Archive for the ‘Technical’ Category

Automatic notification of Debian package updates via cron

Very simple, and hinted at in the Debian APT HOWTO. I think I used to use a different package for this, but I think I like the simplicity of this method better. After installing apt-show-versions, I made the following entry in root’s crontab: @daily apt-get -q -q update 2> /dev/null && apt-show-versions -u root gets [...]

June 20, 2009 · agw · 4 Comments
Tags: , , ,  Â· Posted in: Debian, Technical

Old crap strikes again

One of the power supply fans on my ancient Compaq DL320 server is starting to become noisy. First, I can’t complain…this server is really old. I acquired it when my previous employer did a big server upgrade for another company. This thing came back on the stack. It was all bashed up, had been left [...]

May 29, 2009 · agw · One Comment
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Linux, Technical

HPT-366, breakage workaround

Looks like I have been able to get around the issues with the HPT-366 chipset. I have a filesystem reorg (xfs_fsr) going on with the system, heavy drive activity, and no timeouts or bus resets. The solution was to turn everything on, including DMA and write cache, but explicitly disabling interrupt unmask. Now with all [...]

May 24, 2009 · agw · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Linux, Technical

Self-repairing hardware

In this post I rambled on and on about the benefits of redundant storage. Well, somewhat dubiously the “failed” hard drive in my Windows box decided to start working again, and the rebuild of the array completed this morning. It pretty much tried to rebuild the array after every power up and failed pretty quickly, [...]

April 28, 2009 · agw · One Comment
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Technical

RAAAAIIIIID? (disk failures)

I’m sitting here with two dead hard drives on my desk. One 250GB SATA drive, one 160GB, both Seagate. The 250GB drive is a little over two years old, the 160GB a bit over a year old. The point I’d like to make isn’t that “Seagate sucks” – drives fail. I buy Seagate drives for [...]

April 16, 2009 · agw · 4 Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Linux, Technical