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

Stony Creek Mountain Bike Videos

Published September 16, 2008

I mounted my old Coolpix 5400 on the handlebar of my bike in order to get some video of bike rides.

Yesterday I decided to go for a bike ride at Stony Creek, but before doing that I grabbed some small pieces of non-slip foam and some cable ties and strapped my old Nikon Coolpix 5400 to the handlebars of the bike. (This is how it looked when riding.)

The resulting videos aren’t great, as being mounted on the handle bars made the video jerky and noisy, with every little movement, bump, and vibration translating into shake, blur, and noise. However, I think they are interesting enough, and in one of them you can even watch me fall.

These videos are only short, couple minute segments of what I feel are some of the more interesting pieces of single track at Stony Creek. Length was limited by the recording time of the camera.

Here’s the videos on YouTube in high res, including the one of me falling (#3):

· The Pines #1
· The Pines #2
· Roller Coaster #1
· Roller Coaster #2
· Roller Coaster #3 & Me Falling
· Roller Coaster #4
· Roller Coaster #5
· Marker 26 to 25
· Back to Parking Lot

The original, and thusly higher quality, MOV files straight out of the camera at https://nuxx.net/videos. Just be warned, they are large:

· stony_creek_15oct2008_pines_1.mov (46.3 MB)
· stony_creek_15oct2008_pines_2.mov (46.4 MB)
· stony_creek_15oct2008_rollercoaster_1.mov (45.9 MB)
· stony_creek_15oct2008_rollercoaster_2.mov (25.5 MB)
· stony_creek_15oct2008_rollercoaster_3.mov (24.8 MB)
· stony_creek_15oct2008_rollercoaster_4.mov (45.7 MB)
· stony_creek_15oct2008_rollercoaster_5.mov (38.8 MB)
· stony_creek_15oct2008_to_parking.mov (46.6 MB)
· stony_creek_15oct2008_up_mount_sheldon_26_to_25 (22.5 MB)

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More Broken Bike Stuffs

Published September 16, 2008

Today while riding one more go through the Roller Coaster at Stony Creek (after recording videos, to be posted later) I fell pretty hard on the right side, and hurt my shoulder. I was going around a slow-ish switchback and my front wheel skidded to the left and I just went down.

I’d thought the only thing damaged was my shoulder, but after getting back on the bike it didn’t shift right. I just put it on the stand to sort it out so I could ride tomorrow and while it initially appeared to be a cable tension issue, which was wholly possible seeing as I’d just replaced the rear derailleur, that wasn’t it. The bottom of the rear derailleur appears to be cocked inward, and after checking to be sure it wasn’t another broken mounting bolt, I noticed that the derailleur hanger appears to be a bit off. After removing it from the bike and checking it with a straightedge it does appear that I’ve bent it slightly.

When I removed the wheel I also noticed that the rear axel / hub / bearings aren’t turning very smoothly at all. I suspect that when I had to do the half-assed single speed conversion during which the chain would occasionally climb to the next ring there was too much pressure on the bearings, or something. So, I guess I’ll have to fix that before I ride next too. Hopefully it just needs some adjustment and I haven’t destroyed the races.

I need to learn to ride better and stop being so rough on my bike.

Since I’m already buried in working on problems with the server and getting it up and going again I’ll have to put this off for a bit.

Also, in that fall I scraped my leg and bruised my right nipple. I have never before bruised a nipple.

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3ware 8006-2LP Sucks Under FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE

Published September 14, 2008

Results from using Bonnie++ on FreeBSD 7.0 with a 3ware controller (twe), gmirror, and just a single local disk.

As mentioned here I got my new server working with a 3ware 8006-2LP and a pair of new 500GB disks. While it was working fine, I noticed that when updating the FreeBSD ports collection that the update would occasionally pause, consuming no CPU, but with the update process having a status of sbwait. I understand this to mean that the process is waiting on a blocked socket.

It turns out that the twe(4) driver is what is known as GIANT-LOCKED, which I believe means that it uses the old SMP locking mechanism in FreeBSD:

twe0: <3ware Storage Controller. Driver version 1.50.01.002> port 0x8c00-0x8c0f mem 0xfc7ffc00-0xfc7ffc0f,0xfb800000-0xfbffffff irq 28 at device 3.0 on pci1
twe0: [GIANT-LOCKED]
twe0: [ITHREAD]
twe0: 2 ports, Firmware FE8S 1.05.00.068, BIOS BE7X 1.08.00.048

Best I can tell, the result of this is that the disk controller’s driver needs to wait for the kernel to free up other resources and tell the driver that it can go ahead and work before it does things. The result of this tends to be that the driver works well, but there is a lot of latency.

This understanding matches what I observed, which was the aforementioned lengthy pauses when doing things which required a bunch of disk IO. In order to prove this understanding out, I set up a test hard disk running a stock FreeBSD 7.0 amd64 installation from which I could run Bonnie++, a file-based disk benchmarking suite.

In my testing I used the following three scenarios:

· One 120GB IBM Deskstar PATA drive (IC35L120AVVA07) connected to the motherboard booting the OS, listed in the results as banstyle_deskstar.
· Two 500GB Western Digital SATA drives (WD5000AAKS-40TMA0) connected to the motherboard with software RAID 1 via gmirror(8), listed in the results as banstyle_gmirror.
· Two 500GB Seagate SATA drives (ST3500320AS) connected to the 3ware 8006-2LP using the twe(4) driver in hardware RAID 1, listed in the results as banstyle_twe.

The result ended up being that all three configurations are generally around the same speed for throughput, but the 3ware controller had an absurd amount of latency. If one looks at the HTML version of the Bonnie++ output here (or the PNG here or above), one can see that was giving near three SECONDS of latency for random seeks and writes using write(2). This is insane.

The only thing I can think to attribute this to is the GIANT-LOCK in twe(4). I guess this means that I’m going to have to go back to gmirror(8) for software RAID and return the card. How disappointing.

(If anyone reading this disagrees with these findings or wishes to comment on them, please don’t hesitate to do so here or by emailing me directly.)

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Salsa’s Fargo

Published September 14, 2008

Salsa's stock photo of their new bike, Fargo. It is a touring bike based around 29" mountain bike wheels. I think I want one.

While waiting for Bonnie++ to run (more on this later — it’s not good) I wanted to post about a new bike recently announced by Salsa, an interesting looking touring bike built around a mountain bike-ish frame and 29″ MTB wheels.

For the last month or so I’ve been kicking around the idea of building a new bike for myself, but each time I find myself stuck with either the idea of another mountain bike or something a bit more touring-ish. I have a mountain bike which fits me quite nicely, so I’ve started to think that I should just be content with what I have and let things be. Then, while looking up info on the new wheel that built, I come across Salsa’s Fargo. This bike looks like it’d do an incredibly good job at longer rides and possible commuting, and maybe even some biking / camping trips.

There’s something I really like about the idea of 29er wheels (29″ / 700c), the ability to use wide mountain bike tires, clearance for fenders with 2.3″ tires, disc brakes, etc.

At an estimated $2k (built up) I don’t know if I’ll be able to afford one, but it’s sure tempting to start thinking about one. The frames are supposed to ship in November and the bikes themselves in February. Trails Edge sells Salsa stuff and is (relatively) local… Maybe I should finally pay them a visit…

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Black and Shiny

Published September 14, 2008

Set up to polish my boots in the laundry room. One boot is done.

After eating some really nice Skillet Baked Ziti (recipe from America’s Test Kitchen) that Danielle made for dinner I avoided working on my server by polishing my boots. As you can see above or at this close-up of the toes of my boots, they needed it.

Now I get to go back to figuring out why twe(4) in FreeBSD 7.0 seems sluggish. It may just be my perception, so I’m double-checking this by comparing the new 3ware-based array to the old gmirror(8) version. Or, it may be that it’s one of three drivers (the other two are ohci(4) and atkbd(4)) which indicate that they are GIANT-LOCKED, which means that they use the old SMP locking method.

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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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