chobas.com's blog » Technology

ext3

Thomas — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 02:15:01 +0000

ext3 is dead to me. Long time readers will know I normally go with xfs (yes, I’m a xfs fanboy), but sometimes it’s easier to just go with the default. No modern filesystem should run out of inodes. This is simply inexcusable. :/

Hot Card

Thomas — Sat, 22 May 2010 01:01:47 +0000

A fanless graphics card isn’t much use if it locks up without a fan blowing on it…

(This is really just a poor excuse for a post so that I have one for May…)

Mercurial

Thomas — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 02:26:53 +0000

This is probably the reason why I’ll never use Mercurial as a version control system: its complete inability to revert to a known, sane state without deleting and starting all over. No thank you I’d prefer not to have to re-download 10’s of MB of data onto my NFS home dir when I have a perfectly good, already almost perfect copy on disk.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2139165/mercurial-delete-all-local-changesets-revert-to-tree

Gnome’s Empathy

Thomas — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 06:37:33 +0000

Now I remember why I had a bad feeling about Gnome’s Empathy (http://live.gnome.org/Empathy). It’s because after having to install deps that aren’t bundled by default (what good is a program that doesn’t come with any backends by default?), and starting 5+ daemons that I didn’t have to have running before, it still doesn’t open a window.

Buzz props

Thomas — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 21:37:10 +0000

I’m not one for too much buzz love, but I gotta give Buzz props for 2 things:

1) allowing me to comment on things directly in the ui that notified me of the new content (I suppose facebook does this with their new reply-to feature, but it seems icky)
2) allowing me to cc people directly in my comment and have it show up in their inbox

Both features I’ve apparently gotten used to and miss when I’m using software that doesn’t have them.

More DriveS!

Thomas — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 04:48:41 +0000

It’s only taken me 4+ weeks, but the filer is finally upgraded. Here’s hoping my random iops doubles (along with significant gains in streaming writes). The real reason I did this was because the first raidz stripe was ~completely full (30G free — down to 9GB free after several resilverings). I think this effectively reduced my io to the single new stripe. Once this gets baked in for a bit (and I’ve had time to make some more backups), I’ll throw my 5×400G drives back into the array for even more space. :)

Before:
[root@filer0 tgarner]# zfs list tank NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT tank 3.96T 1.05T 52.7K /tank [root@filer0 tgarner]# zpool list tank NAME SIZE USED AVAIL CAP HEALTH ALTROOT tank 6.37T 4.95T 1.41T 77% ONLINE -

After:
[root@filer0 ~]# zfs list tank NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT tank 3.98T 3.17T 51.1K /tank [root@filer0 ~]# zpool list tank NAME SIZE USED AVAIL CAP HEALTH ALTROOT tank 9.09T 4.97T 4.12T 54% ONLINE -

why zfs and I aren’t on speaking terms

Thomas — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 18:07:48 +0000

Per Cole’s request:

I’m not exactly sure what happened (’cause it happened just last night), but I ~lost a whole bunch of data. Granted it was a scratch disk, and granted I have a backup from the middle of January, that’s not the point. So zfs has snapshots right? Well that’s what I have backups of, the snapshots. There were like 4 snapshots. I have perfect replicas of my first two snapshots. I even have perfect incremental snapshots between each. But I can’t seem to get my backup “take” the incrementals. That was part of the issue. Now yesterday, likely due this scratch drive going bad (not superbad, just retrying sector reads a lot), the box kernel paniced. I saw it just before I went to work. It rebooted and came up fine. I went to work. I’m pretty fed up with the filer not being in a perfect state of being, so I sit down after work to beat it into submission. First item on the agenda is getting a perfect copy of the scratch disk, or at least figuring out what my good backups are missing. Well, I can’t even read the darn thing. It says something about corrupt metadata. At this point I have very few options. Basically they amount to a `zfs export` and `zfs import`. And I’m pretty sure that once I export it, I won’t be able to get it back, ever again. So, feeling that I have no other recourse, I export, and guess what happens: I can’t re-import it. Well fooey. I basically take my lumps, have a decent backup from January, recover from elsewhere the data I know I am missing, and curse zfs for being so smart that I have like zero recourse to debug w/o begging Sun engineers on a mailing list of how to recover this drive. Since the o/s that I’m running is quite old, it is also possible that newer versions of OpenSolaris could be better about being able to import this disk. I tried to upgrade my install of Nexenta last night, to no avail. Neither dist-upgrade nor a fresh install worked for me. So I’m stuck for a bit. Maybe over the course of the next few months, I might be able to recover it. I’m going to try not to worry about it too much. It’s just a super pita that it’s such a huge black box. Even if I, say, wanted to ddrescue the whole disk, I have no idea how to import it into the os. And there are tools (like zdb, etc) that in theory you might be able to recover, but that’s all voodoo to me. Anyhoo, that’s the gist of it. I lost another 1TB disk the other week. I still haven’t put all of the 5 1TB disks that I bought some time ago in. Which is the main goal of this weekend. I got another disk at Microcenter. I did a replacement last night, so I have 3 more to go. Given that they take 6 or 8 hours (depending on how much data is on the stripe), and that i/o basically comes to a crawl when this is going on, it’s going to be a long weekend.

zfs

Thomas — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 06:05:57 +0000

zfs and I are not on speaking terms right now…

Handle with care

Thomas — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 06:10:54 +0000

!@%$($)@_+!! it. If ever in the future I tray again to move myself please stop me. I’ve gone through 2 power supplies and now my video card doesn’t seem to want to cooperate. At this rate I’ll have a whole new computer within the month. :( All of these broken components were not in the budget. Thank goodness I had the (flippant) desire to put the filer and the tv in the truck. In hindsight I should have put my workstation in there as well. Putting it at the very back of the trailer where it would get the most sway, have the most room to move, and get the most scratched up was a bone-headed move. I suppose I should be thankful I didn’t lose any data, though I’m wondering now about the hard drive in the workstation, if it’s going to hold out or not. It’s had a good run, and smart checks out, but it has some smart checksum errors, which is troubling, along with some less than desirable sounds emanating from it. And of course both frys and microcenter were closed by the time I discovered the video problems. Thanks alot ups for delivering my package at like 8pm (12 hours after it was put on the truck).

Noise

Thomas — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 22:33:39 +0000

Having virtually complete silence in the apartment is definitely a welcome change. For almost a whole week, I didn’t have any computers on. With the rack squirreled away, the living room was completely silent. I powered up my workstation, but it was too noisy compared to the silence. So I bought some new, more silent fans to swap out, and now I can hear my hard drive chatter, which I can’t say I’ve been able to hear in longer than I can remember. :)