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GRAFFITI -- May 21, 2007 thru May 27, 2007 >> Link to the Current Week << Last Week << Mon   Tues   Wed   Thu   Fri   Sat   Sun >> Next Week Search this site : Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable.     About eMail - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message.

MONDAY    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
May 21, 2007

0829 - Good morning. Another work week begins. I'll catch up tonight, perhaps.

VersaCharger Pro and cables from Boxwave for my Samsung M610 phone

2300 - Good evening. Only briefly, because it's late and I am still up at the ass-crack of dawn, but I wanted to follow through on my implied promise to return today.

I picked up a Samsung M610 a couple of weeks ago as a replacement for my Treo. The Treo had not been behaving well, after having been dropped on its head by your's truly once or twice. It still did the Palm-ish stuff okay, but it was getting dicey as a phone. The Samsung is a sexy little thin phone, and still does the web, which is nice, too. I wasn't about to pay Sprint prices for a bunch of accessories, though - and they didn't even have the sort of items I was looking for. So after the purchase, I did some searching about, and came across Boxwave. They have accessories for all sorts of phones and PDAs. So I picked up a VersaCharger Pro and a pair of charging cables, one with Sync capabilities. All together, about $50. Not the cheapest path, but a highly rated vendor.

Now, to get to sleep before I fall over. Happy Monday ... what's left of it.

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Mon    TUESDAY    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
May 22, 2007

2048 - Good evening. Well, isn't that special! Vimes, the main Linux workstation around these parts, is now reporting "GRUB Hard Disk Error" when I boot him, cold or warm. That's not heartening. I guess that instead of nattering here about whatever, I really should dig up my Knoppix disk and see what I can see. More later, or tomorrow...

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Mon    Tues    WEDNESDAY    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
May 23, 2007

2124 - Good evening. Okay, "digging up" a knoppix disc involved downloading 5.1.1 and burning it. Once booted, my wireless keyboard and all that goo (which lost its mojo during the non-booting portion of my adventure) started working again. From that first boot, it was clear - there was no boot drive - 250 raw marketing gigabytes just gone. I rebooted and got into the BIOS, where there was also no Seagate drive to be found. Hmmm. So I downed the box, popped the lid, and took it downstairs.

No, I didn't beat it to a pulp with a hammer. Shame on you for thinking that. I used compressed air to blow all the dust out of the system, first. That's because my next "solution" involves popping and reseating all the cables in the system. Best done with less dust around. So, relatively dust-free, and back upstairs without any visible bruising on the chassis or motherboard, I worked my way across the system, pulling and reseating each cable. Yes, I was only having problems with ONE drive, but there's no time like the present. If the problem *is* a cable, I'd want to have preemptively reseated all the others anyway, soooo....

That did the trick. The BIOS saw the drive. The system booted from the drive. Everything came back up and has been running hunky and dory ever since. Well, in a sense, it seems. I took this opportunity to get around to installing smartmontools and checking out all the drives. Yikes - they all say old age, and pre-fail. Except for ONE of the Western Digital drives, which is saying FAILING NOW. Yeah, well. Those Western Digital drives have always run way-hot, and for some reason, this one is reporting 66°C. Yeah, that's too hot.

So, with all my "old" 250G drives getting ready to kick the bucket, I went over to NewEgg and picked up three 500G Seagate drives for $130 each. Yeah, 1.5 terabytes for under $400. Amazing. When those get in, I'll pull all the old drives from the system. I'll setup the new drives in a RAID5, and reinstall Ubuntu 7.04. Then I'll get the former "home" spindle into an external chassis and pull my home down onto the new setup. I'll try to document this a little bit for y'all (and for my future self), for when we need to do software RAID with Ubuntu one day. Yeah, I could have picked up a proper hardware RAID card as well, perhaps a 3Ware. But software RAID should be fine. I'm certainly not going to use the nVidia fakeraid setup.

I actually did a couple of useful things today at work, so that's a plus. It feels good to start being productive early, rather than just wading in slowly at the kiddie end of the pool. Speaking of diving in, I need to have a look at IPF for Solaris. Later...

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Mon    Tues    Wed    THURSDAY    Fri    Sat    Sun   
May 24, 2007

2031 - Good evening. I've decided that since I keep a pretty robust set of backups, and that Vimes is now fundamentally a system for "play" ... well, I'm going for performance instead of security. So, it'll boot from a 256M RAID1 /boot partition, with one hot spare, formatted EXT3. The rest of all three drives is in a RAID0 stripe set, overlaid with three LVM volumes: 2G for swap, 64G of XFS root, and 1.395TB of XFS home partition. Performance should be good, given the striping. This may yet prove to be a bad choice, but I have the hardware to experiment with, so why not? Now to grab a bite to eat while the initial package load happens.

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    FRIDAY    Sat    Sun   
May 25, 2007

2127 - Good evening. Well, I've got WoW reinstalling on the freshly-rebuilt Vimes. Something about the current Crossover install and WoW and the new 2.1.mumble Black Temple patch didn't get along. A clean install gets almost all of the patching done in one pass, and since my game state is saved on Blizzard servers, I can install anywhere. Anyway, here's the bottom line:

bilbrey@vimes:~$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/main-root  64G  3.8G   61G   6% /
varrun               1014M  112K 1014M   1% /var/run
varlock              1014M     0 1014M   0% /var/lock
procbususb           1014M  124K 1014M   1% /proc/bus/usb
udev                 1014M  124K 1014M   1% /dev
devshm               1014M     0 1014M   0% /dev/shm
lrm                  1014M   33M  981M   4% /lib/modules/2.6.20-15-generic/volatile
/dev/md0              236M   17M  207M   8% /boot
/dev/mapper/main-home 1.3T  127G  1.2T  10% /home

The two important ones are at the top and bottom of that listing. Yeah, I'm not going to run out of space in my / partition. I figured that's easier than splitting into my usual /, /usr, /usr/local, /tmp, /var ... after all, this box doesn't touch the net as a server. What's super-nice though, is the "Available" space left in /home. Yup, 1.2 Terabytes. Yummy, huh! So it is clear that I lose nearly 100G in filesystem overhead. That was a top of the line disk's worth of data not too many years ago. But now it's just the cost of being me.

The short description of what I did (posted yesterday evening) should be enough to get y'all going. But you *must* use the Alternate install image, you just don't have enough control over partitions, RAID, LVM, and filesystems when using the GUI installer from the Live CD. And when the install is done, you can realise, as I did, that doing RAID1 for the boot partition was pretty silly, since losing any one disk will break the RAID0 big space, and the system is torched. That is, the system is primed for a new installation and learning opportunity. The big deal here is that I simply don't care about any of the data on this system. I've got the core of my home backed up onto the server, and whatever games and other cruft I install can go away happily at the drop of a hat. I can reinstall what's interesting, and move on. Ah, World of WarCrack is done patching. I think I'll play for a while.

Tomorrow morning, I've got to work for a couple of hours at the office. There's changes to be made to some production equipment, and weekdays aren't the time to be doing that. If you get a holiday this weekend, enjoy it. Catch you tomorrow sometime.

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    SATURDAY    Sun   
May 26, 2007

First harvest of the season

0817 - Good morning. Nothing much new to report except for the first two strawberries of the season. Hurray! I'm exhibiting extreme forebearance in waiting for Marcia to wake up, to share them with her.

Vimes is doing fine. The new drives are all running down in the 40°C range, the CPU is pegged at 40°C, and the GPU on the nVidia 7600 GS runs in normal ops at 52°C. Right now, with World of Warcraft running, it's up at 71°C. That chip has a default throttle setting of 125°C, according to the nVidia Settings application.

Not much else to report. I'm off to work in a little while, and I'll be back by the time that the heat of day is upon us, perhaps hitting 90°F in the afternoon. Happy Saturday!

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    SUNDAY  
May 27, 2007

1217 - Good afternoon. We got an early start this morning, the shopping was done and we were back home by quarter to ten. I got some pictures out front yesterday, the flowers are all doing well...

The impatiens and sutera in baskets (six around the front porch) are going gangbusters, and just as last year, we have a robin nesting in one of them. Our clematis, trained up the front lamp post, is the envy of several neighbors. This year I fertilized it at what is obviously the right time - the load of blossoms this go-round is stunning. They're such pretty blossoms. In back, the peonies are blooming, and I've cut two and put them in a vase in the family room. Very nice. But while I play florist...

Our soldiers fight on. Memorial Day is nearly upon us, here in the USA. And while we seem to be under-appreciated around the world, I can't see heaping anything but praise on our fine men and women in uniform. While we remember those who fought in other battles, other wars, let the world remember the times when America came to their aid. Maybe that will help them pause, and see how they might contribute to and influence the outcome of the current troubles in the Middle East. Don't look to the UN. Stand up ... be counted.

Sadly, our losses continue to mount with each passing week. Take a few minutes to regard the names of our fallen heroes, and think on their families, their unit mates, and the sacrifice they make on our behalf. Of the three missing soldiers I mentioned last week, the body of Pfc. Joseph J. Anzack Jr. was found in the Euphrates. The other two, Fouty and Jimenez, continue to be the objects of an exhausting manhunt.

• Sgt. 1st Class Scott J. Brown, 33, of Windsor, Colo., died May 18 in Baghdad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when his unit came in contact with enemy forces using an improvised explosive device and small arms fire.
• Spc. Marquis J. McCants, 23, of San Antonio, Texas, died May 18 in Baghdad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when his unit came in contact with enemy forces using an improvised explosive device and small arms fire.
• Sgt. Anselmo Martinez III, 26, of Robstown, Texas, died May 18 in Tahrir, Iraq, of wounds suffered when his unit came in contact with enemy forces using an improvised explosive device.
• Spc. Casey W. Nash, 22, of Baltimore, Md., died May 18 in Tahrir, Iraq, of wounds suffered when his unit came in contact with enemy forces using an improvised explosive device.
• Spc. Joshua G. Romero, 19, of Crowley, Texas, died May 18 in Tahrir, Iraq, of wounds suffered when his unit came in contact with enemy forces using an improvised explosive device.
• Sgt. Justin D. Wisniewski, 22, of Standish, Mich., died May 19 in Lutfiyah, Iraq, of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his unit.
• Sgt. Ryan J. Baum, 27, of Aurora, Colo., died May 18, in Karmah, Iraq, of wounds suffered when his unit came in contact with enemy forces using small arms fire.
• Sgt. 1st Class Jesse B. Albrecht, 31, of Hager City, Wis., died May 17 in Iskandariya, Iraq, of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle.
• Spc. Coty J. Phelps, 20, of Kingman, Ariz., died May 17 in Iskandariya, Iraq, of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle.
• Pfc. Victor M. Fontanilla, 23, of Stockton, Calif., died May 17 in Iskandariya, Iraq, of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle.
• Staff Sgt. Christopher Moore, 28, of Alpaugh, Calif., died May 19 in Baghdad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle.
• Sgt. Jean P. Medlin, 27, of Pelham, Ala., died May 19 in Baghdad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle.
• Spc. David W. Behrle, 20, of Tipton, Iowa., died May 19 in Baghdad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle.
• Spc. Joseph A. Gilmore, 26, of Webster, Fla., died May 19 in Baghdad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle.
• Pfc. Travis F. Haslip, 20, of Ooltewah, Tenn., died May 19 in Baghdad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle.
• Pfc. Alexander R. Varela, 19, of Fernley, Nev., died May 19 in Baghdad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle.
• Sgt. Jason A. Schumann, 23, of Hawley, Minn., died May 19 in Ad Diwaniyah, Iraq, of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle.
• Cpl. Ryan D. Collins, 20, of Vernon, Texas, died May 19, in Hamiyah, Iraq, of wounds suffered when his unit came in contact with enemy forces using small arms fire May 18.
• Lance Cpl. Benjamin D. Desilets, 21, of Elmwood, Ill., died May 22 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
• Cpl. Julian M. Woodall, 21, of Tallahassee, Fla., died May 22 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
• Pvt. Oscar Sauceda Jr., 21, of Del Rio, Texas, died May 22, in Baghdad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when his unit came in contact with enemy forces using small arms fire.
• Sgt. Robert J. Montgomery Jr., 29, of Scottsburg, Ind., died May 22, in Al Jabour, Iraq, of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his unit.
• Staff Sgt. Shannon V. Weaver, 28, Urich, Mo., died May 21 in Baghdad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when multiple improvised explosive devices detonated near his vehicle.
• Sgt. Brian D. Ardron, 32, of Acworth, Ga., died May 21 in Baghdad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when multiple improvised explosive devices detonated near his vehicle.
• Spc. Michael W. Davis, 22, of San Marcos, Texas, died May 21 in Baghdad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when multiple improvised explosive devices detonated near his vehicle.
• Staff Sgt. David C. Kuehl, 27, of Wahpeton, N.D., died May 22 in Taji, Iraq, of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his unit.
• Staff Sgt. Kristopher A. Higdon, 25, of Odessa, Texas, died May 22 in Taji, Iraq, of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his unit.
• Pfc. Robert A. Worthington, 19, of Jackson, Ga., died May 22 in Taji, Iraq, of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his unit.
• Spc. Benjamin J. Ashley, 22, of Independence, Mo., died May 24 in Balad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle.
• Pfc. Robert H. Dembowski, 20, of Ivyland, Pa., died May 24 in Baghdad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when his unit came in contact with enemy forces using small arms fire.
• Staff Sgt. Steve Butcher Jr., 27, of Penfield, N.Y., died May 23 of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his unit in Ramadi, Iraq.
• Pfc. Daniel P. Cagle, 22, of Carson, Calif., died May 23 of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his unit in Ramadi, Iraq.
• Sgt. Iosiwo Uruo, 27, of Agana Heights, Guam, died May 24, in Buhriz, Iraq, of wounds suffered when his unit came in contact with enemy forces using small arms fire.
• Pfc. Casey P. Zylman, 22, of Coleman, Mich., died May 25 in Mosul, Iraq, of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle May 24 in Tallafar, Iraq.

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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.

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