nuxx.net
Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.

Category computers

rowla.nuxx.net Problems

September 14, 2007

Oh boy. I don’t need this now:

c0nsumer@rowla:~> dmesg
[...]
ad0: FAILURE - device detached
subdisk0: detached
ad0: detached
GEOM_MIRROR: Device hotbackup: provider ad0 disconnected.
c0nsumer@rowla:~>

No SMART warnings, nothing. On Sunday the disk reported a clean healthcheck with 17970 hours of power-on time. ad2 had 24195 hours reported in the same log file. I’d expect it to go soon, too.

Thankfully ad0 is one of the first two disks on a secondary pair of disks in the box which aren’t critical. I first copy backups to those disks then copy them from there down to my house each night. Having half of that mirror set gone isn’t horrible, but I’ll have to take care of it at some point.

Maybe I’ll just throw one of the 320GB disks I have here on there in its place and finally get around to moving all my backup drives here internally. Time to check prices on new disks at Newegg I guess.

UPDATE: For $120 I can get a 500GB Seagate which would go nicely in my Mac Pro as a backup volume. I could then use one of the 320GB disks it would be replacing it as the hot backup in rowla.nuxx.net. I’d then have a spare 320GB I could leave attached to the Mac Pro via the FW800 enclosure, turned off, as an offline backup of photos.

Or I can leave it and wait until the other half of the hotbackup mirror set (ad2) falls over. The replacement 500GB disk will probably be cheaper at that point and it’ll require no work to be done right now.

This will be decided tomorrow.

around the housecomputersmoved from livejournal

Connect360

August 26, 2007

For those of you like me who are new to the Xbox 360, and who also have Macs as their main machines, check out Connect360. It shares out your iTunes stuff automatically so that the music on it can be used in the 360.

I just finished getting the Professor of Giraffeology achievement (score at least 10 million in the tutorial) with ~16mil while listening to some Analord. That worked quite well. Even though the music in SG is good, having something you really know seems to make it even better.

Now it’s time to start thinking about leaving for work, as I’m supposed to be there from 2pm until things get done, and I want to return some stuff to Radio Shack and get some lunch on the way. (Probably a BK veggie burger, as they are decent and salty foods are sounding good. Last week I had purchased some phono plugs at Radio Shack and I can’t get them open. They don’t unscrew and pulling with pliars just deforms the connector. Stupid Radio Shack parts.)

computersgamesmoved from livejournal

OS X 10.4.10 FTP Client

August 22, 2007

Well, it seems I’ve broken OS X 10.4.10’s FTP client:

ftp> get ThePowerOfNightmaresDVD.iso
local: ThePowerOfNightmaresDVD.iso remote: ThePowerOfNightmaresDVD.iso
227 Entering Passive Mode (208,70,29,143,149,3)
150-Accepted data connection
150 4283032.0 kbytes to download
100% |*************************************| 2078 MB 142.81 KB/s --:-- ETA

That was unintentional.

computersmoved from livejournal

Eagle3D

July 6, 2007

Second-Try Render from Eagle3D

A bit bored at work today I’m poking around with Eagle3D which generates POVray files from CadSoft Eagle .brd files. The ceramic disc caps up there are wrong caps are mostly missing, the TO-92 parts are misaligned, and the screw terminals and RJ45 connectors are missing, but I think it looks pretty nifty.

At this point I’m going to stop messing with it and get some lunch. I don’t need an accurate rendering of the board for anything, I just thought it was nifty to mess with. Now to figure out some lunch… I’m not sure what I’m going to have, but it’ll probably be something low cost.

computerselectronicsmoved from livejournal

CLUSTAL W vs. Mac Pro

June 27, 2007


Four CLUSTAL W Jobs

In order to help Danielle out with something I currently have four scripts running, each running six sequential CLUSTAL W jobs doing DNA sequence alignment on 500-some sequences. Each core in my Mac Pro (quad core 2.6 GHz Xeon) is chewing away at data, and each of those individual jobs should take around 40 minutes each.

This is v1.81, compiled as an Intel binary with GCC i686-apple-darwin8-gcc-4.0.1 earlier today. I was going to use the pre-compiled fat binary v1.83 version made available here, but Danielle had originally been running this all on her slow(er) XP laptop with v1.81, and I didn’t want to risk any versioning problems.

Hopefully the data will prove to be useful tomorrow. I hope.

If it does, I might have to run more. That’s okay, at least the Mac Pro is finally getting a workout.

computersmoved from livejournal

Power Mac G5 Shipping Problems

June 22, 2007

Arraugh. The guy who purchased my Power Mac G5 received it and found it to be not seeing the hard drives. When he opened it up he found that the drive latches were up and the drives were dislodged. Here is the message from him:

Hi Steve, I received the item. There was a bit of a scare though.
I turned the computer on and all I got was a flashing folder with
a question mark. So I started up on the OS X DVD you included
and tried to run Disk Utility. To my surprise, there were no hard
drives in the computer. So I opened up the computer and
noticed that both hard drives must have been dislodged from
the case during transportation. And both of the gates that hold
them in position were in their up position. And the bottom HD
had the interconnects damaged in the process. Fortunately, I
was able to straighten the pins and reconnect the wires and
everything seems to be working fine. Just wanted to let you
know. I am still testing the machine right now. I will keep you
posted if there are any further problems. Thanks Steve.

This is kinda frustrating. If you take a look at this photo you can see the latches holding the drives in place. I wonder if it got dropped during shipping in a combination of ways which caused the latches and drives to become dislodged?

Uggh.

UPDATE: I sent the photo of the latches and such off to the person, and he replied with this:

Yeah, it looks like the source of the problem must have been in the
shipping. The foam inside the box looks damaged. And there is a
hole in the box. I will take photos and post it up soon. But so far,
everything seems to work fine.

So, it sounds like UPS sure bounced the package around a bit.

acquired thingscomputersmoved from livejournal

Mac Pro Photos

June 8, 2007

RAM Board in Mac Pro w/2GB of Crucial RAM

I’m not sure if any of you are interested, but I’ve posted some photos of unboxing and setup of my Mac Pro (photo gallery retired). The box is a bit different shape from that of the G5, but the two machines are practically identical. This is good because it ensured that the aluminum shelf I made for it a few years ago still worked great once the machine was placed in the rack.

Also, this machine is amazingly quiet. It’s just as loud as my work laptop and loads more powerful. :D Anyway, here is the link to the Mac Pro album (photo gallery retired) if you are interested.

acquired thingscomputersmoved from livejournal