Mostly Harmless

[Ladies and Gentlemen this is your pilot speaking: we are currently cruising at an altitude of 35,000 feet at speeds upwards of 600 megabytes per minute. We have just passed 190 gigs and should arrive at our destination (196 gigs) at approximately 8:15pm EST. Thank you for flying"Veritas Sucks"Airlines.]

It seems like it was only 11 hours ago that I got out of bed and connected to work via VPN for a nice-n-simple"fsck -o full"on our E220 RAID, and now it will be only a few more minutes before my complete fucking data restore is completed.

But I’m not bitter. Oh wait a minute, yes I am.

The whole RAID got toasted this time while trying to fix some residual damage from last week’s Happy Fun Veritas Play Time."Take the system down and do an fsck,"they said."All will be well with the world, you betcha by golly,”they said.

So we do an fsck and eventually grow weary of whacking"y"to clear hundreds of bad inodes and give it the old"fsck -y"treatment. That was, apparently, a bad idea, according to the Veritas tech o’ the day.

Our fsck failed with this error:

vxfs fsck: rgetblk bad request, bno = 17039621, sz = -2145361920
file system check failure, aborting …

That means, effectively,"Have a nice day, reformat."(Or, alternately, that the tech o’ the day gave up pretty easily when I said I had a fresh backup I could restore from.)

It would be perfectly peachy with me if the volume had giant holes in it but was still mountable, but no such luck. Let’s just pitch 196 gigs worth of data into the bit bucket and start over.

Not trusting Veritas one iota, after last week, I had mirrored all the data to our old server before taking the system down. The full system backup had also just completed, and there’s even an additional backup the users do manually.

So redundancy (paranoia) saves the day. Veritas does not save the day, yet again.

Is Veritas Foundation Suite a giant pile of crap or am I just lucky? What do the poor bastards with only one server do?

I am getting to be quite the wiz with rsync though, so that’s something.

First of all, any resemblance of the Buffy-O-Meter to the progress bar over there at distributed.net is purely coincidental. (YR!)

The Buffy-O-Meter is tracking my accumulation of BtVS episodes on VCD or SVCD. Today I hit 50% (currently 56 of 112 episodes, counting the unaired pilot). Wooo!

I’m gonna need a bunch of CDs of course. Not a problem since they’re practically free now. I picked up an Imation 50-pack at Worst Buy for $5 after rebate (1 per cust., good til 1/26/02, yada, yada).

I’m kinda wanting a faster burner, ya know. Glad I didn’t get that 8x dog.

This morning I made the mistake of speaking aloud these fateful words:"I think today is going to be a good day."I, of course, spent the next few hours on the phone with Veritas Support resurrecting a server 1,000 miles away from here. I especially liked the part when the technician said there was a 50% chance of getting our data back.

A real comedian, that fellow.

Is it just me or does Veritas Foundation Suite cause more problems than it solves? Yes, we’ve got the file system that’s supposed to do useful things vis-a-vis journaling and surviving crashes nicely but it can’t survive an orderly F*ing shutdown. Breathe on the config files wrong and the server don’t boot no more. What the hell is up with that?

Interestingly, the configuration info I had for the disk groups was out of date. As you might expect, this is not a good thing. This is the point where the Veritas tech will start running out of ideas.

If you can pull the correct volume size information out of your ass at this point it would be fantastically useful. So we did that.

Actually we used the partition information from ‘format’. Since the volume in question was a single 272 gig volume on a hardware RAID it was relatively straightforward.

And thus was the world saved, or at least 180 gigs of it. (180 gigs was the used space, BTW. Got the whole RAID back.)

I was never terribly concerned though… what with my 8-hour old backup and my redundant server. Ha! Suck on that Veritas!

Oh yeah, if you’re running vxfs now would be a good time to run ‘vxprint -ht’ and save that to a file somewhere. Maybe print it out, make a couple of copies, mail it to some friends, etc.

I kinda feel like I should post something here, seein’s-as-how it’s been a couple of weeks since the last post. Here are some things I thought about posting but never got around to…

I saw a cool sig on Usenet (Gavin somebody):"Welcome to Rivendell… Mr. Anderson."*

I spent a lot of time on Usenet, in general, and continue to go through blank CDs like candy. The local news server is more or less fully functional now so I am back to just using that and EasyNews. Those losers at NewsFeebs (sic) can sell shoddy news feeds to someone else, thanks.

Speaking of CDs, the new Toast Titanium update doesn’t have that nasty little bug that caused the app to crash and hold the CD hostage until the computer was restarted. Instead of quitting other apps and burning at 8X I now burn CDs at 12x while simultaneously downloading news, listening to MP3s, cracking RC5-64, and web surfing. Amen.

The car bumper fix was a bit cheaper than the estimate, coming in at just under $700.

My DVDs aren’t here yet and I’m getting a little peeved. They have shipped though, or so they claim.

My new chair is here but thanks to the spectacularly bad packing job, and unkind shipping, the swivel mechanism on one of the arms was broken and the back is just a little bit crooked. I called the chair people and new parts are on the way. It’s not quite as"solid"as the $450 chair from HOM but I wasn’t in the mood to spend $450 at this juncture, and this chair certainly isn’t going to fall apart like the last one.

My student loan balance is $409.75. I might get crazy and just pay that off, lest Sallie Mae decides to lower my payment yet again to drag it out more. My payments started at $80, then went to $72, then dropped to $50."How ’bout I just send you a fucking check, it’s only $400 dammit!"The new iMac is OK in my book. It just needs R2-D2 decals for the dome. I especially like how the high-end model has a DVD burner, a faster G4 processor, and an LCD display but only costs $200 more than the G4 Quicksilver I bought mere months ago.

Ikonboard.

I am waiting semi-patiently for the official launch of the new web site from Erik. I know the new URL and it’s lookin’ good so far.

While it is still technically possible it is unlikely that I’ll get to bed by 1am for the 10th day in a row. Last week my work start time fell within a tight 4-hour range — skewed somewhat by getting there at 6:30am on Monday for a server change.

* Watch"The Matrix"and"The Lord of the Rings"if you don’t get why that’s drop dead funny.

They fired Dennis Green’s losin’ ass!!

Wooooooooooo!