Month: November 2004

The Greatest Canadian

The CBC is having a series on “The Greatest Canadian”. I haven’t been following it, mostly because we don’t get CBC TV here in Rochester NY. (Yeah, we get two channels in Russian and one in Vietnamese, but the closest neighbour country, and one that speaks the same language as us? No way!)

Anyway, my pick for the Greatest Canadian would be Pierre Trudeau – Joe, the “I AM CANADIAN” guy in the beer commericals isn’t in the running. My dad probably wouldn’t agree with that, because I don’t think he ever forgave Trudeau for that time he did a pirohuette behind the Queen’s back. I know my western friends like Les never forgave him for the National Energy Plan and the time he gave the finger to protesters in Salmon Arm, B.C. In the last couple of years he was in power, I hated his arrogance – but that was before Mulroney and Cretien showed us just how arrogant a Canadian Prime Minister could get.
Continue reading “The Greatest Canadian”

Man, Taco Bell is getting tougher

This job ad seems pretty typical for a fast food restaurant manager, until you get to the requirements section:

Minimum Requirements:

    * Aircraft is a Challenger 601-3A.
    * Minimum of two years college or equivalent technical training.
    * Must hold a valid Airline Transport Pilot certificate
    * Hold a valid FAA First Class medical certificate
    * Have a minimum of 2,500 hours total pilot time.
    * Minimum of 250 hours multiengine.
    * Have a minimum of five years aviation experience, some transport category experience preferred.
    * Have no violations recorded with the FAA and be able to demonstrate his/her piloting ability to a high standard
    * Be a leader and confident in decision making.
    * Bilingual is a plus.

In other news, my test last night without the CD-ROM didn’t help – it still failed accessing /dev/hdc4. And my Knoppix disk was pooched so I couldn’t boot a non-Fedora 2.6 system to test it.

So how *does* one de-upgrade a computer?

After last night’s hang, I resolved to do some testing to see if I need a new motherboard or something.

I booted my computer with a non-smp kernel into single user mode. This would eliminate most “distractions” or other causes for the error. Mounted /dev/hdc1, which is an ext3 file system. I did a simple tar of some of the files on /dev/hdc1, and after about 30 seconds it froze up.

So then I booted with a Mandrake Move CD, which has a 2.4 kernel. I mounted /dev/hdc1 again, and did the tar and it worked. Then I mounted /dev/hdc4, my mp3 collection, and did something that’s frozen up my computer every time since I upgraded:


find . -type f -print | sort > /tmp/mp3.files

It didn’t freeze. Not only that, but my mp3s appear to still be there (although the presence of large numbers of files in /mp3s/lost+found makes me think that some of them will be pooched.)

So now my question becomes – how do I get back to a 2.4 (or maybe a 2.6 non-Fedora) system without incurring another 2 days of downtime and headaches? I won’t be around this weekend, and I don’t particularly want to risk this happening every night for two weeks.

Upgrade still not going well…

I woke up this morning to find every screen logged into the server was showing “unable to contact the UPS” errors. One window was still responding a bit, and an “uptime” command showed the load average just a hair over 230, and rising.

After power cycling, I find the log shows that sometime around 2am, when the nightly cron jobs kick off, the second IDE controller started throwing errors again.

I’ve got to consider the following possibilities:

  • The hardware just miraculously decided to fail when I upgraded.
  • The hardware was always a little bit bad, but the 2.6 kernel notices the problem and the 2.4 kernel didn’t. OR
  • There is nothing wrong with the hardware and it’s a fault in the kernel

Tonight I’m going to have to go offline again, while I try booting with a Knoppix CD with a 2.4 kernel to test the hardware again. If that works, then I’m going to try 2.6 with no smp, and with the infamous “noapic” flag (whatever the hell that means).