Cricalix.Net

Having just bought a decent DVD-RW drive, I’m trying to work out why I never bought one before.  It’s dumping 4 gig of data quite quickly, starting around 11 MB/s, and topping out around 22 MB/s.  8 GB of 70 archived so far, so 8 more disks to go.  I’ll have to generate a TOC type CD or something to go with the archive - perhaps a 64 MB USB stick will work (got one lying around somewhere), just detailing which disk has which files.

Spring Leaves

Originally uploaded by cricalix.

Taken as I walked in to town on Saturday morning. Tweaked the blue channel to bring the sky up a bit, as it was washed out from the sun. Testing this posting from flickr as well. It seems to generate HTML that Wordpress can render when posted, but the moment I edit it, it breaks. Weird.

Well, I just went to synchonise my local gallery with my offsite hosting, and tried to search my home folder for the command I usually use. Who tell me do dat?

30 seconds after I pressed Ctrl-C to cancel it, nothing had happened. That’s usually a bad sign, as on an unloaded servr, grep stops quite quickly. So I loaded another SSH session, and tried to get a file listing in my home folder. That session hung too. Things started to ring little alarm bells in my head.

So I logged in a third SSH session, and queried dmesg to see what the kernel had logged recently. This is when the alarm bells turned into full air-raid sirens - ATA and SCSI errors about unrecoverable reads, and failure to reallocate sectors on failed reads. This means the drive that my home directory sits on is dying. S.M.A.R.T. blithely says ‘This drive is fine chief, what you so worried bout?’ At this point, I’ve got a transfer running to copy my 70 GB of images over to another machine with a large enough drive to hold them.

Since this server is using an LVM configuration, and not RAID, I’ve got no redundancy on my disks, nor do I know precisely what data is on what drive. The operating system itself is on a different drive, but it looks like I’ve got close on 120 GB of data on a failing drive, and not enough archive space to back it up. Time to scratch my head, and work out how I can keep this server intact, while upgrading the storage for the images etc to RAID. Though, with a failing drive, that’s going to be fairly hard, as I only have one other spare drive :(

This post written in Lynx.

Since I cannot afford a new computer at the moment, I decided to try a slightly crazy experiment with my Xeon server.

Ingredients are 1 Xeon server, 1 Linux OS, 1 VMware Server installation, 1 XP Home CD, and 1 use of the nLite tool.

Blend 1 XP Home CD with 1 nLite tool, removing components as desired, and disabling the SFC check for the installer.

Create a new VMware image for a Windows XP Home guest, and set the CD-ROM to point to the ISO image created by nLite.

Install XP inside of 10 minutes, including reboots.

Map a network drive to a machine with some NEF files, install Capture NX. Start playing.

Remember to tell Windows to run Windows Update, even though this machine won’t be going on the net.

61 critical updates to be downloaded and installed.

It’s a bit slow in terms of interface response lag, but the Xeon powers through the RAW files, despite VMware being in the way.

Just had the friendly plumber over to look at the downstairs ex-loo.  He reckons the cap on the sewage will be newspaper and cement, so not a big issue to clear out.  I had been thinking of dropping two pipes down from the bathroom/airing cupboard to feed hot and cold water to the bathroom, but had totally forgotten that there’s a cold feed coming up through the floor in the form of a lead pipe (and the feed to the house is a lead pipe, don’t even want to think what the labour costs to replace it all will be).  Hot water won’t be an immediate necessity in the downstairs loo, so I’ve asked him to get me the price on a bog-standard bog.  He reckons it’ll be about the same as his labour estimate (which was a decent 75 quid [normally 100, but 75 for you]).

Mulling it over with Dad, I’ll probably tell him to include a slimline basin as well.  Hopefully they make ones that use a mixer tap that can have a single feed initially, and upgrade it to a double feed later if I feel like it.  Should have the rough quote tomorrow, and he said he can probably do it between jobs in about 2 weeks.  Good timing, I’ll have another paycheque by then!

The only other things to sort out down there at that point will be the wall colour, sorting out the bad paint job on the door frame and window frame, and doing something about the floor (which is rough cement at the moment).  The loo is on the ‘outside’ of the house, between the kitchen and external wall, and is accessed by the ‘hall’ that leads to the outside door.  That means I need a hard-wearing surface, and I’ll probably want to go from loo to outside door in one fell swoop.  I could also raise the hall to the same level as the kitchen, but that’ll play havoc with the external door, so I think I’ll leave that as it is.

Not going to bother with heat for that room, not now at least.  I’ll probably (per Dad’s suggestion) put some coat hangars in there though, so it becomes a functional loo.  If I can box the cistern and pipe in (the pipe is very ugly, covered in different layers of paint, and juts at an angle), I might even be able to build in a shoe locker to the side of the cistern where there’s no pipe.  That’d also give me a shelf on top of the toilet for storing toilet paper and other sundries.

I reckon I’m looking at 200 quid for the bog, sink and labour.  If I can get the guy who fitted my kitchen to do me a good quote for the boxing of the cistern, I should be able to add a good bit of value for minimal expenditure.  I hope.

This also means I can get off of my lazy arse and (a) contact the plasterer to fix the wall in the bathroom, (b) put down the flooring in the bathroom and (c) finish the boxing in the bathroom and declare it job done so I can move on to another room.

That’s the traffic spike that gb.ubuntu.com saw when Fiesty Fawn released.

That’s quite impressive.  Makes me glad I don’t have to foot that kind of bandwidth bill.

Guess I’ll wait a few days before telling my work box to upgrade.

Spring is definitely in the air.

The flowering cherry is covered in pink flowers, the wild strawberries are putting forth their white flowers, the Japanese maple is budding, the (crab?) apple is covered in green, with dots of pink.

A plant I don’t know the name of is covered in tiny white flowers, another plant I don’t know the name of has put forth purple flowers, the bluebells are gearing up to flower, the daffodils have had their last hurrah, the hebes are growing, the lavender is sprouting fresh new leaves, and the heather is moving along at a good clip.

And the lawn needs mowing.  Again.