Month: January 2007

It’s not easy being green

We got the results of our EnergyStar audit on Saturday. They’re recommending $20,000 worth of work, and promising that we’ll probably save at least $150 a month on average based on last years energy bills. They also said we could save another $150 a month if we did the windows, but doing them in a way that’s sensitive to the age and architecture of the house (ie. not replacing leaded glass windows and wood frames with modern plastic crap) would be really expensive – maybe $30,000 to $40,000.

The problem is that the net present value of $150 a month for 10 years (which is the expected lifetime of the new furnace) is only about $14,000. Obviously energy prices will go up, and the only energy year we have records for, last year, was unusually mild, so the savings might be greater in a year like this year. But it’s still hard to say “go ahead and spend that money” with such an uncertain pay-back. So I have to think about the non-monetary pay-back as well, like the fact that the house will be more comfortable, and it will reduce our carbon footprint, and it might have a small positive affect on the value of the house.

Still, $20,000.

Sigh.

Time to worry, or just a glitch

I have mail logs going back to 24 December 2006. Recently, I noticed that every now and then one of my postfix processes will die with a “SEGV” (the dreaded Segmentation Violation). They appear at odd times in my logs, starting January 1, and continuing on the 7th, 8th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th (x2), 19th, 20th (x2), 23rd and 24th. It’s different processes each time, and each time it gives a warning about having some difficulty starting the replacement process (although the mail delivery continues, so I assume it starts up immediately after). I don’t see the same sorts of errors on my colo box, which uses an older version of postfix similarly configured.

I asked on the postfix-users mailing list, and got the totally unhelpful answer that it was something wrong in my config files – obviously wrong because it doesn’t happen if I start and stop postfix. And another person said my system memory probably was going. Well, that’s possible – the system is about 6 years old. It uses PC133 Registered RAM, which is still expensive – replacing the 1Gb I’ve got now would cost around $90, or about the same cost as 1Gb of the newest PC5400 RAM.

This machine is old for a server, and certainly the technology has passed this box by – it has AGP, not PCI Express, it has USB 1 (although I put in a PCI USB 2.0 card so I could use external hard drives), it has IDE instead of SATA, it refuses to boot without a PS/2 keyboard in spite of the fact that it’s perfectly happy with a USB keyboard after it’s booted. But on the other hand, it’s perfectly fast for what it does, and I’ve got three IDE hard drives and a 16x dual layer DVD burner in there and everything is just working the way I want it to. The only complaint I have is that it’s cranky – if I add new disks, I’ll often have to reboot three or four times before the bios will recognize them, and most times it won’t boot from a power on – I have to boot, wait for it to complain that there aren’t any hard drives in it, and then control-alt-delete it.

I don’t want a new server – if I were buying a new desktop now, it would be something to run a certain MMORPG faster. Maybe a Mac Pro with Boot Camp. But I want this server to continue to serve.

Lets hope this is just a little glitch.

Senator Leahy, you’re my favourite US politician

Listen here

It is beneath the dignity of this country, a country that has always been a beacon of human rights, to send somebody to another country to be tortured.

and

Attorney General Ashcroft said we got assurances. Assurances? From a country that we also say now “oh, we can’t talk to them because we can’t take their word for anything”.

Man, it’s great to listen to a Senator who remembers that there are three equal branches of government, not just one and two rubber stamps.

What is Hitachi thinking?

For years now, whenever I’ve had drive or controller problems, I’ve hauled out IBM’s DFT (Drive Fitness Test), even if the drive isn’t a DeathstarDeskstar. Now IBM’s drive division belongs to Hitachi, but DFT lives on. I used it last week to make sure my new colo box could handle the sorts of loads I wanted to put on it. But now that I have my old colo box back, I want to test it to see if the problems I was having might be fixed with a new drive cable before I sell it on eBay.

But this box doesn’t have a floppy. No problem, I thought, the Hitachi site has a bootable CD version. So I downloaded it and burned it and booted with it. But the first thing it does it scan the IDE controllers, and when it’s scanning “Secondary Slave”, it suddenly starts spewing errors about being unable to read A:\COMMAND.COM. Evidently DFT needs to read its own disk just at the moment that the drive was disconnected for scanning. So when they made the CD ISO, they didn’t actually test it, or didn’t think about how it works, and instead of using the “Linux Live CD” model where they make a ramdisk and load themselves into it, they just made a DOS boot partition on the CD and expect it to be there all the time.

I guess it’s off to my junk shelf to see if I have a floppy drive and cable.