Cricalix.Net

One of the benefits of owning your own place is that you have control of your garden (if you have a garden). One of the drawbacks of … well, you can fill that in yourself :)

Yesterday, after getting in from a small tour of Devon (family gathering, 13 of us at a pub in Bratton Clovelly - good food!) that started on Friday, I decided to tackle the compost bin in my garden. The quality of compost coming out the bottom was utter garbage (literally it turns out), and I wanted to restart it / fix it. Step 1 was to start emptying the bin into various containers so I could decide what to keep and what to throw. In the top 6 inches of the bin, I found 5 worms, a few bits of decaying material, a large amount of dry grass and clippings, and various bits of plastic. Plastic. In a compost bin. I have to wonder whether the previous owner thought that plastic would be decomposed in a compost bin.
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At $work, we’ve been running very tight on disk space for a few months now. So tight that we’ve had to regularly drop data out of the tables and store it offline, in the hope that we can restore it later. Luckily it’s only mail transaction logs, but they’re still fairly important. I campaigned via my director to get something decent and scaleable in place - perhaps an IBM SAN component. Scales to multiple terabytes, supports multiple enclosures, hot swap everything and a fair chunk of redundancy.

It finally arrived on Friday - couriered straight from Germany by a courier company called HopHop. That had me laughing. Good thing I understand some basic (VERY basic) German, because the courier didn’t seem to speak English! The box was over 5 feet long, 3 feet wide and 2 feet deep - all this for a 4U rackmountable array? Turns out it was a bit of a Russian Doll box, containing 10 seperate hard drive boxes, 4 QLogic FC HBAs, 2 GBICs, 2 fibre patch cables and a partridge in a pear tree plenty of documentation. Probably weighed in at 80 kilos all told.

I had just been remarking to a friend the other day about how stable my Force9 ADSL connection is. Silly me forgot to do all the usual superstitious stuff like knocking on wood when I said that. Wednesday last week, my line died at 9:22 A.M. Didn’t think much of it, I’m used to the line rebooting once in a while when BT do something at the exchange. Got home that evening and found that the line wouldn’t come back - no DSL signal present on the line. Went through the whole rigmarole of acquiring a different bit of DSL kit (which I need to return), changing filters etc. Nothing. Raised a support ticket with F9 and waited.

Next day the ticket gets a response saying ‘BT say the line is OK.’ Respond with a ‘No it isn’t, there’s no signal at all, and I’ve tried multiple bits of kit.’ So Friday rolls around and the issue gets escalated to BT. It’ll take BT 48 - 72 hours to respond, not including weekends. Short ending is that by the time I got home on Tuesday morning after installing some SAN hardware in Manchester, my DSL was active again.

I hate dialup. I really do.

Last night I felt a bit bored, so I downloaded Kubuntu (Ubuntu Hoary + KDE). This morning, I archived my 50 GB /home area to my RAID, along with a few odds and sods like my postfix config, various MySQL databases (including wordpress), popped in a CD and booted off of the Kubuntu AMD64 installer CD. ~30 minutes later I had a pristine Kubuntu install loaded. So far, so good.

I then remembered that the driver for my RAID is a finicky beast, written by the company that make the chipset (IT8212F) and not written very well. It’s a 2.4 kernel module that’s been barely ported to 2.6, and requires lots of love and fuss to make it work. To start with, it uses the deprecated MOD_DEC and MOD_INC routines on loading and unloading the driver. To make it compile under a modern 2.6 series kernel, these lines have to be commented out.
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