I work with open source and free software technologies and
specialise in C, scripting and PHP.
I live with my partner, Tina, in the New Forest, England.
When my main Windows computer's disk died (see below) I did a spot of
surgery. I actually bought a whole new machine. I then swapped the
broken disk in the old machine with 2 IDE drives in RAID 1 formation
and turned the old machine into my new Linux box. It seems the whole
experience was too much for it. It started to get unreliable last
month, with a couple of spontaneous reboots happening every day in some
cases. Then a couple of nights ago there was a crackle and a smell of
burning and nothing more from the CPU. At first I thought it was the
CPU itself, but conventional wisdom tells me that it's more likely to
be a capacitor in the PSU which has blown and taken out the 5v power
rail. So maybe the box is repairable, but a new one was long overdue.
So, a quick visit to Dabs resulted in the delivery of a new Shuttle
case with an Athlon64 3700 and a couple of gigs of RAM to go into
it. I wanted to reuse the almost-new IDE drives from the old box, so
went with an older Shuttle design which has IDE headers (as opposed to
SATA, which actually this box also has). I put it all together and
apart from a small aberation from the graphics card it all seemed to
work first time. Except Linux.
I'd fully expected the Linux system on the 2 drives to boot quite
happily on the new machine. The hardware is very similar to the box
they came out of. But no, it didn't want to play. The kernel paniced
when it tried to find the root filesystem on RAID1 /dev/md0. I didn't,
and still don't, understand why. The disks were in the same logical
places, and as far as I can see nothing significant had changed. I
could still boot a rescue disk and mount the /dev/md0 filesystem. I
suspect the old machine being a 32 bit Athlon CPU, and the new one
being a 64 bit Athlon CPU might have something to do with it, but I'm
not sure. Weird.
Anyway, a reinstall wasn't a great hardship, and all my data was
sitting on the still functioning RAID array, so now that's done and
I'm back online again. I now have 2 dinky Shuttles, more space and a
lot less noise and heat being generated. These boxes will happily
accompany me back to Australia in the new year!
Disk Failure - 1/11/05
It all went quiet for a short while there, didn't it? For good reason
- I had a disk failure in my Windows computer. Being the Windows
machine, it didn't have anything of great importance on it, but it did
leave me without Photoshop and the other tools I use to do my
photos. Fortunately I had a back up of my USA images, so normal
service will be resumed soon.
I tried to rescue the disk, of course. I put it in the freezer,
whacked it with a hammer, and various other tricks that might
encourage it to spin up, but it wasn't having it. It's dead. Less than
2 years old too, and the second of the 3 Western Digital disks I
bought in Perth to have died on me. Come to think of it, the third,
which is still going, was a replacement for the first to have died, so
maybe that one's time is due soon. I don't think Western Digital will
be getting any more sales from me any time soon.
The quickest route back to normality would have been for me to buy a
new hard disk, reinstall my software and data on it, and start using
it. I could have been back up and running within a couple of days. But
I chose to use this opportunity to overhaul my machines, which I'd
been planning on doing since I left Australia.
I gave my Linux machine to Clive before we left, since it was ancient
and not worth storing or shipping. I did ship the Windows machine back
to the UK since that was only about 3 years old and still had enough
life left in it to justify moving it around the world. That meant when
we got here I didn't have a proper Linux machine, so my old PIII-500
laptop has been doing my web, email, aMule, and other Linux stuff,
plus it runs the DHCP, BIND, SOCKS5 and other servers for the other
machines I have on the network. It was a tad sluggish, to put it
mildly.
So I decided to make the old Windows machine, with the dead disk, into
a Linux machine, and buy a new Windows machine for Photoshop, games
and other other Windows related, erm, work. Bitten by data loss from
this disk dying I decided on mirrored pairs of disks in case one fails
again, so I bought 4 250GB drives - that's a terrabyte of storage for 300 quid!
Setting up RAID 1 on Linux was pretty easy and I did all that over
last weekend. In an effort to get the noise of the machine down I did
the old "suspend the disks on elastic" trick, which, it turns out,
does actually work. But the case has 4 fans in it, so it didn't make a
whole lot of difference in the end! I then installed SUSE Linux 10.0
on the machine, and now have a fairly decent desktop Linux box once
again. An Athlon 1700XP might be pretty slow by today's standards, but
after a PIII-500 laptop it feels like it goes like the blazes!
Which leaves the new Windows machine to put together. I got a Shuttle
case and a pile of bits - Athlon 64, another 2 250GB drives, 2GB of
RAM, and so on, and that's all still sitting on the floor waiting to
be assembled into something more useful. Which hopefully I'll get
around to this weekend...
The next batch of photos are, if I recall correctly, from the drive
from Escalante to the Rocky Mountains. It was all snowy and very
pretty, and since Tina did a good part of the driving I got a few
photos taken. Those will hopefully be up within a couple of weeks, but
I suspect that depends on how the assembly of the new machine goes
together...
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