After finishing The Subtle Knife from Philip Pullmann’s
trilogy His Dark Materials I am now reading The Amber Spyglass
which is the last book of this trilogy.
Monthly Archive for July, 2005
I just came home from
seeing War of the Worlds.
The last third of the movie is a bit strange but the beginning is pretty good.
I have been seeing unusually many movies in the last two weeks and before that I
have not been in the cinema at all for about two months. Strange…
NP: Manau – Mais Qui Est La Belette?
I can now use the whole RAID thanks to the help of Jesse. The trick was to partition the drive with parted instead of fdisk. He also told me that it is necessary to set the disklabel to gpt with mklabel gpt.
Again I have no clue what this means but it works:
/dev/sdf1 3.7T 673G 3.0T 19% /ftp/pub/.3
The drive is mounted with noatime,errors=remount-ro,data=writeback and I am now starting to copy data on the new RAID to see how it performs.
A first short test with bonnie++ resulted in:
Version 1.03 ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
-Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP /sec %CP
rhlx01 12G 99583 92 37551 34 79104 33 393.7 3
This is about 10 times faster than our old RAIDs so this already makes a big difference.
Update: This solves the problems I wrote about in my posting: New Raid.
Yesterday Jennifer and I saw
Madagascar and we both liked it.
We were a bit disappointed because after all the hype that was made
around the movie and all the trailers we already saw, the movie did not offer much
we did not already saw somewhere else. Good movie but our expectations were much
higher.
The space on our ftp mirror was really getting tight:
/dev/i2o/hdb1 137G 130G 6.7G 96% /ftp /dev/sdc1 576G 557G 19G 97% /ftp/pub/.2 /dev/sda1 567G 558G 8.4G 99% /ftp/pub/.6 /dev/sdb1 353G 343G 10G 98% /ftp/pub/.1
But luckily a new RAID drive was ordered two weeks ago and it finally arrived. 12 400GB SATA drives with a Fibre Channel connection to the host. This means 4.8TB, which should definitely be enough for the next few months. Okay, it will only be 4TB because I have to subtract one disk for the RAID5 and one disk is used as hot spare.
Warren did already warn me about drives bigger than 2TB: 139207, 150991. And he was right.
Although the drive size is correctly reported by the driver I can only use 2TB of it:
sdd : very big device. try to use READ CAPACITY(16). SCSI device sdd: 7808880640 512-byte hdwr sectors (3998147 MB) SCSI device sdd: drive cache: write back sdd : very big device. try to use READ CAPACITY(16).
I have no idea what try to use READ CAPACITY(16) means but with fdisk I can only partition 2TB and the rest seems lost. My only solution now is to create two volumes on the RAID controller, each with 2TB and then it works without a problem.
My digital picture frame is almost finished. I have now glued the LCD on the backside of the frame and I have also installed the other required parts of the laptop.
Instead of a getty on tty0 it is starting directly startx which is controlled by a pretty simple .xinitrc:
#!/bin/sh
while true; do
feh -r -F -Z -z -D 5 -f ~/bla --hide-pointer
done
I have feh running in a loop so that I can easily restart the slideshow without having to restart the whole X server and feh is really amazing. At first I had gqview running to display the pictures but it required almost 15 seconds to load one of the images and feh does it without any delay. I have no idea why it takes
so much longer with gqview but it works now just as I had expected it to.
I had two last problems which are fortunately now solved:
- The mouse cursor was visible during the slideshow until I discovered that feh does have the option --hide-pointer (I admit that was pretty easy).
- The display always blanked after 10 minutes until I finally found out that I had to put Option "BlankTime" "0" in the ServerLayout section of xorg.conf. I had previously tried to put this option in every other section of that file and of course it had never worked. The main problem was that I always had to wait 10 minutes to see if my changes worked or not.
All I have to do now before I can put it on a wall is to buy a wireless PCMCIA card and it should be ready. But to find a wireless card which just works sounds like it is going to be the hardest part.
NP: Paolo Conte – La Casa Cinese
Today was the day: Jennifer and I have bought a house. Now we have to wait until it has been completed in December to finally move in.
NP: Linkin Park – A Place For My Head
Yesterday Jennifer and I saw Batman Begins and to my surprise it was not as bad as expected. It was pretty good entertainment and the only time I was a bit bored was during the car chase which was just a bit too long. So having had rather low expectations helped us having a nice evening.
NP: Pearl Jam – Leash
At the last meeting of our local LUG (Linux User Group Esslingen (LUGES))
I installed luminocity and
we had a lot of fun with it. Of course almost everyone doubted its
usefulness but it is definitely really really cool.