Day: March 15, 2007

For some strange reason, when some people post comments to my blog using their livejournal OpenID (jenniferm and ptomblin_lj, for instance), SpamKarma2 complains that their posts are missing the “payload”, which is a hidden input field with a cryptographic hash of some of the other values in the form. But others can post without this problem. I look at the page source before I post, and I can see the payload is there, so something is stripping it. I have no idea if this is some sort of interaction with Akismet or a bug in OpenID or what.

So far I’m not impressed with Akismet. Ever since I’ve installed it I’ve seen an increase in false positives. I’m going to try to disable it and see if the OpenID commenting problem goes away.

Update: Disabling Aksimet didn’t help. Must be the OpenID plugin.

I have a PCI USB 2 card, which I use to plug in external USB 2 hard disks for backup. I have one external disk that I’ve been using for months now, and it’s been working fine. Some months ago I bought a second drive, with the intention of swapping between the two, and keeping one in my desk at work as an off-site backup. It worked for a while, but then started failing during backups. I’d lost the reciept, so I ended up selling it locally to somebody under the understanding that it may fail, and if they don’t like it they can return it.

The day before yesterday, I bought a new drive to try again. I stuck it in and backed up about 200Gb to it. Then I simulated 7 nightly backups all without incident. Last night, our power glitched for about 3 seconds, which was long enough to knock both the external drives off, because they’re not on the UPS. This morning I power cycled them and mounted them both, and did another nightly backup. But in the middle of backing up to the second drive, it started failing in a very similar way to the old drive. It started with:

Mar 15 07:51:30 allhats kernel: lost page write due to I/O error on sdb1
Mar 15 07:51:30 allhats kernel: sd 18:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to device being removed
Mar 15 07:51:30 allhats last message repeated 47 times
Mar 15 07:51:30 allhats kernel: sd 18:0:0:0: rejed 18:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to device be
ing removed
Mar 15 07:51:30 allhats kernel: sd 18:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to device being removed
Mar 15 07:51:30 allhats last message repeated 1154 times
Mar 15 07:51:30 allhats kernel: __journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_frozen_data
Mar 15 07:51:30 allhats kernel: EXT3-fs error (device sdb1): ext3_get_inode_loc: unable
to read inode block - inode=7897505, block=15794191
Mar 15 07:51:30 allhats kernel: journal commit I/O error


Two external hard drives, both of which caused these sorts of problems under load. Hmmm. I’m starting to wonder if it’s not the disks. Maybe it’s something about the USB controller. I need to test this somehow. I wonder if my work computer has USB 2?