Mdesbo's Blog

New Blog Address

mdesbo — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 11:03:04 +0000

I’ve switched to a privately hosted blog. http://www.bauworm.com

Seagate Freeagent Theater+

mdesbo — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 08:21:52 +0000

I bought 2 of these units from HT (ht.com.au) while they were on sale for $63 each. The only issue I have had so far is the subtitles appearing to take up the whole screen. The workaround was found at: http://forums.seagate.com/t5/FreeAgent-Theater/FAT-Subtitle-getting-cut-off/m-p/62510/highlight/true#M4400

The solution is “While the video is playing and showing subtitle, “Pause” it and then use the arrow left/right/up/down buttons.”. Worked a charm.

blargh

mdesbo — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 13:10:36 +0000

I wish I could write down everything, or at least tell it all in a long and exciting story. I love writing, but everything seems to just mishmash into a big pile of crap. Everything seems pretty bad right now. I’m single, my job sucks and the weather is still too cold to ride to work on my pushbike. There is a plus side to everything; It couldn’t get much worse.

I’ve got money coming back in my tax return, I’m still able to use my legs and summer is coming. I’ve got a job lined up for after my internship so that should be pretty nice and I might be able to afford to buy a car. I think I’ll switch from car, bike and deadly treadly to just car and treadly. That’ll save on rego and insurance, plus it is dangerous out on the road when you’re on 2 wheels. The ride isn’t too far, about 45KM for a round trip. I should be able to pull it off in about 2.5 hours. The car trip is about 1.5 so an extra hour will be thoroughly enjoyed especially if I can just relax and enjoy the scenery without having to worry about potholes, roadworks, motorists and anything else unmentioned but worth adding.

I’m moving into a new role this week (it was supposed to be a month ago, but the new guy was delayed). It is just stupid how much work I have been given (over the last 7 months) and no-one keeps track of it. Hopefully they see some sense once I am gone and get some more people. I don’t usually get frustrated, but this is just terrible. I had some work to do 2 weekends ago which was delayed just because some guy thought it was a good idea to not approve it. The work went ahead this weekend with some unexpected issues, and I went through the correct (as far as I know) steps to get it remedied, but someone at the helpless-desk seems to think that ticket management shouldn’t be part of their job. The off-shored accounts are just headaches. I’m glad to be moving into a role within our borders.

On the social life front I’ve been to more LAN parties in the last few weeks than I have in the entire year before that. There is still an empty feeling. I’ve only ever had 4 girlfriends, but I seem to overreact when I get dumped (3/4 times). I just reminisce about how I could have done things better, which probably just adds to the mind issues. Until recently been concerned over the amount of phone calls that girlfriends involve. Now I understand how nice just simple conversations are, and receiving a phone call. Also photos, I will attempt to be more photogenic in the future.

I’m also working on my physique. I’ve been doing push ups semi-regularly and now I can do 35+ (hopefully I’ll be able to manage 40+ after I get over this damned cold). I also need to buy some more figure hugging nerd t-shirts as I am cutting down on my weight. With this dang fangled ‘eat less, exercise more’ mentality hopefully I can push myself back up to 95kg without having a belly. I’ll keep dreaming that a girl might ask me out one day. I almost forgot, wii fit is a sham.

I’ll post some pics of my server next time. I might also work on it too, if I get some free time from work.

Hindsight is Powerful

mdesbo — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 13:22:00 +0000

I have been looking back through my blogs over the last few years and it is amazing how much I still feel the same way about almost everything. I have learned many things over the years. I suppose I just haven’t learned the right things.

Looking at young people today I see hopes, dreams and aspirations. I was just floating along with nothing of the sort. I have never really had plans for anything. I look at myself and see some normal guy who has had the luckiest breaks ever.

I left primary school with no dreams. I could barely turn on a computer. I had played with one at home a bit, but I was teetering on computer illiterate.
I left high school with a high school certificate and not much else (in the way of extra curricular activities). I took some classes on IT and spent my days (after I broke my collar bone bike riding) doing IT and star trek related Thursday afternoon activities.
I left college with a pretty poor AST score and not too much worthwhile on my certificate. I started concreting to lay the way for future endeavors in my life.
I left TAFE (the Canberra Institute of Technology) with some hopes and dreams. I had no idea what the real world was like. At this stage in my life I was sleeping a lot and I seemed to have a very poor memory for dates and times (almost always missing deadlines and enrollment dates). I got super lucky with my IBM internship.
I started Uni with the mindset of all of the above. I didn’t really care about the grade, as long as I was getting a job at the end of it. Some of the scores I got were abysmal. I remember sitting down at some of the assignments regretting procrastinating. In hindsight that was a pretty poor way to start life, but the last 2 years I think I have really excelled at doing all kinds of things.

I might have the ‘aussie dream’ bestowed upon me by my parents. I have no dreams pushed upon me by them. I never wanted to grow up to become anything. I still don’t want to grow up to become anything. I just want to own a house. Maybe a car.

I’ve got a lot of free time on my hands now I’m single. I guess I’ll blog more. I’ll include pictures next time.

Sea Rats ahoy!

mdesbo — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 12:07:36 +0000

Thanks Sarah for turning my notepad drawing into a comic. Please feel enlightened by my humourous writing.

Expanding the array

mdesbo — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 06:18:10 +0000

I added another drive to my array. This brings it to a total of 9x1TB disks in raid5. 8000GB of space in total. I came across this problem when I upgraded from 5 drives to 8 drives (Three $60 1TB drives came up on allclassifieds.com.au/ac and I could not resist). I have a dodgy 3-way molex power splitter that caused me some issues last time. It has been replaced.

The file system would not expand and xfs_growfs was not reporting any differences. After checking out google I found suggestions like rebooting, upgrading xfsprogs or backing up the data and just creating another file system.

The answer was a lot simpler and did not require any data loss. This is on centOS5.4.

Please don’t come back and tell me that you lost all your data as I don’t care. This method isn’t guaranteed to work and is just a suggestion.

Short answer:

[root@files ~]# umount /data
[root@files ~]# parted /dev/sdb
 (parted) print
 (parted) rm 1                                                             
 (parted) mkpart primary xfs 0 -0
 (parted) print   
 (parted) quit                                                         
[root@files ~]# mount /data
[root@files ~]# xfs_growfs -d /data

Long answer:

Just to show off the current space before anything has happened. 6.4TB total with 606GB free.

[root@files ~]# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
 31G  6.7G   23G  23% /
/dev/sda1              97M   27M   66M  29% /boot
tmpfs                1006M     0 1006M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sdb1             6.4T  5.8T  606G  91% /data

The xfs_growfs command is used with the -d option to attempt to grow to the maximum size. This comes out with an error because the file system thinks it is already at the maximum capacity.

[root@files ~]# xfs_growfs -d /data
meta-data=/dev/sdb1              isize=256    agcount=112, agsize=15258623 blks
 =                       sectsz=512   attr=1
data     =                       bsize=4096   blocks=1708964573, imaxpct=25
 =                       sunit=0      swidth=0 blks, unwritten=1
naming   =version 2              bsize=4096  
log      =internal               bsize=4096   blocks=32768, version=1
 =                       sectsz=512   sunit=0 blks, lazy-count=0
realtime =none                   extsz=4096   blocks=0, rtextents=0
data size unchanged, skipping

Totally un-eventful un-mounting of data.

[root@files ~]# umount /data

Once you enter parted onto the device currently holding your file system. You will be asked to fix the GPT table. I chose to fix it, but it might not be required.

Print out the contents of the table just to make sure you’re removing the right partition and it starts at 0. Otherwise you will need to alter your commands to suit your situation.

Remove the partition and rebuild it with the maximum possible space.

Print out the contents again to make sure that it is what is intended.

[root@files ~]# parted /dev/sdb
GNU Parted 1.8.1
Using /dev/sdb
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) print                                                            
Error: The backup GPT table is not at the end of the disk, as it should be.
This might mean that another operating system believes the disk is smaller.
Fix, by moving the backup to the end (and removing the old backup)?
Fix/Ignore/Cancel? fix                                                    
Warning: Not all of the space available to /dev/sdb appears to be used, you can
fix the GPT to use all of the space (an extra 1953103872 blocks) or continue
with the current setting?
Fix/Ignore? fix                                                           

Model: AMCC 9550SX-12 DISK (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 8000GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name     Flags
 1      17.4kB  7000GB  7000GB  xfs          primary       

(parted) rm 1                                                             
(parted) mkpart primary xfs 0 -0
(parted) print                                                            

Model: AMCC 9550SX-12 DISK (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 8000GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name     Flags
 1      17.4kB  8000GB  8000GB  xfs          primary       

(parted) quit

Mount the partition and grow the file system.

[root@files ~]# mount /data
[root@files ~]# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
 31G  6.8G   23G  24% /
/dev/sda1              97M   27M   66M  29% /boot
tmpfs                1006M     0 1006M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sdb1             6.4T  5.8T  605G  91% /data

[root@files ~]# xfs_growfs -d /data
meta-data=/dev/sdb1              isize=256    agcount=112, agsize=15258623 blks
 =                       sectsz=512   attr=1
data     =                       bsize=4096   blocks=1708964573, imaxpct=25
 =                       sunit=0      swidth=0 blks, unwritten=1
naming   =version 2              bsize=4096  
log      =internal               bsize=4096   blocks=32768, version=1
 =                       sectsz=512   sunit=0 blks, lazy-count=0
realtime =none                   extsz=4096   blocks=0, rtextents=0
data blocks changed from 1708964573 to 1953103863

Viola!

[root@files ~]# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
 31G  6.8G   23G  24% /
/dev/sda1              97M   27M   66M  29% /boot
tmpfs                1006M     0 1006M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sdb1             7.3T  5.8T  1.6T  80% /data

Toaster Scare

mdesbo — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 22:54:25 +0000

I really do love toast. When it is in the toaster I like to daydream about eating toast. I always get scared when it pops up and even more scared when I’m expecting it.

I was listening to the radio the other day and the lady on 102.3FM accidentally dropped a spoon into her toaster and shorted out the circuit breaker. So remember not to try to pry out your toast with a metal object.

iPhone’s flesh is weak

mdesbo — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 09:11:59 +0000

I took this photo back in December 2009 and I’ve been meaning to post about it since then. There are 2 little cracks going up the case (they are hard to see in the photo) and since December they have gotten a bit bigger. The cracks themselves offer no visible detriment to the phone, but they have let dust in underneath the screen. This has to be the worst issue arising from the cracks. There are also cracks in the phone up near the headphone socket and SIM card ‘slot’. I would take a picture of the dust under the screen, but I am sure it would turn out looking just like a picture of an iPhone.

In other news, apparently I can jailbreak with the iOS4.0. Lucky I don’t have a 3GS. I wonder if they have implemented a photo storage system that doesn’t involve “Camera Roll” yet…

Parking at work

mdesbo — Fri, 07 May 2010 11:03:58 +0000

Office parking isn’t fun when all the spots are small. There has been speculation about how much nicer the entire car park could be if they removed a few of them. I arrived late at work one day to find only a handful of places to park. *There is the option of parking down the street, but I would prefer to apply myself to a difficult spot than walk from an easy one.

As you can see my photography skills are terrible. The cars on either side of the Champagne Chariot are way outta line. I parked in the morning and managed to leave before them both. Needless to say I entered through the passenger’s side door. Please note that ABSOLUTELY no attempt was made to obfuscate any number plates, I was merely trying to show how much room these chumps had left.

LSI 8208XLP

mdesbo — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 03:47:14 +0000

I have been playing around with my 8208XLP since I got the damned thing almost a year ago. When I originally got it I purchased 3x 1TB western digital green drives to put in my sweet case (as seen in my first wordpress blog). I had it all ready to go except the raid controller wouldn’t do raid5. I was a little suspicious about this and after some digging (through the worst software release notes ever) I discovered that apparently I needed to updated the firmware on the controller. As an eager beaver I did this. The server wouldn’t boot properly; it would halt on the startup whenever there was a RAID created. I left it sitting there for days. I tried different BIOS versions from different vendors (for the same card) and nothing would work. I have given up on this card twice. I emailed tech support for LSI and both times they have suggested I RMA the card back. Shipping the card is too expensive as there is no LSI located in Australia (or at least there wasn’t last time I checked). So in desperation (in a similar stint as the fist time I gave up but less extreme) I erased the boot section of the flash and viola the card sort of works, albeit not accessible to boot to the OS. (sasflash -o -e 5) was the killer key sequence.

The MegaRaid Management utility is clunky and the slowest java application I’ve seen in a while. While performing the background initialisation on my 3TB array (added a seagate 1TB to my 3 WD drives) it would only display 0% in the progress field. It did not say anything about the RAID5 compatability and I had to go digging again. Some of the vendors who utilise the 1068 chip sell upgrade ‘buttons’ which allow for the card to perform RAID5. The linux drivers were also a pain in the backside. You cannot just install a driver rpm or run a normal script. The drivers have to be extracted in the worst fashion from the redhat driver disk, and only support about 3 kernel versions. I’m probably just terrible at linux, but it seemed like way too much work for 1 kernel module and an entry in /etc/modules.conf.

The card itself is a low profile, short PCI-X expansion card. It has 8 sataII/sas connections available via 2 fan-out cables. It can come in a 4 port version with only one of the fan-out cable slots. The cable added a fair bit of cost to the original purchase. About $70 for the card and $40 for the cable from a local supplier. A have decided against purchasing cards with non-standard connectors as they do add a fairly large sum to to the total cost of ownership. Plus it is much easier to buy 1m SATA cables than 8087-to-4xsata in a 1m length.

I don’t know what the controller thinks constitutes a faulty drive, but it has flagged the disks faulty a few times and then happily (very very slowly) rebuilds the array on to them.

Conclusion: This card has been a total pain in the arse for me. It was not expensive, but it has taken a lot of my time to get nowhere. The card will not load its optionROM with a RAID configured and will not enter into the utility.