nuxx.net – Page 135 – Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.

Control

Published September 14, 2008

Danielle and I finally watched Control (Official Site · IMDB · Wikipedia), which she had received from Netflix last week. While it was a bit slow and (obviously) predictable, I enjoyed it.

I think that tonight I also got banstyle.nuxx.net working properly again. Over the past two days I did a bunch of extensive testing with spare RAM, Breakin, and a white board, and I think that I may have narrowed down the problem. I believe that the MCEs I was seeing were caused by a combination of a failing DIMM and modules which were the same in part number but not in actual chip content. There may actually be a bad slot there too, but I’m not certain of that.

I’ve winnowed the box down to 6GB of matched, tested RAM and it seems to pass all the tests I’ve thrown at it thus far. With the discovery that ad6 is dying as well I ordered a 3ware 8006-2LP and two Seagate ST3500320AS 500GB disks. Those were fitted into the server and I then dumped the the partitions from ad4 to it and everything seemed to be working fine, but occasionally slowly. Jumpering the board to force the first PCI-X slot to 66MHz (to match the PCI 8006-2LP) and turning on bus mastering for IDE transfers on the PCI slots seems to have sorted this out.

SMART tests and a number of hours of Breakin have shown the disks to be okay, so come Monday morning I’ll attempt to get a good 36 hours of burning in happening. If this all goes good the server will be back in place on Wednesday, with everything moved (shifted?) back over by Thursday evening.

If you are interested, here is a photo of my workbench just after dumping the partitions from one half of the old mirror to the new mirror set. Due to a bug in dump (or UFS) on FreeBSD 7.0 I had 6.3 booting off of an external USB drive, running dump to throw data from disk to another, a partition at a time.

After that photo was taken fstab was edited, everything booted up great, and then the new drives each passed an extended offline SMART test.

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Time Machine Network Backup Speedup / Fix

Published September 11, 2008

I just acquired a new external disk enclosure and 750GB disk for hanging off of an AirPort Extreme and using for Time Machine backups of my main machine. From this I currently have ~480GB of data to back up, and for some reason the initial large backup repeatedly fails when I attempt to do it over the network.

The easy way around this is to first do the backup to the drive when it is connected locally and then hang it off of the AirPort Extreme to continue the incremental backups. The problem is that this doesn’t work as one would expect, because when an initial Time Machine backup is made to a local disk the backup ends up in a series of subdirectories, which is a different format from what it is via network.

When the backup is made to a volume hanging off of an AirPort Extreme a .sparsebundle file is created containing the backup; essentially a disk image stored on the network. Therefore, if you make a Time Machine backup locally and then try to use it via an AirPort Extreme the .sparsebundle file will be created on the disk in parallel to the now-useless directory structure.

So, how do you work around this? Easy. Hook the external disk up to the AirPort Extreme then either let the backup fail or cancel it, which will leave the incomplete .sparsebundle file on the disk. Disconnect the drive from the AirPort Extreme, connect it to your Mac, and point Time Machine to that volume. If it finds an appropriate .sparsebundle on the volume (which it will, since it’s already there) it’ll use that instead of creating the aforementioned subdirectory structure.

The backup will then happen quite quickly, and after it completes you can just hang the drive back off of the AirPort Extreme, redirect Time Machine to back up to that network volume, and things will continue via the network.

UPDATE: Since 10.5.5 was applied to my machine I have been unable to use this backup method and have had to resort to making the entire initial backup via network.

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ad6 is Dying Too!

Published September 11, 2008

Error messages on the console showing that ad6 is actually failing hard. Good thing I ordered replacement disks.

It’s a good thing I received a 3ware 8006-2LP and a pair of Seagate 500GB disks today, because one of the two drives in the mirror set on my new server is just about to fail. To make matters worse, the failing disk is ad6, and ad4 is the one I’d accidently broken the other night, so I’ve been desperately waiting for the disks to finish syncing so that everything would be backed up.

This failed at ~10:00am this morning, which kept me from rebooting the box remotely to run more stress testing and (hopefully) replicating last night’s error.

Now that the data is sync’d I’ll wait for it to finish fscking then I’ll shut it down cleanly and begin running Breakin again.

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London in November

Published September 11, 2008

This morning Danielle and I booked a vacation to London in November. We’ll be staying at the Holiday Inn Express LONDON-EARL’S COURT from 09-Nov through 17-Nov. Total cost only ended up being $1900-some for the two of us, flying on unrestricted NWA tickets non-stop out of Detroit.

Now to figure out what to do in the UK… We’d like to visit some people from here and #llamasoft, and hopefully some interesting places. Plenty of wandering is in order, too.

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Esquire Is Good For Something

Published September 10, 2008

The front page e-ink display and PCB from the cover of the October 2008 issue of Esquire magazine.

Yes, I too picked up a copy of the October 2008 issue of Esquire. The magazine itself is going in the trash, but I pulled the front panel apart so that I could poke with an e-paper / Electronic Paper / E-Ink display. I must say, this is a very nice, very high contrast display. If this were put in some more portable, more durable, more cost effective form than the Kindle (and without the data network crap) I could see myself getting one to use for reading.

When the magazine was sitting on the front seat of my car, glancing over at it reminded me of $RANDOM_NEAR_FUTURE_SCIFI where magazines are shown sitting on tables and racks blinking and flashing away. To be honest, I found it as irritating as a banner ad. I hope this isn’t where things actually go tech-wise.

Also, when I arrived home today I noticed a lot of dust and cut marks in the asphalt near my garage door, which makes me believe that something is being done about the sunken area there. What’s strange is that it’s been like this for years without issue. I’m not sure why it’s being fixed now.

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CPU 2: Machine Check Exception: 4 Bank 4: f61c2001ba080813

Published September 9, 2008

A real, honest, good failure while running Breakin on banstyle.nuxx.net. It points to something being wrong with the second CPU or bank of memory.

In testing my server banstyle.nuxx.net has had its first real set of errors / failures. This is a good thing.

First, last night I started getting SMART warnings about bad blocks on ad6, which is the second hard drive. So today I just went ahead and ordered up a pair of ST3500320AS 500GB disks and a 3ware 8006-2LP, the same as is used in my current server.

Note the sdb errors, which are consistent with the other errors I’d been seeing indicating a bad block on the second hard disk.

Second, I came home today and found my server hung while running Breakin, displaying the error CPU 2: Machine Check Exception: 4 Bank 4: f61c2001ba080813 TSC 2561d00c4ef7 ADDR ce19fd00. So, at least I’ve got some place to look for what else might be the issue.

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nuxx.net Is Back Up

Published September 8, 2008

Well, my site, nuxx.net is back up. I have the new server here at home and I’m starting to take a look at it. Hopefully I’ll have some sort of answer soon.

Unfortunately, in looking at it, I both screwed the BIOS and the software RAID array. In the BIOS I tried to backrev the BIOS, only to find out that Tyan (motherboard manufacturer) had changed Flash chips with the particular board I got, and the older BIOS’ don’t support it. Long story short, I was able to downgrade to an older BIOS, but as that older BIOS doesn’t support the new chip type, attempting to upgrade it again simply causes the flashing program to report “Error : Flash part is not supported”.

Beyond that, I was waiting for the server to rebuild the array (after the hard power off of the failure on Sunday morning) and getting impatient, so I decided to disconnect (via software) the inconsistent half of the array, thinking that I could just let it finish building later. This didn’t go so well (for some reason) and I ended up breaking the array. I think it’s back together, but I do worry a bit that something may be lost. We’ll see, I guess.

Mail is back up, things were sync’d over, but there is/will be some quirkyness with the mail received in the last day or two. Expect to see some duplicates. Sorry.

Oh, great: Sep 7 22:37:12 banstyle smartd[863]: Device: /dev/ad6, 1 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors

Right now I’m feeling really frustrated with this whole process and wanting to just put it away and maybe start over later. I just don’t want to leave everyone else’s stuff down.

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All In One Go

Published September 6, 2008

The winding bridge through The Pines at Stony Creek, with a skinny section. I was able to ride half of it in my first go.

Today I headed over to Stony Creek and rode the route normally taken by the Wednesday Night Group Ride (Pines -> Snake -> Roller Coaster) in one go, attempting every log pile along the way. I was able to do it, only putting my foot down twice, with each of those two times being at the top of log piles I hadn’t previously ridden over. At the end of that segment I felt like I was about to throw up, but in a good way.

After this I rode through The Pines again, and attempted to ride across the skinny section in the curving bridge. The first time I tried I made it half way before dropping off. The second time I only made it about 1/5 of the way before falling off.

Heading back to the parking lot I decided to ride down a narrow path which supposedly leads to a small lake or pond. It was a bit overgrown (Photo 1 & Photo 2) and part-way down my arm was caught by a thorn, cutting it a bit. Right after this I got tangled in more brush, my bike fell part-way to the left, and when I fell I landed with my stomach on the right end of the handlebar. Oops. Now I’ve got a couple of weird bruises on my stomach along with the cut on my arm.

Other than beating myself up a bit, it was a really nice ride. One thing I noticed is that the crooked tree I’d mentioned before has been cut town. This disappoints me, because it was fun leaning and riding around it. Oh well.

Time to shower and get on with the day.

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Pulped Data is Secure Data

Published September 6, 2008

A week's worth of receipts in a Tupperware container after having been soaked in warm water and pulped with a stick blender.

I’ve had a small stack of scraps of paper on my desk for a little while now, each bearing rather important passwords. I’d intended to burn them, but that is a hassle with both my neighbors wondering why I’m burning things out front, finding a can to do it in, etc.

Wanting to clean up my desk a bit I decided to destroy the passwords in a different manner: soaking in a pint glass of water, then pulping with a stick blender.

This worked so well that I took the week’s worth of receipts which I’d just entered into Quicken, soaked them in a larger container of water, and pulped them as well. I thought about then experimenting with making some new paper from this pulp, but I don’t have any screening handy, nor do I need another project.

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banstyle.nuxx.net: It’s Back

Published September 5, 2008

The display on the VGA output of my new server, banstyle.nuxx.net, after it went down hard at ~01:30 EDT on 05-Sep-2008.

My server, banstyle.nuxx.net is back. In case you didn’t see the LiveJournal post I made about the server being down, know that it went down about 01:30 EDT this morning and didn’t come back up over night. The symptoms were that the machine had an active link to the switch, but the arp cache was aging and the box was generally unreachable and unresponsive. Here’s a Cacti graph showing the outage.

At lunch I drove down to the colo facility, was escorted down to the room, and first noticed that the box was powered up, the network activity LED was blinking, but the disk controller LED was dark. Plugging in a monitor I saw that blinky colored bars overlaid on the normal console, looking like a hardware problem. Perhaps something with the video controller.

The box was rebooted, and as a precaution I went into the BIOS and disabled the bits which redirect video output (text mode only, of course) to the serial port, essentially allowing the whole box to be managed from a terminal. I figure that maybe, possibly, somehow this contributed. After that, I booted the OS back up, did an initial check to be sure everything was okay, started the backed up mail on the old box flushing, and left. Things were a bit slow at first while fsck ran in the background and the mail filtered through, but after that everything seemed good.

So, to be honest, I don’t really know what went wrong. The server is working well again, I guess I’ll just have to keep a close eye on for a while. This is particularly frustrating because it’d been working great for the last four months while I had it at home. If there are any more problems, please bear with me…

For reference, here’s the stuff in /var/log/messages showing that there was nothing between the events noted in last night’s post about SMTP-AUTH and the reboot this morning:

Sep 4 23:05:50 banstyle postfix/smtpd[91552]: sql_select option missing
Sep 4 23:05:50 banstyle postfix/smtpd[91552]: auxpropfunc error no mechanism available
Sep 5 11:57:31 banstyle syslogd: kernel boot file is /boot/kernel/kernel
Sep 5 11:57:31 banstyle kernel: Copyright (c) 1992-2008 The FreeBSD Project.
Sep 5 11:57:31 banstyle kernel: Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994
Sep 5 11:57:31 banstyle kernel: The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
Sep 5 11:57:31 banstyle kernel: FreeBSD is a registered trademark of The FreeBSD Foundation.
Sep 5 11:57:31 banstyle kernel: FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE #2: Wed Aug 20 12:57:10 EDT 2008

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