chouyu_31

For the past while, I've been reading about ZFS in OpenSolaris 10. Generally speaking, it makes creating and manipulating filesystems involving many disks in various RAID configurations very easy. How easy? This link has a sample of creating a file system with mirrored and striped disks.

Well, I don't have a spare computer to run this kind of thing, nor do I have the time or money to build/buy a machine to run OpenSolaris 10. What to do?

I've recently switched from using Parallels Workstation to using VMware Server (for the VMware tools for linux for faster video performance, which I use to test PyPE), and VMware Server has support for a Solaris guest operating system. Even better, VMware offers raw disk access to drives, which would allow me to run Solaris inside VMware, inside Windows, and get all of the goodness that is ZFS without dealing with another computer, etc. Toss in Samba/CIFS mounting, and I've got a complete storage solution.

It's just finishing up the installation, and aside from the huge download (around 3gigs), and a really awful prerequisite check (if you want package A that requires package B, it will tell you that it requires it, but will neither automatically add it (good) nor offer to add it (bad)), the installation wasn't that bad.

Now I just need a bunch of big disks.


On a completely unrelated note, WinTabber is quite convenient, even if it did crash one of my SSH clients once. It has reduced by 10 the number of windows I have sitting in my taskbar.

Update:
The network speed between the Solaris on VM and my local machine over sftp is horrible; 30k/second. Even worse than its speed is that it randomly hangs. Http, ftp, etc., all suffer the same (crap) speed. Adding users is a pain (still haven't gotten it to work), configuring everything is a pain, and even when comparing it to Ubuntu without VMware tools, it's awfully slow. Checking df tells me that it's not using any swap, so I don't know. Maybe someone else has some ideas, but for right now, I'm blowing away the Solaris virtual machine and calling the time I spent trying to get it to work a learning experience.

Ah well, I don't have the big disks to use anyways.

Someone was having issues with PyPE on Ubuntu 6.06. I figured that a quick download of Parallels for Windows with a trial key, and a bootable Ubuntu live CD installed onto a small virtual disk would get me a system that I could then install Python and wxPython on.

So I downloaded and installed Parallels. Oh, reboot so that you can use the network. Ok...

Wait a second, what happened to my E drive? *reboot* *unplug external CD* *boot burned ubuntu cd* Huh. *check S.M.A.R.T.* 68 relocated sectors, 1 pending relocation sectors. *check other identical drive* 0 relocated sectors. Crap, got a bad egg. *grumble*

In the Drive Manager, the drive is listed as "offline", and telling it to "reconnect" gives me a strange error (that I can't remember off the top of my head).

What was on that drive? Emulators and roms (which I never got around to playing), my commercial development work (worklog, uncommitted source code, private keys, ...), various game installations, essentially all of my music (which I never listen to, honestly), a large amount of anime and movies that I hadn't gotten around to watching and/or burning. The worklog and uncommitted source code are the big losses if I can't recover any data.

Since the maxtor software is working on the drive, and is able to read various portions, there is a chance that it will be able to poke the drive into being readable by Windows. If so, I'll copy everything off and toss it onto the 120 gig drive I found physical space for. On the upside, I do have an *identical* disk, so if I need to swap the circuit boards in order to snarf the data, I can. The diagnostic just finished, and said "your drive needs to be replaced, backup your data" Um...that's what I'm trying to do. *pull out my copy of spinrite* Here's hoping it can at least get it limping along so that I can backup the important stuff.


I also discovered the fan on my video card seems to have seized up at some time in the past. It has been running so warm that it actually cracked the plastic in the fan. Good job aftermarket BFG brand fan (the previous fan had issues too, which is why I bought the aftermarket one). I had hoped that I wouldn't have to go the way of my previous computer and add in various cooling fans to keep everything nice and cool, but it looks like I may not have a choice.

Update 1:
One sector near the middle of the disk seems to be having issues (must be that "pending relocation" sector). I believe I can attempt recovery on it (whether I get the 4096 bytes of data back, I don't much care) and get the drive limping again.

Also, the reason the drive isn't usable in Windows is because it is a "Dynamic" disk. Had I created it as a "Basic" disk, it may still be usable *cry*. To make a dynamic disk into a basic disk, I need to blow away the partitions (which I can recover from), which I can only do if I can access the drive. Ug.

So...if Spinrite can see the drive, and the maxtor software can see the drive, I wonder what it would take to just pull a raw image of the drive and write it to another device or file. Or heck, maybe I just need to turn S.M.A.R.T. off in the BIOS, boot into the win2k recovery console, and start copying. I'm rambling. It's 5AM. I've got a doctor's appointment at 11AM for my back, maybe I should get some sleep.

Update 2:
On my way back from dropping Annie off at work, I picked up two under-hard drive fan sets (which have cooled the drives from ~50°C to 30°C), a 5.25" bay ducting fan (I've now got two drives up there), and a "chipset cooling kit". The fan with the latter set I'm using on the video card, I'm cannabalizing one of the 3 fans for the drive bay fan for my chipset (because it is hot to the touch), the two drive coolers are working as intended, and I'm using one of the chipset heatsinks for the southbridge (which is also hot to the touch), though I won't have a spare fan for it.

Spinrite wasn't able to recover those sectors likely destroyed by high heat. However, GetDataBack for NTFS looks like it is going to save my bacon. I'm creating an image of the drive right now (with GDB for NTFS), and the software can recover from drive image files.

Update 3:
At some point during my mucking about, one of the 512 meg sticks of memory seems to have stopped working. It's a kingston stick and has a lifetime warranty, but even if I have to buy a replacement, they are fairly reasonable at $60 including shipping.

I don't know about the rest of you, but ever since I started using an IDE rather than SCSI CD burner, my machine has performed poorly during burns. Maybe it's too much to expect of IDE?

Well whatever. I had picked up a handful of external USB2->IDE controllers (with 3.5" aluminum enclosures) a few months back, and a quick test told me that I shouldn't have any problems using my burner externally; so I am. It is, quite literally, just the drive, plugged into the adapter. And you know what? It works great. I can burn away, it uses 5-8% processor, and nothing is jittery.

Back to work!

Update for: http://www.livejournal.com/users/chouyu_31/210168.html

1. The problem is that I lacked the proper registry entry, as described by http://www.48bitlba.com/ .
2. USB devices don't use the bios to access the drive, so isn't restricted, as long as your USB drive enclosure supports large drives (mine does).
3. The moment I discovered that I could read the 5.5 GB wedding footage, I should have copied it to another drive.
4. Instead, because I thought it was fine and the file was safe, I started copying 15GB of wedding footage onto the 200 gig drive, which ended up overwriting the wedding footage. Read this one as: "Josiah is an idiot"

Angus, or anyone else: If you end up finding that digital tape from the minicam, the one that looked straight down the aisle during Annie and I's wedding ceremony, I'd really like to have it. It's probably lost to the ages, but a guy's gotta hope. I'll ask my parents, and I'll dig through our stuff when we move in a couple years...but yeah.

On the upside, Annie's not looking for a divorce because of this. We do have the entire ceremony from another angle, the audio from the minidisk recorder that was in my pocket, as much of the reception as was recorded, and our friend Diane has some completely unrelated footage that she thought was lost to a burglary...so yeah.


Note to readers: If you ever get married and have wedding footage...for goodness sakes, back it up! Oh, and make sure you remember to get the tapes (I can't remember if I ever did), and if you do, put them some place safe!

So...

I transferred all of my data last night. I calculated md5s for every file on both drives. They were the same.

I shut down my machine this morning, swapped the drives, the booted my machine. "chkdsk found some errors, shall I repair", Of course! Zap! There goes some files. Wait...what?

I freak out. I thought I lost the minicam shot of our main wedding shot due to corruption. I can't check it because Quicktime wants to be updated, and it is having problems installing (wtf Apple?) So I give it a shot on my laptop, turns out the file was fine. *big sigh of relief*

We head out to dinner, and I come back to finish verifying some other files..."can't open because foo is corrupted, run chkdsk" Um...Ok..."deleting blah from blah because of blah" NO!!!


Fuck me. There went the minicam shot from down the aisle of Annie and I's wedding...and...well...75% of everything else. I know the minicam shot is there, being that it was the first file I copied to the drive, but it looks as though I'm going to need to do a bit of data recovery. I hate data recovery. I really do.

The worst part about all of this is that I didn't lose power, I used the system tray "disconnect device" mechanism before disconnecting the drive, it ran checkdisk on Windows startup... I did everything I was supposed to, and I lost data.


If/when I pull the data from the drive, it's getting a fresh format, a pass with spinrite, and a fresh copy of the data. If that doesn't do it, Seagate is getting a nasty call from me.

Update available here: http://www.livejournal.com/users/chouyu_31/210285.html

Hey everyone, so I'm up in San Jose, doing work, and I would be reading and commenting on people's journals when I have free time, but unfortunately, my boss' cablemodem service provider (Comcast I believe), has been having serious service issues. Doing a traceroute tells us that two hops up their routing jumps from 12ms to 1200ms (that is 1.2 seconds) roundtrip.

Apparently SBC in this area has started to offer $15 DSL, which is a screaming deal. My boss is talking about getting it, keeping his cablemodem so that when the current service is acting up, he can swap the cable and call it good.


Anyways, it comes down to me not being able to surf the net much at all because it is so slow. I can get email all right, but that is about it. Surfing on a modem would literally be faster.

For some reason, over the course of the last few months, my machine has been intermittantly losing DNS connectivity. That is, I am not able to access DNS servers for name resolution (which normally turns things like google.com into 216.239.39.99), for a minute or so at a time. I'll be mucking around, then my web surfing will be paused. I wait a minute, and I'm back up.

Last night, it lasted for 30 minutes, and I decided I'd give a reboot a shot (who knows, it may be my firewall software, which stops being aware of the existance of connections after some amount of time, even though they still work). Well, it worked again, and continued working until a little over an hour ago. Strange.

Since I haven't been using the on-board ethernet card, I figured I'd swap the cable, dupe the MAC address (I like to keep my old IP), and see what she does. Well, it works. Maybe the good-old $5 Dlink 530+TX is giving up the ghost, 4 years is a good run for an ethernet card that is always on.

But there's a rub. Checking my firewall's logs, my connectivity seems to drop every time I get pinged by the DHCP server, which my firewall rejects (I've still got the proper DNS settings even after the ping, and I can ping the DNS, but I can't connect to their ports). Maybe the DHCP server is telling the DNS servers "don't respond to the asshole that isn't letting me ping him". Who knows?

I've disabled ping rejections, and am using the onboard gbit ethernet card, we'll see how it goes.

Woo!

This update is coming from my new computer. Yeah I know, there are more important things to be said right now, but I thought I would start out with that.

I tell you what; this is the first new computer I've had since the summer of 1999. That's right folks; your beloved Josiah has been using the same computer for 5 1/2 years. When I calculate all of the upgrades I've spent on it, it comes down to around $150/year. Not bad. All I have to do is use this computer for 2 years, and I've got the same price/year ratio...but this guy should last longer than 2 years. And what did he upgrade to?

P4 2.8 ghz, 512 megs ram, 280 gigs of hard drive (2x80 gig drives, 1x120 gig), etc. Why did I get it? Well, it was only $300 or so including shipping (there were a few bits I added in myself, among them an 80 and 120 gig drive).

Where did I get it; seems as though I never posted it. Dell was having one screaming deal last week.



discoflamingo: Get time off for E3! (you have been notified)



And now to the really important stuff...Politics. Or whatever the hell you want to call it nowadays. I like to call it "a bunch of lying fucks who want to screw you out of your money (republicans) vs a bunch of other people". Or somesuch. Get me some real media, who can show how Bush and company systematically lied about the WMD (hey, guess what, they ended their search without finding any *blargh*), and how they are fucking us even now. Even the so-called "liberal media" are a bunch of pussies...well, some aren't, but they have less circulation than Cheney's heart (cue rimshot).


Have I become a crazy-left-wing-something-or-other? No, just getting sick of the lies. Here's another lie, "Social Security won't be available when those in my generation retire." Check the numbers, Social Security will be running on easy for 10-20 years. When that time comes around, they will make an adjustment of .1% of people's annual salaries, or push the cap higher (currently those making $80k/year pay the same as someone making $1million/year in SS taxes), and be covered for another 50 years...like they did in the late 70's.

So, where is this $10 trillion number coming from that Bush and company are pushing around to anyone who will listen? Well, if no rates were ever adjusted, and economic growth were expected to keep on the same rate as they have on average for the last century, for the rest of eternity, then in current dollars, Americans would be $10 trillion in debt from handling the shortfall. That's right people, to pay for an eternity of shortfalls, we would pay $10 trillion in today's money.

But if we make a tiny adjustment 10-20 years in the future, guess what? No more debt. It's magical how that works, isn't it? In other words, Social Security is not in danger now, nor will it be in the future.

As for private accounts, they would reduce benefits, reduce security, and cost us $2.4 trillion (or some such ungodly number) to convert, according to Bush's own number crunchers. Oh, and those that run those millions of accounts, the various banks and such, would make shitloads of money on the fees for handling your accounts. It is all a fucking scam.



I could post about all sorts of other stuff, but I won't. Shit to do, I hope everyone understands.

On Monday, July 26, 2004 I purchased a Quazar Electric Scooter from a local Kragen Auto Parts. It seemed to have the proper ratio of top speed, battery life, etc., to handle taking Annie to/from work (if necessary), and more immediately, take me home from a junkyard. That is, I was junking my 1983 Dodge Van on the 27th, because Annie and I were leaving on the 28th, and I wouldn't have time to junk it any other time, and I needed a ride home. This thing seemed capable of doing it.

In any case, the scooter claimed it could be run for 13 miles. The junkyard was around 11 miles away, I figured I was good.

( Read the rest of the review )

Segway Concept Centaur. Daddy wants one real bad.