myrddin.org: weblog

My Mum gave got me a gift certificate for a flying lesson for my birthday last year of which I decided to cash in a few weeks ago. My lesson was supposed to be today, but unfortunately my scheduled aircraft was in for maintenance and was unexpectedly unavailable this weekend so I had to reschedule for next weekend instead.

Many of you do not know this but I had an aspiration to become a pilot in the Australian Air Force but backed out when I was a teenager because of the high maths requirement. This unfortunately made me back out of this ambition, albeit I ended up doing the advanced math required of a pilot in later years anyway. One thing led to another and I somehow ended up in Information Technology, specifically Linux..go figure ;P One of the things I’d love to do if I ever were to leave my current profession would be to fly! Considering the current spate of outsourcing of IBM staff to India, there may be a time when our team becomes dissolved to a vindaloo loving peer, which means I’d be looking for alternative means of employment. I’m currently classified in the IBM’s Top Talent programme so I don’t think this will be something in the oh so near future, but if it does… then I’ll have something of interest to bound on into.

I’ve been into flying for such a long time now. As a teenager, I was an Australian Air League member with the aspirations (as mentioned above) to join the air force. As discovered recently, the amount of hours required to gain your pilot’s licence isn’t as much as I had perceived and may actually be a reality. I’ll have to wait and see how things go next weekend as see if its somehting that I’d still be interested in doing.

Edit: geesh Darren is a spelling bee nazi!

Filed under: m.o

well, the ext3 problem reared its ugly head again a few days ago. I then resorted to backing up my apparently fucked root filesystem to an alternative slower disk and rebuilding from a debian amd64 netinstall cd. Once the box was back up I mounted the backed up disk as read only and casually rsync’d configs and data back as appropriate.

To top things off, my Linksys ADSL2MUE adsl modem fucked up and died what I hope to have been a slow painful death as well, considering the greif it gave me over the last 24 hours while reconfiguring it. I’m now back to my ‘ol trusty dlink DSL300 adsl modem. In less than 24 hours I have already lost line sync once so it’s prolly a good idea that I looked for a new adsl modem that has bridged mode support yes, I love my bridged mode, it removes all the bullshit crap from the modem and relies on my trusty debian firewall to do all the important work, which obviously I have more trust in…

Filed under: m.o

arugh, I feel like pulling out some hair! After wasting a few days doing hardware shuffles and so on on my file server and my workstation, I have finally removed the parallel ata disk that was being used for the OS on my file server. I just went to delete a stack of files and *BAM!* same fucking error again@!# *bashes head against the wall*

EXT3-fs error (device sda1): ext3_free_blocks_sb: bit already cleared for block 16899952
Remounting filesystem read-only
EXT3-fs error (device sda1): ext3_free_blocks_sb: bit already cleared for block 16899953
…and so on…

Google thus far has been totally crapola and i’m at the moment stuck as to what to do now… anyway, time for another damn fsck! that’ll give me some time to think about things…

Update!
One of the ways I was reproducing the error was by trying to delete some stray /var/log/apt-proxy.log* files which appeared to have not been picked up by logrotate and were all between 1 & 2Gb in size (yes, I had an excessively high debug level set at one stage). As soon as I would rm these logfiles the error would occur instantly and the filesystem would be thrown into read only mode. The way I got around this was to zero the files using something like this:

for file in `find /var/log/ iname “apt-proxy.log.*”`; do > ${file}; rm -f ${file}; done

The rm of the files once they had been zeroed out seemed to work without reproducing the errors. Since then the box has been quite stable so I can only presume that this was the root cause of the problem. Interesting though that the multitude of fsck’s didn’t find/fix the apparent ext3 problem. Really weird I must say… needless to say I’ll be closely monitoring the situation.

One thing that only dawned on me not too long ago was that when I did the whole disk shuffle I only created new partitions and filesystems on the new 160Gb sata2 disk for my machine, not the one that went into my file server. The steps were:

1. insert 160Gb sata2 into my machine (to replace the existing 120Gb sata)
2. create partitions & filesystems of the relevant size
3. mount old & new filesystems while booted off an alternate media (read: knoppix)
4. rsync data from old disk to new disk
5. move 120Gb sata to fileserver
6. dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda bs=4096 # /dev/sda being the 120Gb pata & /dev/sdb being the 120Gb sata
7. fix grub & fstab entries and remove old pata disk

It was the dd step that obviously caused the issues, whatever filesystem errors were introduced from the original motherboard dying in the ass would be moved to the new disk.. I knew I should have just created the filesystems and used rsync like I did on my workstation. *slaps back of head* Oh well, its too late now.. least the problem appears to be resolved.

Filed under: m.o

The past few days have been a right pain in the ass!

Firstly I rebooted my firewall to a new kernel version only to find that the motherboard had other ideas.. Shortly after booting the machine the power would pretty much drop on the 12volt rail. After pulling apart my linux media machine from downstairs I had determined that the power supply was not at fault and the problem was isolated to the board. The board was a Gigabyte board and only lasted 5 months.. i *knew* I shouldn’t have bought that damn thing, I always buy Asus gear at home as I know very well how shit Gigabyte hardware is.. anyway moving on

I managed to get a colleague to check up online for a replacement board, and I opted for getting an Asus A8V Deluxe which I already had running in my workstation anyway. To make things a little easier I moved the board from my machine to the firewall and the next day put the new board into my workstation.. no big deal right? No, of course not.

EXT3-fs error (device hda1): ext3_free_blocks_sb: bit already cleared for block 12324208

Turns out that there’s some obscure problem with running PATA and SATA disks in combination (which I never had on my workstation as I only run SATA there). The idea was to have the root filesystem on PATA and use the 4 onboard sata ports for a nice big raid5 array with 300Gb disks. But in light of the errors I was getting I needed to get rid of the PATA and solely run SATA disks.. oh well, no big deal right? Just go out and buy another sata, dd the disks and bingo, problem solved..?

I ended up going to North Rocks computer markets on Sunday to pick up a 120Gb sata to replace the 120Gb pata in the box, however getting out there there was *ONE* stall and no 120Gb disks, so I opted for a 160. As we were leaving we noticed a sign saying the computer markets had moved.. *BAH!* I was not impressed in the least. I also picked up a Bluetooth USB dongle so I could transfer stuff to and from my new work mobile phone. Anyway, getting home BOTH the 160Gb sata disk and the Bluetooth USB dongle were DOA! grrr.. that really pissed me off. The wankers that sold me the gear are located at Harris Park which is extremely out of my way, but what choice do iI have.. *sighs* I’ll be trying to get their replacement’s today at some stage.. Hopefully nothing else goes wrong :\

In the mean time, my firewall is offline as the root filesystem throws an error and remounts itself read only every hour or so, or instantly when you try to delete any data from it. Each time I performed fsck’s and each time found errors. Luckily so far nothing of any importance has been lost or corrupted…

Filed under: m.o

I’ve been tagged by Dave

Four jobs I’ve had:

1. Linux Technical Leader
2. Senior Network Engineer
3. Network Administrator
4. Apprentice Electrical Engineer

Four movies I can watch over and over:

1. Equilibrium
2. Constantine
3. Biker Boyz
4. The Punisher

Four places I have lived:

1. Caringbah, Australia
2. Miranda, Australia
3. Westmead, Australia
4. Maroubra, Australia

Four television shows I love to watch:

1. Battlestar Gallactica
2. Stargate Atlantis
3. Stargate SG1
4. NCIS

Four places I have been on vacation:

1. Tasmania, Australia
2. Brisbane, Australia
3. Melbourne, Australia
4. Canberra, Australia

Four of my favorite dishes:

1. Chilli Con Carne
2. Rojan Josh
3. Massaman Curry
4. Roast Lamb

Four websites I visit daily:

1. gateworld
2. yourtv.com.au
3. unnamed torrent site
4. google

Four places I would rather be right now:

1. Out riding the motorbike
2. On holidays down in Tasmania
3. Out fishing
4. Sleeping *peers @ the time*

Four bloggers I am tagging:

1. Nicholas
2. John
3. err.. who else do I know actively writes or even had a blog?!
4. Not looking good here.. and no I won’t just choose a random blog that I read cause that makes it too easy

Filed under: m.o

As you can se from my last post, I restocked my fish tank a few weeks ago with a seriously cool (and agressive) breed of African Cichlid, the Lake Tanganyika Tropheus Moliro and Tropheus Duboisi. Unfortunately one of the Duboisi’s refused to eat last weekend and died yesterday. Once the sick fish was identified (about 2 days of it not eating) I picked up a medium sized breeding enclosure to seperate him from the others in case it was a stress related illness caused by the other agressive fish. The death was 3 weeks after their introduction to the rebuilt tank and I could not explain why the death had occurred as I have been extremely cautious of the tank toxidity and water quality attributes and could only conclude that aggression was the cause of the stress related symptoms. The tank was at a stable 9.0 pH level (perfect for Lake Tanganyika cichlids), I had been using Tanganyaka buffers & cichlid lake salts, performing moderately aggressive 15-20% weekly water changes so there was really no excuse for the sickness.

The tank is a 200L with a 1200L/h cannister filter located underneath the tank. What had actually happened was that after the last weekend’s water change, I had replaced the shut off taps as the old one’s seals were starting to leak. Once I had closed up the cabinets below the tank after the water change, the inlet tubing had become kinked! It wasn’t until 3 days later that I heard the filter struggling to pump water and upon closer inspection noticed the kink and relative lack of water volume through the outlet hose into the tank. This will have no doubt caused a severe degradation to nitrification process and subsequently would have been extremely harmful to the new fish. Considering these little dudes are a lot harder to keep than the normal ‘run of the mill’ Cichlids, this would have no doubt been the cause of the death of my poor little Duboisi.

Filed under: m.o