Bloggy

After weeks and weeks of promising to release kdesvn-build “soon”, I managed to release kdesvn-build 1.9 today. It’s got quite a few useful bugfixes at least, and I know dfaure likes the unit test feature. Plus if you have megabytes upon megabytes of unused log directories you’ll want to grab this release.

This will be the last kdesvn-build release that even pretends to be able to build KDE 3.5, just FYI.

Posted by mpyne under KDE & kdesvn-build | No Comments »

So the other day I had suffered probably the third dataloss in a year due to the XFS filesystem in use on my desktop + power loss.

Update: I just realized that I failed to mention that the dataloss is my fault, not XFS’s. Had I done more diligence in my research when I set it up in the first place I would have been aware of that particular shortcoming (shared with ext4 in its 2.6.29 and earlier configuration) where metadata updating before data, merged with powerloss could result in zero-length files. The files I lost were always ones being written to at the time, never just “random” files. Anyways…

I had already setup fairly well I thought, given that I was using RAID 1 (i.e. two redundant hard drives to hold one hard drive of data) and had UPS protection on the computer anyways.

The failures in my setup were notable though:

1. My backup strategy depended on me having enough time to actually hook up the external drive, run the backup, unhook it, etc. Scripting it so that it would take less time still required too much time to initially setup. Therefore my backups were fairly out of date. Compounding this, when I finally did setup the external and try to perform a backup, I found to my displeasure that it was ntfs formatted and therefore I couldn’t write to it. (I had the read/write ntfs-3g driver available but had forgotten about it by then, and didn’t have time to troubleshoot further).
2. UPS only works when your 2 year old son doesn’t go hard resetting the power on you.
3. UPS + disabling the front power switch only saves you until your next kernel panic induced by bleeding-edge video drivers (the fact that they were open source didn’t save me here ;)
4. The RAID worked — both hard drives were in the same inconsistent state, with the same lost files after the fsck… :(

The corrective action for all of this is complete however. Last night I used ntfsresize on the external drive (since it had data I wanted to retain) and used the free space to make a new ext3 partition for backups. From there I booted up a Gentoo LiveCD and copied all of the hard drive’s data to the external drive. I then reformatted the hard drives with ext4 (with appropriate mount options to avoid having it cause the same issues I have now with xfs) and copied all the data back.

There were some hiccups relating to me using manual mdadm commands to bring the hard drives online from the LiveCD. I apparently changed some of the md device names on the hard drives in the process which required some more manual mdadm –assemble action to fix. But everything is working so far, although I’m sure there’s a few packages that need to be reinstalled to account for the dataloss over time.

Luckily the major reason for my lack of free time looks like it will be rectified within the next week, more on that later.

Posted by mpyne under Computing Troubles & Personal | 14 Comments »

So our boat is in refit right now, and even though the workload seems to be reduced in theory, it’s been more stressful than ever. I can at least be thankful that I’m no longer in Engineering Department, since it still seems like Engineering division officers are forced to spend long hours at work all the time due to some new and exciting broken part.

One thing I’ve noticed though is that pretty much every job I’ve had that’s supposed to be “easy” (especially being the Tactical Systems Officer) is a lot harder in practice, since I actually attempt to perform all the duties/responsibilities instead of just leaving things to rot. It’s fine, as I know I’m accomplishing a lot but then I worry about what the guy who relieves me is going to do. :)

Anyways, as you may have inferred from the subject the heat pump in our house seems to have broken. The refrigerant line on the outdoor coil was completely iced up (which is unfortunate given that this is only supposed to ever happen in wintertime, and it’s quickly approaching summer here).

I’ve looked it up a bit online and it seems the scenario is either dirty coils (although the ones I can see look fine), clogged coils, low refrigerant (which implies a leak), or something other semi-minor issue. It’s times like this when I really value the Navy-style fashion of having gauges and pressure switches everywhere, at least I’d have a chance at figuring out what is going on. This system has no user-visible status of the refrigeration cycle other than when the lines freeze up. :-(

Although my time has been sharply reduced between Emma, Ian, and refit I’m still working on my programs. I’ve recently committed the purge log feature I recently blogged about. It doesn’t run by default however. I’ll try to make a release tonight but I also want to make a kdemultimedia introspective for JuK so we’ll see.

Posted by mpyne under KDE & kdesvn-build & Navy & Personal | 4 Comments »