Archive

morning sms

Published on 12/8/2008 in miscellaneous. 5 Comments

Her:

Hi babe, good morning … my pussy really hurts

Me:

Um, good morning to you too!

Her:

Really hurts when I pee

Me:

Er …. been to the doctor?

Her:

My uterus hurts .. it’s killing me

Me:

Go to the doctor!

still geeking

Published on 9/8/2008 in deep geekery. 2 Comments

Well it should be pretty straight forward installing OpenSolaris. But it’s not. Not for me anyway.

First off, it wouldn’t display on my Apple monitor.
I plugged it into my TV and at least I could see what was going on.
I thought it had hung during the boot from the DVD, but it just took ages. Eventually booted up and installed, but it wouldn’t boot from the hard drive. Bad PBR signal was the only message. Whatever that means. Tried a few more times (each time takes an hour). No luck. I was using release 85. Couldn’t get 95, so tried 93. This time it booted. All good. Set up the zfs pool, shared it, eventually mounted it on my Mac, fiddled around with the user ids and permissions, and could eventually read and write …. very slowly. About 2 MB/s. Other people get 40 MB/s and more depending on their network. So copying all my media would take 4 days. Okkaaaaayy.

Had to figure out if it was the network - don’t think it is, as writing a file direct to the drive gets 2 MB/s. So … the SATA driver? The drives in the right mode? IRQ conflicts? Nooooo idea. I’m learning all sorts of Solaris commands, but not really getting anywhere.

Google helped a little. So dude had the same hardware and same issue. He zeroed out the drives and reinstalled and it seemed to help. So I’m trying that right now. But it takes hours to zero out 3TB of drives.

dead drive

Published on 8/8/2008 in geekery. 2 Comments

I was right, the 1TB Lacie Drive just died. It made a beep, then started making a kind of clicking noise.

It was pretty much full. All my TV shows and movies. Luckily, I’d copied everything over to other drives.

Anyway, don’t ask me about OpenSolaris install. It’s almost 1am. Still not even installed. A few hiccups along the way!

tooooooo many

Published on 7/8/2008 in blogging. 0 Comments

Too many bullet points in the last two posts.

Will do better.

zfs

Published on 7/8/2008 in deep geekery. 4 Comments

Major geekery alert!

I have 2.1TB of hard drive space in my Mac Pro, and 1.5TB in my external Lacie drives. However, there is no redundancy built in. No RAID5 if you know what I mean. If one of those drives fails, then I’ll lose what’s on it, unless I have a backup.

I have backups of my main drive (system, user files, music, photos), via Time Machine, which has saved my ass twice already, but my other media (mainly movies and TV shows) on a specific drive would be lost if that drive failed. My 1TB Lacie drive has started making funny noises, and Firewire on the Mac is a bit dodgy I think. Or my drive is already dodgy - always unmounting and remounting.

So, I’m going to build a home fileserver. I’m just going to follow those instructions and use ZFS on OpenSolaris.

Why ZFS?

Stolen directly from the link above - mainly:

  • Simple administration
  • Ability to create large, redundant data storage pools with one command
  • Built-in data scrubbing to enable ZFS to self-heal ‘latent failures’ (bit rot etc)
  • Is designed upon the assumption that disk hardware should never be trusted, so solid checksumming, transactions are used
  • Designed to use cheap, commodity SATA disks, not expensive SAS disks
  • RAIDZ1 can survive 1 drive failure, RAIDZ2 can survive 2 drive failures
  • Failed disks can be replaced and substituted with one command (if no hot spares are available)
  • ZFS data pools can be shared via NFS, Samba/CIFS and iSCSI
  • Sun Solaris OS and ZFS are free and open source

So I just bought some hardware:

Total cost was HK$9500, with $4700 of that being the 3 1TB drives. If I went AMD and 4 x 640GB drives, I could have got the system for about $7000, but I couldn’t find the AMD motherboards supported by OpenSolaris and with enough SATA ports. So, it was a little more expensive that I had hoped. It better work!

So, this evening, I will mainly be geeking. Installing OpenSolaris, setting up the zfs pool and filesystem, then sharing it over the network and auto mounting it on my Mac. Then I need to transfer all my files.

back, kinda

Published on 6/8/2008 in miscellaneous. 3 Comments

Well, I’m gonna try. 

Tropical Storm Kammuri kept most of HK at home today.

Working from home right? Too far Tony?

Anyway, I decided on a bit of geekery. You know you missed it.I decided to upgrade my Wordpress installation from 2.3 to 2.6. Total disaster. The upgrade went fine at first, I could view the blog just fine. Couldn’t log in though. Known issue, but none of the suggested fixes worked for me. Time to roll back! However:

  1. My database dump wouldn’t load (yeah, should have tested it first)
  2. My hosting company had not been backing up the database!

Luckily, the awesome support dude at Liquid Web managed to fix my database file, so I’m back where I started. Shame, as Wordpress 2.5 and 2.6 look pretty nice. Will wait to see if they fix the upgrade issues.  

So where have I been?

Tip of the hat to Jimmy Two Times for many of the book and music recommendations.  

Well, I’ll try to be back more often. I gotta tell you the Boracay Typhoon Story and the Private Dancer Epic Fury Story.

Actually, Private Dancer Doris was supposed to be here this week, but her Cebu Pacific flight last Friday had engine problems and turned back to Manila. Now she’s too scared to fly. Well, at least I don’t have to worry about her biting my knob off.   

In a bit. 

testing new host

Published on 6/8/2008 in miscellaneous. 0 Comments

test test


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