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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.

Continue readingCPU 2: Machine Check Exception: 4 Bank 4: f61c2001ba080813
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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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SMTP-AUTH for Postfix via courier-authlib (authdaemond)

Published September 4, 2008

Getting SMTP authentication working with Postfix via authdaemond on FreeBSD 7.0 without occasional, useless errors in /var/log/messages has just caused me an hour of frustration. Therefore, I wish to document what I had to do to make it work right:

First off, Postfix (mail/postfix) and courier-authlib with MySQL support (security/courier-authlib with AUTH_MYSQL set in the config) must be installed. Setting up courier-authlib to talk to a MySQL db is beyond the scope of this document, but it basically involves setting the following lines:

/usr/local/etc/authlib/authdaemonrc:

authmodulelist="authmysql"

/usr/local/etc/authlib/authmysqlrc:

MYSQL_SERVER localhost
MYSQL_SOCKET /tmp/mysql.sock
MYSQL_PORT 0
MYSQL_OPT 0
MYSQL_USERNAME mail
MYSQL_PASSWORD [OBSCURED]
MYSQL_DATABASE mail
MYSQL_USER_TABLE mailbox
MYSQL_CRYPT_PWFIELD password
MYSQL_UID_FIELD uid
MYSQL_GID_FIELD gid
MYSQL_LOGIN_FIELD pobox
MYSQL_HOME_FIELD homedir
MYSQL_MAILDIR_FIELD CONCAT(homedir,'/',maildir,'/')
MYSQL_QUOTA_FIELD quota
MYSQL_NAME_FIELD name

After that is set, Postfix’s main.cf must have SASL enabled with smtpd_sasl_auth_enable = yes. Next, the following smtpd.conf must be placed in /usr/local/etc/sasl2:

/usr/local/etc/sasl2/smtpd.conf

pwcheck_method: authdaemond
log_level: 3
mech_list: PLAIN LOGIN
authdaemond_path: /var/run/authdaemond/socket

auxprop_plugin: mysql
sql_select: select password from users where email = '%u@%r'

Now, here’s the stupid part. See those last two lines, auxprop_plugin: mysql and sql_select: select...? They don’t do anything, and that SELECT statement won’t even return anything useful on my db. Without them there SMTP AUTH works great. However, if you don’t have those lines there, Postfix will regularly complain loudly with errors such as these:

Sep 4 21:30:02 banstyle postfix/smtpd[47677]: sql_select option missing
Sep 4 21:30:02 banstyle postfix/smtpd[47677]: auxpropfunc error no mechanism available

Please note that with authdaemond, CRAM-MD5 and DIGEST-MD5 authentication mechanisms won’t work. (These would normally be set with mech_list: PLAIN LOGIN CRAM-MD5 DIGEST-MD5.) If enabled they will appear available but won’t work.

One final thing… Want to know how to be sure that the server is notifying clients that it supports authentication? Just simply telnet to port 25 on your mail server and type in EHLO domain.com. The AUTH LOGIN PLAIN and AUTH=LOGIN PLAIN lines show you that plain-text authentication is now available:

c0nsumer@banstyle:~> telnet localhost 25
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 banstyle.nuxx.net ESMTP Postfix
EHLO nuxx.net
250-banstyle.nuxx.net
250-PIPELINING
250-SIZE 10240000
250-VRFY
250-ETRN
250-STARTTLS
250-AUTH LOGIN PLAIN
250-AUTH=LOGIN PLAIN
250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
250-8BITMIME
250 DSN
QUIT
221 2.0.0 Bye
Connection closed by foreign host.

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nuxx.net Mail Move

Published September 3, 2008

Tonight I ran into a harsh realization that the setup I’d intended to use for mail administration, Postfix Admin, has no facilities for editing server-side filters. Therefore, I’m moving my old, highly modified vMail.Admin install over to the new server.

Tonight I got everything working and tested except for the web-based front end for Postfix’s database. That shouldn’t be too hard to get going, I just don’t feel like working on it any more tonight. After that is going I will be shutting down mail on the old box and moving it to the new one. During this time you may (read:will) experience problems having mail delivered, checking mail, the works.

Sorry.

Due to how email works nothing should be lost, it might just take a while to arrive. Just keep using secure.nuxx.net for pop3s / imaps or SquirrelMail and everything will work fine.

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Sites Moved to banstyle.nuxx.net

Published September 3, 2008

As mentioned before, I am in the process of moving to a new colo provider while at the same time moving everything hosted on nuxx.net to the shiny new banstyle.nuxx.net.

As part of this I moved all websites to the new server. That means if I host your site, it’s now on the new box. Mail, nor any of the shiny tools used for checking logs and such have been moved; I hope to get to that later in the week.

If you have any problems, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Oh, and I might be sticking ads on the sites of people for whom I host just simple galleries (aka nuxxfriends). This is to offset the cost of the server and colocation. Hopefully that’s not a problem.

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Wheels Go ‘Round Again

Published September 1, 2008

The rear of my bike, with new a SRAM PG-850 cassette, SRAM PC-870 chain, and Shimano Deore RD-M531-L rear derailleur.

This afternoon I made a quick run to REI (yes, they were actually open) and was able to pick up a Shimano Deore RD-M531-L rear derailleur for the must-be-MSRP price of $54. This, along with a new SRAM PC-870 chain and an SRAM PG-850 cassette purchased as-new from someone on the MMBA forums got my bike working great again.

After getting everything together and set up I went for a short test ride around my neighborhood, which turned into a 15 mile loop up through River Bends Park to Ryan Road. In short, practically all of my shifting problems are gone. I still have to replace a bent front chainring, there’s still spoke noise, and I think I the bottom bracket may be making a rubbing sound, but none of that makes it difficult to ride.

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My New Single Speed

Published September 1, 2008

The emergency single speed conversion done to get home. I ended up using the 22 and 13 tooth rings.

I’ve been thinking that it’d be nice to have a single speed bike to ride, but I didn’t want to acquire one this way.

Today I ate a very large breakfast then set out with the intention of riding to Lake Orion and back, then to Metro Beach and back, hoping to break 90 miles today. After riding just about four miles and getting to the intersection of 23 Mile and VanDyke, just when I was feeling warmed up, something felt odd when shifting. Looking down I saw that my rear derailleur was canted to the side with the chain coming off of the top jockey wheel. As soon as touched the assembly to try and reposition things the derailleur came off, as seen here.

I ended up doing an emergency single speed conversion by shortening the chain, tensioning it up as I could, then riding carefully home. I had to make a total of three adjustments to the chain, because I found that if I had the chain on anything but the smallest rings it would drop off and skip around.

Even after settling on the two smallest rings I had to be very careful because occasionally the chain would bounce a bit and climb up one gear, putting so much tension on the chain (and BB) that it was nearly impossible to pedal. When this happened I’d have to remove the rear wheel, re-seat the chain, then keep going again. This had to be done at least six times in the four miles home. Eventually I found that if I pedaled gingerly, never pedaled when going over bumps, didn’t apply much force when going uphill, and coasted as often as possible I was generally fine. I could

Now to figure out what to do… The Shimano SLX group is tempting, or maybe the SRAM X.9 stuff. One thing I know I won’t be doing for a while is riding my bike.

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