Well… Jeremy Gregg is a touch unhappy about it, but I’m currently copying files from Porom -> PortaDrive1.
A portion of the files are missing, but the vast majority appear to be intact. Which is good since I don’t have backups for some of it as the backups were on the portable drive that I wiped to back up Randy’s computer. (So, Jeremy, I lost more files than you did.)
Set up a wireless network (well, _I_ wasn’t using any of my wireless gear) for Tim and Maria down the hall. Unfortunately, Tim’s laptop started throwing errors while I was working on it. Win98 was not saving my changes and while it saw the network (via a Linksys 802.11G bridge) it couldn’t access it. Eventually it become unbootable… He says this isn’t really new, but I’m feeling awful about it. I think I mostly took the time tonight to recover Porom to prove that I could. Obviously I’m losing sleep over it =/
Hard drive looks mostly intact, I lean toward memory issues. Attempted to run Memtest86 off of a Xubuntu based recovery CD but found the CD drive didn’t work. It has a PXE capable BIOS so if it isn’t working tomorrow I am going to attempt to network boot it using Porom as a terminal server. Probably will just use Edubuntu as it comes nicely built in and I can grab the ISO and burn it there (DSL) before coming back here to my 15kbps.
In other news, CenturyTel should get my phone setup tomorrow (today). Finally have all the roadblocks out of the way. The installer has been awesome, this will be his third trip up here to try to get it to work.
After a conversation dealing with DV, and because I am disasembling furniture at 1:30am, I watched the VCD semi-rough cut of Goldenlocks.
I include it here, without any context or history. Enjoy (or be scared).
http://www.jmaclabs.com/goldenlocks-vcd.mpg
Mistakes and fatigue took their toll tonight and too much elapsed to make an attempt.
Today’s strategy is based around a custom built live CD. The basic goal is to boot a known working 2.6 kernel with a large package of the tools that may be required to fix the system. All with the correct networking, users, and ssh ready to read the hard drives, wherever they may really be located. Reasonably confident in it, but have a deadline by what time in the morning it has to be back online. I will probably tweak a bit more of the CD tomorrow and try again Monday night.
In other news, Porom/Relm appears unrecoverable. It’s not normally used as a test box, Celes is my primary test box. But, Porom is almost identical to Moogle so was put into service. At some point the partition table may have been damaged. And with it, possibly a heck of a lot of my files.
Beatrix, my laptop that last night was starting to run into issues I tracked down to a severely messed up instance of spotlight. Spotlight is the search/index software for OSX. mds, the indexer, was causing an excessive level of disk I/O (~4500 writes per second). OSX was respawning it every time I killed it but it was showing up again with slightly different characteristics each time so took some tracking down. It became quite clear when respawns got down to <1 second from 15 minutes earlier.
Had some great fun last night attempting to move a server from a 2.4 series kernel to a 2.6. (2.4 has never had appropriate support, in my opinion, on this system and should never have been installed in the first place).
Oh, did I mention I’m doing this remotely.
At issue is that the 2.4 series is treating the SATA drives as IDE as the IDE drivers have some support for SATA. In general SATA is dealt with with the SCSI drivers today. I think that’s somewhere in the issue, at any rate.
Tried close to 10 different configurations of kernels and boot options last night. Nothing worked.
I think the only next step is to just treat this as I would locally, setup a boot CD using the kernel I want, see how it is treating the drives, and go from there. But, none of the boot CDs I tried last night worked at all on my test system. A bad sign.
That I have no sense of direction and rarely know where I am.
In comparison to the person in this Reuters article I am a walking GPS.
(entire article included in Extended if link unavailable) (more…)
There are times, like now, that I’m really quite tired but I can’t get to sleep because my mind is stuck on something.
Today I wandered down the mountain to check in on Ben and Megan. In the process I also stopped in at the new Barrier Audi, the dealership where my car came from. Very nice facility, lots of shiny new cars, very nice young salesperson gave me a quick tour and discussed all things Audi. The A4 is hands down the best car I’ve ever driven. I say this having driven quite a wide selection of cars, most of which I do not fit comfortably in.
The downside to this is that after dealing with Audi this past year, I will not buy another. Ever. I always preface my discussions with people on them as “They are great cars, but…” I would also be hesitant to give Barrier my business when I replace my car. I’ve probably detailed the trials and tribulations in a few posts, no idea if they managed to find their way to this blog though so I’ll recap. (more…)
I have a couple of Tux emblazoned items. The most visible is a thinkgeek.com hat. It’s very simple, just khaki with Tux embroidered on the front and thinkgeek.com on the back. The other is a LinuxFund credit card. I point out that in big letters it says Linux Fund on it.
Why am I even making this post?
The odd bit is that very few people I run into actually recognize Tux and associate Linux. It does happen sometimes, and it’s always quite nice when it does. Had a guy in a shop when I was buying something ask to shake my hand.
But, 90% of the female population (yes, I made up that percentage, but it’s an educated guess from years of observation) likes penguins. All of that subgroup think Tux is cute. I could relate countless stories of this, and I get “Awwww… Cute penguin!” at least 4 times a week. Ben will probably comment and relate a good story about the Aladdin buffet.
Mostly I’m posting this today because when asking for directions to the nearest post office, at a small pizza/coffee/whatever shop here, I ended up with the simultaneous observation of the “cute penguin” effect by all 3 girls behind the counter. This sets a new simultaneous cute penguin record for me. It’s also the first time that my hat has been called cute, especially since it’s looking a bit the worse for wear after many years of service.
http://www.thinkgeek.com/interests/linux/2998/ for those interested in the tux hat.
12:30pm Tuesday — Oof
Yet another extremely poor night of sleep. Woke up at 8am when my alarm went off and promptly reset it to 11am. Hit the snooze button every 8 minutes until noon. Lunch today is, guess what, beans! Left-overs even from dinner last night. Chased down by a honey bunches of oats cereal bar that had no flavor what-so-ever. Goals for today are to get some mail sent, try to check my grades. (more…)
Where in the world do things go?
2:00pm Tuesday — More Attempting to Put Things Places
Among the worst night’s sleep I’ve ever had and still fallen asleep. Woke up at around 1pm more tired than when I went to bed. (more…)
In this series of articles, hopefully 1 per day, I will be chronicling the ups and downs of my transition from Kennewick, WA to Snoqualmie Pass, WA. It may be a bad sign that my computer doesn’t believe that Snoqualmie is a word. (these entries are being written in Apple Pages until I get a chance to go online [outside] and post them) (more…)
