopy as well as on multiple websites, and do it in a way that's extensible (with plug-ins), collaborative, and simple enough to be used by non-geeks.

I'm probably going to need a lot of help with that last part.

09:39 pm - Annoyances

It seems some SATA drives have a tendency to spin down and not come back to life quickly enough to suit the drivers -- or even the BIOS. My fileserver, which has a pair of 400GB Seagates, seems to be afflicted. Twice, recently, I've come home and found it hung, and when I power-cycled the thing it took no less than two resets before the drives were happy. This does not make me happy.

As far as I can tell, every damned one of my four SATA drives has this problem, in varying degrees. Grrr. I seem to have it most often with drives that are left unused for a long time -- it mostly seems to hit the backup drives (though not always). For now I'm enabling swap on my mirror drive; I don't think it was this bad back before I disabled it to save wear and tear on the drive.

But I'm seriously considering sticking them in a RAID box where they'll get plenty of exercise, and replacing them with IDE drives. Not what I was planning to spend money on, though.

Meanwhile, I've been spending the last hour or so running malware scans on the flower_cat's stupid Windows machine. And disabling the virus scanner, which seems to be causing a host of problems all by itself. Did I mention that I *HATE* Windows?

22:19 Did I mention that I'm an idiot? Seems the fileserver's bootloader menu is a mix of various and sundry old bits that don't go together anymore. No, I do not want to boot from the swap partition! Nor do I want the year-old multimedia kernel that seems to have stuck itself in for the hell of it. That's the problem with not rebooting for a long time...

Current Mood: annoyed

09:31 am - Weekend wrap-up

Well, it's been a pretty productive weekend, although not at all the way I'd planned it. Having to take the server rack down to install the new UPS after Saturday's power glitches, combined with the DSL modem going down, gave me an excellent excuse to do some long-needed maintenance.

My new gateway is up and the user home directories moved over; web, DHCP, and DNS still need to be moved over, but at least everyone in the house should have a good net connection now. The "new interim" gateway is up on the old DSL line; hopefully that will go away soon, but I can't get rid of it until I figure out a good solution for email.

The new gateway has a 200GB disk now; it was going to have flash, but the CF-card-to-IDE adapter I was going to use seems to be broken. That's OK: I was going to have the big disk on it anyway. I'll have to replace it in a year or less, since it already has a year or two's use on it -- it came out of my main fileserver as part of last May's disk upgrade. But it'll let me move the Debian mirror, which will free up over 100GB on the fileserver. Which I'm going to need for recording -- the fileserver's 80% full right now.

Spent several hours last night trying to get two of the Windows boxen to recognize my networked HP printer. No dice - the driver install hangs. I HATE Windows -- configuring a networked printer is a 2-minute job on Linux.

No recording this weekend. Grumble. And I'll probably spend most of the next two weeks doing data entry for sales taxes, which are due the 31st -- the day after I get back from Seattle. So they'd damn well better be done before I leave. Grumble.

04:11 pm - Further adventures in family computing

... so this morning I took advantage of the fact that installing the new UPS required me to power down the entire bloody rack to re-route a few cables and to reconfigure the "interim" gateway machine that had been my main DSL router since last April when I installed it, and make it the "interim" gateway for the old DSL line. Pretty simple; I took down the mail server because I wanted to be around when I turned it on in case it didn't work. Good thing -- there are still some pieces of configuration that have to be changed. Like the hostname? Little things like that.

I left the old gateway turned off; the final uptime was 603 days. It will eventually become the main gateway.

At that point, I headed out to Fry's to get a new DSL modem. They had a D-Link for $50. Stopped at Sears on the way home for vacuum cleaner bags; by the time I got home it was raining hard.

One of my Linux laptops, Argo, is currently the interim gateway for the DSL line. It's taken me about the last 3 hours and a support call to get the bloody D-Link configured: apparently it's not really smart enough to come up in bridge mode by itself. That's going to keep causing me trouble, I suspect. (Come to think of it, my old modem probably just needed a reset...) (Never hurts to have a spare, though.)

I also picked up a cheap ($15) 5-port ethernet switch for the Y.D.; she's been complaining about slow wireless connections on her laptop. Part of that, and I suspect a lot of other network flakiness, was almost certainly due to the fact that the boneheaded family sysadmin (yours truly, of course) had the same gateway IP addresses configured on both routers. Probably never would have discovered it if the Y.D. hadn't told me she had an internet connection at a time yesterday when I knew that the main DSL line was down.

My shiny UPS (APC BX1500LCD) is currently showing a 17% load, and an estimated run time of 34 minutes. This makes me happy. I'd be even happier, presumably, if I didn't have as many machines running in the rack. I'm getting there...

Next in line for configuration are mail on the old gateway, DNS and possibly web on the interim gateway, and a re-install from scratch on the new gateway. Which will have four ethernet ports -- Whee!

update: 17:34 ...and a couple of firewall fixes later, mail is back up. Some messages may have been lost between early this morning and now; I sometimes wonder about forwarding. I *really* need to fix email. But not today.

Current Mood: tired

07:22 am - And the loser is...

... the DSL modem. In spite of the fact that all the lights are on and doing the right thing, it apparently died in some subtle way during the last power glitch. Plugged the line into the other DSL modem, and it came right up.

That, of course, was something I should have thought of yesterday morning. As in, before I went to Fry's.

Dumb bear.

The Alcatel modem is really old and almost certainly won't handle the new 6MB/Sec line, so I'd have to get a new one even if I didn't still need both lines. But...

07:23 pm - Life in the s...l...o...w lane

One of this morning's power glitches took out the DSL line. Grumble. The "line" light is green, but there's nobody home. The phone works, though. I put in a call to Sonic; they tested the line, didn't see the modem, and said they'd put in a call to AT&T; I haven't heard back. I'll try again later.

The only other thing I can think of is that the power surge somehow damaged the modem in some subtle way. I'll ask whether it's worth my while to buy another modem tomorrow, not that I relish the though of going out in the storm again.

The power glitches this morning convinced me that today would be a good day to take advantage of the $30 mail-in rebate on a 1500VA APC UPS that Fry's was advertising. The drive, while not as harrowing as it could have been, was still pretty bad; I ran into two non-functional traffic lights.

I scored the last of the advertised UPS in the store. Good timing. It will replace the two UPSs currently in the server rack (a 500 and a 650) and add some additional features (it has an LCD display) and better monitoring. It can also be muted -- I'll have to look for a similar one for the bedroom; it'd be good to have something quiet next to the bed for my facehugger. In the meantime I can mute the 500VA unit that's currently in the rack.

This is not what I'd planned to be doing this weekend.

08:47 am - The feeling of power?

There was a brief power glitch this morning; the Bay Area is in the middle of what's predicted to be a three- or four-day storm. UPSs carried the household servers and my workstation through it with no problems, but I need to make sure the kids have UPSs. The recording box is on a UPS but seems to have croaked anyway -- I see a trip to Fry's in my immediate future.

The chumby simply turned off and had to be restarted using its power button, making it clearly unsuitable for use as an alarm clock (though there's almost certainly an auto-restart hardware hack for it). I need a UPS for the CPAP, too. Last thing I need is to wake up in the middle of the night with a dead facehugger gripping my nose.

Oddly, I've noticed that some (all?) LCD monitors turn themselves on after a power glitch even if they'd been turned off.

10:00 Terrific. The most recent power glitch seems to have knocked out my DSL connection. The old connection, which I never got around to getting rid of (because I'm still using it for email), is still working, but it's slow and just barely usable. Knew I should have bought into the Meraki mesh network...

11:20 Dumb bear. The recording box died because it was plugged into the surge protector side of the UPS, not the "surge protector + battery" side. Figures. There was stuff blocking my view of the labels, but still...

Current Mood: awake

07:02 pm - Printers and server updates

( Important info for computer users at Grand Central Starport )

Having finally decided to find out whether Linux would handle two USB printers on the same machine, I tried it. It worked out of the box, so I was able to take down dantooine, the little Mini-ITX box currently being used in the office as a print server and guest machine.

This lets me put the chaoswolf's old HP desktop in place as the guest machine without having to resort to a KVM switch. So that's 40 watts I won't be spending. Having to get at the connectors on the back also gave me an excuse to take down nova, the main fileserver, and replace the UPS with a spare. I have a new battery on order, but meanwhile I won't have the annoying warning signal. Also it's been behaving oddly and not talking to the computer -- I may be better off simply replacing it.

Of course, bouncing nova also runs a fsck on all the disks, which have gone some 9 months without checking. It was time.

The next thing that wants doing is doing an upgrade dance with the routers.

Current Mood: productive

11:53 pm - Calling it a day

Not my most productive day ever, I'm afraid, but I've gotten a few things done. Mainly, I've updated my personal business cards and my album mini-fliers, which were last printed before CC&S came out and so had the pre-order URL on them.

I took the opportunity to start copying things over to steve.savitzky.net, which will eventually become my main site, over on dreamhost.com. At the moment it's just a mirror of theStarport.com/Steve_Savitzky/, and there are a number of broken links. It's mostly useable, though. Hopefully I can get it totally up-to-date and functional by OVFF.

I also wasted some time partially disassembling the old panel PC I rescued from the discard pile at work. The plan was to see whether it could be silenced by replacing its noisy fans; the answer is a definite maybe. I couldn't get it apart far enough to replace the power supply fan, but I figured out how to disconnect it. Maybe I can add a large enough case fan to compensate for its absence. The CPU fan might be replaceable, but it might be better just to replace the heatsink with a fanless one.

Time for a bath, and then to bed.

10:57 pm - Upcoming party at the Starport

This year's Halloween party at Grand Central Starport will take place Saturday, October 27th. As usual, it's a potluck -- kids, friends, and musical instruments welcome.

I, alas, lack the power of bilocation, so I won't be there, but it will be an event not to be missed nevertheless. The location and directions can be found on the Household website.

09:03 pm - The rest of the day

After lunch (which consisted of half-a-dozen potstickers and half a block of tofu to use up the rest of the dipping sauce) I went out for a drive with the flower_cat. On the way home we stopped at Bed, Bath and Beyond to buy a new quilt for our bed. Most of what they had was appallingly expensive, but they had a nice black, king-sized comforter on sale for $55. Less a 20%-off coupon. Win.

After that we stopped at Cosentino's -- the Cat's favorite upscale grocery store -- to get ingredients for dinner. Which chaoswolf cooked! It was delicious -- a tomato, mozzerella, and basil salad (which the Wolf ate!), and an odd but tasty concoction of kielbasa, hot and mild Italian sausage, potatoes, sweet onion, and garlic baked in a big package of crimped Aluminum foil. So basically steamed. Yummy.

Found my missing arch support, so I won't have to buy another pair. Found it in the trash, where I had tossed it along with a couple of genuinely dead insoles from other shoes.

Got my lab results back from Kaiser -- or at least, on the web. Their website sucks. The results weren't all that great. LDL low (35, should be >40), triglicerides high (292, should be <199; still, a third of what they were 6 months ago, so the new statin is working). The disturbing one was creatine kinase: 437, should be <200. Could mean heart problems, though there are other possible explanations. The shoulder problems? We'll see; I'll probably hear from my doctor next week.

Made a little progress on clutter in the bedroom, mainly triage on footgear. Tossed some shoes that were clearly dead, and packed a bag of old-but-useable pairs for Goodwill. Swapped quilts.

Some more progress on re-organizing the fileserver; things are pretty much all in the right places now, except for moving a couple of CVS modules around. CVS, unfortunately, doesn't handle this kind of thing very well, which is why I'm looking at replacing it with git or svk. Anyway, things are ready for tomorrow morning's backup snapshot. Which will be archived, seeing as it's the first Sunday in the month.

11:34 pm - 15 more minutes in cyberspace

Copied most of the remaining directories -- all the ones that matter, anyway. The filksong directory was the big one; there was a nasty moment when I realized that I'd copied it onto itself by way of a symlink I'd forgotten about, but yesterday's mirror confirmed that there was no harm done.

You can plan a move like that for weeks, but as Patton said, no battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy. There's a reason why I make backups. And why the mirror is mounted read-only except when I'm copying into it.

There will be a fair amount of cleanup later: chasing down all the myriad symlinks, cross-references, and so on. Let's hear it for grep and find.

07:25 pm - Another 15 minutes in cyberspace

This is basically an update of this post where I explain my plan for re-arranging the fileserver to bring sanity to my backups.

The major change comes about from noticing that /vv/srv already has a fair amount of stuff in it that doesn't need to be backed up, and isn't worth moving. In particular, it has the mail spool, the news spool, and the Debian mirror. Ok then.

So the local collection of websites and other things that I might otherwise have moved into /vv/srv now goes into /vv/share, which makes more sense anyway because it's mostly the kind of stuff that Microsoft and Apple put into their "sharing" control panel applet -- web server and file server data.

It's an open question, of course, whether personal websites like chaoswolf.org and steve.savitzky.net belong in /vv/share or /vv/users. At the moment, it doesn't matter: they're both in the same partition, and both get backed up and archived in the same way.

So the project for this week is to actually, like, move the data. It's a little more work than it looks at first glance, because I also have to make the same set of moves on the backup drive in order to keep from making duplicate copies of tens of gigabytes of audio. And with anything moving out of my home directory, I also have to move the CVS repository tree as well. The reason for doing it now, apart from getting it over and done with at last, is to get it into the monthly backup snapshot on Sunday morning.

10:04 pm - 15 minutes in cyberspace

The purpose of today's computer clutter control is to get a start on my near-term goal of bringing some order and sanity to the crawling chaos that is the household file server. The non-geekish may want to skip this one.

The main motivations for this are the recent disk crash on the workstation, trantor (no lasting harm done, but there's nothing like a near miss to make you more cautious), and the fact that I've acquired a significant amount of offsite storage to use for backups.

In order to do offsite backups, I have to make a clear distinction between private stuff that has to be encrypted offsite, and the public and semi-public stuff most of which is on the web already and can simply be mirrored. Then there's the pile of stuff that's mirrored from elsewhere, including the Debian mirror, the collection of ripped CDs, and so on.

Right now these are all jumbled together, which leaves a few anomalies like saving monthly snapshots of things that will never change.

The main accomplishment for yesterday was writing the scripts to back up the configuration files in /etc on all the servers, and putting them in /home/Config.

The main accomplishment for today was setting up /vv/users and figuring out what goes there, and figuring out how to split up the current /vv/local/starport. Not much else, but at least now I know where things belong.

11:11 am - Backups (I love it when a plan comes together)

Did backups this morning using the new SATA backup drive and new scripts. Fast as a bat: 10 minutes for 273GB of data.

I still haven't done the rest of the associated reorganization; I just wanted to get a snapshot of the current state.

12:29 pm - Backups

Set up a massive file transfer to my shiny new backup drive last night and went to bed; I was rather disturbed to come into the office this morning and find an I/O error on the screen, and the OS unable to find the drive. Gleep!

I took the drive out of the USB enclosure, powered down, put it in Trantor's case, powered up, and was greatly relieved to find the drive up and running. A thorough fsck and a fresh rsync confirmed that all data was present and accounted for. I'm guessing it may have been a glitch somewhere in the external box's USB interface or the cable. Not going to worry about it much. (eta: power-cycling the drive enclosure didn't work; I didn't try rebooting or power-cycling the computer with the drive still external; that would probably have worked, I was just impatient.)

I'm still trying to resist the temptation to do more work on reorganizing my directory tree and setting up the offsite backups.

Current Mood: calm

06:05 pm - OK. I'm impressed

For some time, my Mini-ITX system has been plagued by a noisy CPU fan. My original plan had been to replace it with a silent video chipset cooler, but a little experimentation convinced me it wouldn't fit. This afternoon at Central Computer I spotted a CooolerMaster Blue ICE chipset cooler -- it had a fan, but I'd had good luck with their fans before so I bought it (for all of $8).

The next challenge was getting the old heatsink and fan off the CPU. After easing the board out of the case and removing the pushpins, I discovered that this was far easier said than done. Humf. Well, I've been in that situation before. I pushed the pushpins back in and swapped the fans, which is what I should have done in the first place.

The results were pretty impressive -- it's a lot quieter. Not perfectly silent, of course: there are still two motors in there (the other's in the hard drive; the power supply was already fanless, from an earlier mod). But it's now quieter than dantooine, which is the machine I was using for recording before, so it can take its place in the studio bedroom.

Current Mood: geeky

05:43 pm - Stealth in the bedroom

I knew, when swapping a known-quiet Vantec ION power supply into the flower_cat's new computer didn't make a noticable difference, that the only major noise source left had to be the CPU fan. But I didn't know how major. I put in a CoolerMaster LED Silent 8025 system fan, and it's now almost inaudible. In fact, if you stand equidistant from both systems, most of the noise you hear is coming from the other machine -- in an Antec Sonata case under a cardboard box.

Problem solved.

Current Mood: impressed

10:30 pm - Evil in the office

Apparently, when I installed the driver for the laser printer the other day, it managed to blow away Adobe Acrobat 5 and replace it with 4, which of course rendered some PDFs unrenderable and unprintable. Which seems appropriate somehow.

There is no fscking way installing a printer driver should mess with any other software on my system without (a) checking to see if there's a more recent version and (b) asking my permission. But of course this is Windows we're talking about.

People wonder why their Windows systems become infested with malware.

Actually, this post was just an excuse to show off my shiny new userpic, which I ganked from this T-shirt order form.

Current Mood: annoyed

12:40 pm - Some progress this morning

The networking and firewall on my new gateway-to-be are almost completely configured now. Even tested a little. I finally got over some kind of mental block and set it up in a test configuration (i.e., not the final set of IP addresses because that would conflict with the current gw.

( geeky details )
Whether I have it all together before tomorrow is, of course, still an open question.

Current Mood: geeky