| "Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything." -- Anita Brookner [p143.20] |
I suppose things have been a little quiet recently; but I can blame that entirely on having to commute 2 hours a day to London for work… Yes, I’ve (temporarily) moved to Cambridge.
In other news, I went for a short run yesterday morning, only about 2 miles, but here’s the route:
Someone keeps stealing my ducks!
And then they did it again!
ERC (Error Recovery Control) is used to determine how long a hard drive should wait before giving up and declaring a sector as unreadable.
On most desktop drives, where you do not have another copy in RAID, you want the drive to keep re-trying for ever.
When you’re running drives in RAID, however, you want the drive to error out quickly and allow a spare to be mirrored in.
If you want to use a Desktop HDD in your RAID array, consider running:
smartctl -l scterc,70,70 /dev/sda
This will set the timeout to 7 seconds, a relatively reasonable length of time to wait.
If you’re in the situation of having a large number of drives attached via conventional SATA controllers, like I do, you’ll probably want to make this a little easier. You can run:
for i in `ls /dev/sd[a-z]` ; do smartctl -l scterc,70,70 $i ; done
For more details, you will want to have a read of this page.
The Thecus n8800Pro is a 2U, 8 drive, inexpensive storage array. It comes with a pretty GUI running what appears to be embedded Linux. Clearly I had to get a normal Linux distribution running on there!
A quick Google on installing Linux on other Thecus models suggests that they are standard x86 hardware and perfect to get Linux onto.
The first thing you’ll notice is that there’s no VGA port on the back of the device:
Not to matter, there is a header on the motherboard for VGA:
First things first, you need a VGA cable, some pliers and other cutting instruments:
Carefully remove the blue plastic case and as much metal as you can from the cable, you should end up with something looking like this:
Next, you’ll want to ease your new plug into the holes on the motherboard. Use paper to insulate any metal parts of your plug from unintentional contacts on the motherboard. You’ll need to use something to hold the plug in place, paper works well. You may need to wiggle the cable a little to get signal:
Once you’ve got the cable in place, a quick reboot of the Thecus will give you the option to press DEL to enter the Phoenix BIOS:
Now you’ll need to change the boot order to allow your device to boot from USB CD-ROM before the Hard Disk. I couldn’t get LAN(PXE) booting to work. Then you’ll be able to boot from a CD and install an operating system of your choice.
A few useful bits of output:
lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GME Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03) 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GME Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02) 00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02) 00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 02) 00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 02) 00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GR/GH/GHM (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 5 (rev 02) 00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GR/GH/GHM (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 6 (rev 02) 00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02) 00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02) 00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02) 00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 02) 00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02) 00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GHM (ICH7-M DH) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02) 00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) IDE Controller (rev 02) 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) SATA AHCI Controller (rev 02) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02) 01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82574L Gigabit Network Connection 02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82574L Gigabit Network Connection 03:00.0 Mass storage controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3132 Serial ATA Raid II Controller (rev 01) 04:00.0 Mass storage controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3132 Serial ATA Raid II Controller (rev 01) 05:00.0 Mass storage controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3132 Serial ATA Raid II Controller (rev 01) 06:00.0 Mass storage controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3132 Serial ATA Raid II Controller (rev 01)
cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 15 model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU T5500 @ 1.66GHz stepping : 2 cpu MHz : 1000.000 cache size : 2048 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 2 core id : 0 cpu cores : 2 apicid : 0 fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 10 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx lm constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm bogomips : 3333.64 clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual power management: processor : 1 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 15 model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU T5500 @ 1.66GHz stepping : 2 cpu MHz : 1000.000 cache size : 2048 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 2 core id : 1 cpu cores : 2 apicid : 1 fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 10 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx lm constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm bogomips : 3333.13 clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual power management:
caffeine.andymillar.co.uk is now fully ipv6 enabled!
[root@caffeine ~]# host www.andymillar.co.uk www.andymillar.co.uk has address 212.13.201.140 www.andymillar.co.uk has IPv6 address 2001:ba8:0:1c7::d40d:c98c
So I never get confused as to which server is the “Internet Gateway” and which is the “Private Gateway”, a slight modification to the motd was necessary:
I won’t be getting them confused again :-)
Seriously, some people clearly have too much time on their hands and make sites like this.
Some people are also gullible, and assume that by advertising this random site to all their friends that they’ll get to see some “awesome” pictures of a girl they’ve never met.
1. That makes you look sad.
2. If you use more than about an ounce of intelligence you can see all the pictures without advertising that you’re sad.
3. They’re really boring.
4. The owner, Ponkah Singh, also owns Screw You Katie which appears to use the same picture?
Thanks go to Stuart Ferrier who prompted this rant by being helpful on Facebook:
