The phone is back!

Several weeks ago my e815's backlight stopped working. This seems to be a somewhat-known software problem which resolves itself after resets or time. After a week and many different tests I had given up thinking it must actually be hardware in my case, and switched to a temporary phone until I could decide how to sort out my phones/plans best. Then Thursday night I turn it on figuring it couldn't hurt and everything worked. So I have a full featured phone again. I'm just happy I have one less thing to think about now...

25 drives in 2U

That's 25 146G 2.5" 10k SAS drives, or 3.6TB raw. The thing is somewhat an oversized holder for the drives too, with one layer up front going back maybe 6" and then just power, fans, and interface behind for another foot or so. The drives only list 5W on 5V and 3.6W on 12V, so it's pretty reasonable on power too.

Switches!

Windows NT 3.5

Today was a bit of a cleaning day in the barn, and I glanced through a disk case and noticed this set of Windows NT 3.5 floppies.

HD-DVD Sudoku

"HD-DVD Sudoku"

Dyne

Dean de Lucca has released Dyne, which is my new favorite of anything I've heard recently. There's also some other stuff on his studio page.

Spammers and their netblocks

Over the past week I've noticed several spam runs coming from what appear to be entire /24 netblocks dedicated to spamming. I figured that wouldn't last long or would drop to a few and they'd be on blacklists, but apparently they're not getting cut off/caught fast enough. Fortunately they're all the format randomword1.newdomain.tld with the ip x.y.z.1 (where 1 ranges from 1-255). The following does wonders for filtering them (drop-in for barracudas). Hope someone else finds it useful.

^Received: from (\w+(\d+)\.\w+\.\w+) \(\1 \[\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\2\]\)

The new toy

$ ssh -1 frontrow@192.168.1.102
Password:
Response:
Last login: Sat Apr 7 22:11:30 2007 from 192.168.1.100
-bash-2.05b$ system_profiler|head -14
Hardware:

Hardware Overview:

Machine Name: Mac
Machine Model: AppleTV1,1
Processor Speed: 1 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 1
Memory: 256 MB
Bus Speed: 400 MHz
Boot ROM Version: ATV11.00D9.B00
Serial Number: <Removed>
L2 Cache: 2 MB
-bash-2.05b$

I didn't even need to open the case. And now the fun begins...

Connection speeds

If only I could get a 25Mbps connection at home (for a reasonable price that is)...

The week from hell

I started off the week at a point where I needed a vacation, looking forward to it being a short week and then a 4 day weekend. Last week was busy and ended with a long evening of taking everything down to replace a cache controller on a SAN. Unfortunately despite a good start this week of hiding at work and getting things done for 3 hours, it just went downhill. The problems started with runaway stuff filling up a disk (of course on a volume that happened to be missed when setting up monitoring). There's then the fun issue of Linux drivers turning SCSI_STATUS_BUSY (retry) into BUS_BUSY (abort) to fix some specific bug, which unfortunately when hit with the contention and delays the combination of ESX and shared SAN cause, causes locking devices in read-only mode. Neither the filesystem or database engines like that much, and unfortunately the "fix" is currently a hack in the HBA driver (to roll back the vendor's change). Then came finding random corruption in a database (on Windows this time, unrelated to the Linux driver issue). After trying to track that down, it was discovered the timing correlated with a drive issue behind a SAN controller, which apparently leaked through the redundancy without being caught. As the problem started on the weekend, and the state of log replays requiring downtime, it required replaying transaction logs from Saturday through yesterday - which took hours in itself, not counting the staging/testing and pulling backup copies and restoring files at various states.

Then I had a spam filter randomly die. Turns out the CPU fan failed, so it'd run for 5-10 minutes and then go into thermal protect. Luckily once I knew the problem I was able to safely dequeue the mail without issue and with a screenshot and checking the motherboard model (for which they had me ignore the "Warranty void if removed" sticker), a replacement part was on the way. Not the instant replacement swap out I expected from most reports in support forums, but swapping a fan and heatsink is quicker and easier for me than a backup/restore. The replacement arrived the next day, along with a replacement and extra warranty sticker (which amused me), although I'm not thrilled with the design of the replacement part even though it seems to work. This is all worked around 7 hours of meetings, and the usual daily stuff. Plus I ended up rescheduling my Monday vacation between not really getting the whole weekend anyways and practicalities of scheduling. Hopefully that's turning into next weekend being 4 days though. I did end up having a few minutes of extra time while being at the mall over lunch on Thursday though, which resulted in toy shopping (which will be another post), which at least is something fun for the week. I'm just glad there was one fewer day for things to go wrong, and it's now the weekend.