string of bad luck?
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