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Roughly a month ago I decided to try walking down every public street in San Francisco, a challenge which should end up taking more than a year. Assuming that the streets of SF are 850 miles in total, I'm 13% finished as of today. I've started a separate site dedicated to the finds and happenings of this journey. If anything, those stories should be much more entertaining and educational, so honestly I must recommend that you read that instead of this. The site, for those of you with pre-hyperlink browsers, is hikesf.com. |
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Honestly, if you browser doesn't support hyperlinks, you should go fuck yourself. |
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C7F is now back after roughly four days of being down because of a dead drive. Usually I keep a spare around that I can swap in quickly if needed, but this since the last drive failure was only a few weeks ago, I was totally unprepared. After a trip to Fry's and about 20 hours of painstaking recovery, everything is now back up. |
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Fortunately, I've now done this enough times that I've decided it's not worth the hassle. I bought a whole new system which should be here next week, which will have four 300GB SATA drives for RAID5. I'm going to set it up to be able to lose any two drives and still keep chugging along. I'll also have disk controllers from three different manufacturers and no more than two disks per controller, which means that pashto will be able to lose a whole controller and keep going. Using RAID also means that I'll be able to just plug in a replacement drive and be totally done; no dd from the bad drive, no rsync from backups, no mysqlchecking, no bullshit. |
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Take a lesson: all hard drives are like light bulbs, they will die eventually. Many in the corporate world generally assume that the average hard drive will fail after 18 months. If you aren't backing up your data to at least two different drives, you're going to lose it. |
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After another big bunch of a spammy comments got through, I finally decided to break down and implement captchas. They only turn on if you have links in your post or other suspicious words, so most of you will never see them. Since most comment spammers aren't going to be able to solve even the most trivial captchas, I didn't bother to make them very hard. In fact, Josh, Brandon and I spent a half an hour coming up with a list of captcha words. Words like the following: |
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Although we only have about 47 such words and phrases, so if you have any suggestions for additions, you should add them to the comments of this post. |
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I just spent fourish hours installing a new SATA drive as the root partition in pashto (the machine that's serving you this page, unless you're looking at a Google cache or something.) Recompiling kernels, reconfiguring and copying data takes longer than you'd expect. In any case, this means that I've got more than 140GB of space free even if I retire the old drive. |
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If I don't retire the old drive, this'll mean that I have 0.9TB of disk space in service in the four working computers I own. Fully three-fourths of a terabyte is devoted to c7f. |
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Last Tuesday two drives failed on Pashto in the same night. The dying drive died completely and the perfectly-fine drive bit the dust as well. Maxtor really truly sucks. This is my fourth dead Maxtor drive out of five in the last year. |
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As you can probably tell, Pashto now lives again. But not after nearly as much agony as is possible when doing a restore like this. To fix this horribly dead system, I... |
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- arrived at Best Buy 10 minutes before closing, waited at returns counter until someone told me they wouldn't process any more returns that day. Mother fuckers.
- tried to return old drive two days later, and they wouldn't take it back because it's been more than 30 days (i.e. 44 days), so I just bought a new drive
- realized I have no bootable disks in pashto, looked for Debian install CD to boot from for about half an hour
- re-connected CD-ROM drive in pashto in order to boot from the CD (it had been disconnected because of cable length problems)
- reconfigured BIOS to boot from CD
- realized CD-ROM drive is broken, pull it out and install a spare drive I have laying around
- booted onto Debian installer, setup partition table, make filesystems
- realized Debian install CD doesn't have rsync, or ssh, or even fucking netcat; start three-hour download of Gentoo Install CD instead, which does have that stuff
- looked for my CD-Rs for about an hour, realized I had leant them to Lucie
- burned CD to a CD-R, popped it into pashto, realized it's not bootable, I had fucked something up
- took down tinani to add new drive, do data copy from backup onto new drive
- misconfigured lilo to fuck up MBRs on both tinani and pashto
- fixed tinani with Debian installer CD
- fought with lilo on pashto for hours, it wouldn't make the drive bootable. I tried changing the geometry, and using every lilo option under the sun to make it work.
- realized BIOS bug was causing boot from hard disk to fail after resetting BIOS settings
- added other drives back to pashto, fucking up the jumpers and cabling a few times.
- realized I had killed another old 8GB pashto drive while moving around parts, threw it in the damn trash
- set up a few things that aren't covered by backups, do database restore, lots of checking
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If you think reading that took a long time, imagine how long it took me to fucking DO it. All in all, about 8 to 10 hours of real work over the course of a week. What I have to show for it: three dead drives and a uptime of 92% for the year. In the tech industry you call that "one nine." |
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Last night I finished another short PIL project. I'm feelin' lazy at the moment so I'm just going to quote my gallerymaster post verbatim: |
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This weekend I've been primary oncall for work, and haven't really had the option of leaving the house. So I spent my time writing a random-montage-generator in Python that will create clickable image maps. The first application: Montage of Galleries. |
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The strip of photos on the left is 300 pixels wide and 6300 pixels tall, and is a blend of pictures roughly grouped by the owners on the right. It's composed of 525 images; pictures used as album highlights are preferred first. The image takes 45 minutes to generate, and completely pegs the CPU, so it'll probably be freshened only once a week. |
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The code is pretty flexible, so if you want a desktop-sized montage of photos from your own Gallery, or something else custom, just let me know. |
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I just created Gallerymaster Blog on tinani as a place to publish Gallery info and updates for the Galleryserver. I'll be posting info about software upgrades, new features, bugs, and links to my favorite Galleries and pictures (once a week on Fridays.) |
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Two weeks ago my net connection dropped eight times while trying to do some importang Google oncall work at home. That straw broke the camel's back; and I finally got off my ass and gave SBC the boot. YOU SUCK, SBC! DO YOU HEAR ME? YOU SUCK BIG FUCKING DONKEY BALLS. |
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This almost happened earlier when I called SBC to complain about this problem before. The conversation went something like this: |
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Cody: Hey, my connection has been dropping randomly. It's gone for a random amount of time, but it's often fixed by restarting the modem. This happens 20 to 40 times a day according to my monitoring. It's not the modem because I already switched modems twice. The problem is obviously on your end.
Phone Support Guy: Hmmm... my guess is that it might be the modem, let's ship you out a replacement modem and you can send yours back.
Cody: You're not listening, It's not the modem! I've replaced it before and I've replaced all of the wiring.
PSG: Well, let's do some troubleshooting right now. First, what operating system are you using?
Cody: Debian
PSG: Excuse me, can you repeat that?
Cody: Deb-i-an Lin-ux three point oh
PSG: Sir, that's not a supported operating system for your DSL; that's probably the cause of your problem
Cody: Listen, it's not this box. I can unplug both my Linux systems from the network, leaving only OS X machines, and it still breaks.
PSG: Sir, your modem comes with only three LAN ports, are you using other networking equipment not provided by SBC to connect these machines?
Cody: [sigh] Yes, of course, you gave me six IPs. How could I possibly use them without a hub? In any case, it's not the hub; when the external connection is down, machines within the network can still communicate. The hub is fine.
PSG: Alright, sir, so I'm going to ask you to unplug all external network equipment, leaving only your Macintosh computer connected to the modem.
Cody: [playing along] Fine, this is stupid, but I'll do it anyway. You're the boss, I'm a moron. [spends 10 minutes re-wiring a bunch of crap] I'm back, it's just the Mac on the network and the connection is still dead.
PSG: First step, click 'Start'.
Cody: AGGHHH!! FUCKING DIPSHIT!! [hangs up]
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Now I'm on Speakeasy, which means that codythefreak.net is also on Speakeasy, and all is well. I have six-times the upstream bandwidth, non-sucky packet priority, a stable connection and tech support people that don't think that I'm shit-for-brains. |
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For some time now I've been holding off on adding artsy pictures to my Gallery because they really require a different organization than party/everyday-life pictures, not to mention a different mood. So recently I created the more seriously named CCS Gallery to contain solely my serious photographs. Preview: |
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I'll be copying pictures over from my regular Gallery slowly but surely. It's the sort of thing that won't be updated often, so you might want to consider using the RSS feed. |
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I finally got fed up with the ugly font that ImageMagick was using to overlay text on my random banners, and with the poor algorithm I had written for determining the width of the text to make it fit. So I switched to using PIL today, and changed the color of the text to actually match the site. I feel that I have earned coffee, so now I'm going to get some. |
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This page best viewed while dangerously intoxicated.
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codythefreak.net, or c7f.net is not copyrighted, reserved, limited, restricted, or private. Information is always inherently free.
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If I don't want you to read, view, or plagarize something, I won't post it up. Courtesy appreciated 2001-2006.
Up 159 days, 11:37.
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