Tim's Blog

My server decided to die on me. Two of my hard drives failed at the same time (luckily on different raid arrays) and since they were on the same raid controller, I reached the logical conclusion that the raid controller was dead. I bought another one at a local computer store for way too much money, and it didn’t work. The Linux kernel would hang during boot; not a kernel panic, but a hang. At this point I started to think that it was a software problem because both raid cards used the same chipset (VT6421). I downgraded 2 kernels and tried to boot again. This time the computer would boot and see all the hard drives, but after a couple of minutes, the computer would become unresponsive. After a couple of days of testing in my limited amount of spare time, I decided that at least 1 PCI slot on my motherboard is dead. Now it’s back up and running, hopefully for a long time.

I hate Vista.

I am uninstalling it from my laptop. Forever.

My new laptop arrived in the mail today. It is a Sony Vaio VGN-SZ640. It has a 13.3 inch wide screen display and a Intel Core 2 Duo processor running at 2 GHz. I upgraded the ram to 4GB. It is small and beautiful.

It also came with Windows Vista. Since I need a windows computer for programming a microcontroller in one my my classes, I decided to give Vista a shot. When I booted up the computer, I found that Sony had decided to fill the computer with crappy software so the first thing I did was reinstall Vista. That’s one thing that Microsoft figured out, the installation process is much better than installing XP. Immediately after booting, I remembered all the things I don’t like about Windows, I had a hard time finding all the drivers I needed, and some of them wouldn’t completely install. I am going to give it a shot though, we’ll see how long it lasts before I upgrade to Windows XP.

A Fail event had been detected on md device /dev/md3.

A Fail event had been detected on md device /dev/md2.

Of course this happens after I get home, so I don’t have physical access to the computer. Damn it.

My server is back up and running! I just happened to have a couple of extra 250GB SATA hard drives sitting around, so I replaced the old 80GB PATA hard drives with them and setup raid 0 on them. I put some information on what I did on my wiki. I added the hard drives, booted linux on a live CD, partitioned the hard drives, setup raid, and copied all the files over using cpio. Then I updated /etc/mdadm.conf, installed grub on the master boot record and I was all ready to go. Except that I had partitioned the hard drives incorrectly and it took me 6ish hours to figure it out. Then I was ready to go. Thank god for raid.

This is an automatically generated mail message from mdadm
running on ____.

A Fail event had been detected on md device /dev/md3.

Faithfully yours, etc.

Crap. There goes one of my hard drives. Hopefully I can get it fixed sometime tomorrow before the other one goes out.

Finally I have a relatively robust email setup. Google allows you to setup email for your domain for free, so I decided to give it a go. Now when an email is sent to me, it is sent to Google’s server, then it is fetched using fetchmail by my dad’s server, then I can view it using any IMAP client. This means that as long as Google’s servers don’t go down (highly unlikely), I will never lose any emails.

Have you ever heard a power supply pop, then see it start to smoke? I did. Yep, that right. My server’s power supply died a horrible death, popping the circuit breaker in the process. Unfortunately it happened at a very busy time for me, so I wasn’t able to get it up an running until yesterday. Despite the terrible smoke-belching death of the power supply, luckily none of the other components were harmed. Thanks to my roommate Rune for having an extra 500 watt power supply lying around.

In other news, my laptop (kind of) died. I bought a new CPU fan because the bearings went on the old one and it started to sound like my laptop was going to take off. I was able to dismantle the laptop and install the new fan with no problems, but during the reassembling, the I broke a couple of little tabs that keep the keyboard and speakers attached to the case. It still works fine, but it is falling apart. I am currently bidding for 2 broken laptops of the same model on ebay, I am hoping that will all those spare parts, I won’t have to replace my laptop for a long time.

On a more upbeat note, I got a bunch of free stuff. My roommate Luke and I drove by a pile of free stuff in someone’s driveway. Naturally we stopped to see if there was anything good. I ended up walking away with a desk, a philips screwdriver and a working laptop! The laptop is only 600 MHz and has 256 MB of ram, but it runs perfectly. I also just got 3 webcams, they are really low quality, but they were only 99 cents each. I don’t know what, but I definitely have a project ahead of me.