Month: September 2012

The USB freeze up problem isn’t happening any more. I don’t know exactly what fixed it, but I ran the SEATools long test on it, ran fsck on it, plugged it into a different USB port in a different cradle. Possibly coincidentally, I was having another problem with not being able to log off or authenticate in the software update program, and one suggestion I found on-line was to install a particular “KDE extras” package which seems to have cured those problems.

The replacement disk for the one that came with errors arrived, and a quick fdisk and mdadm /dev/md128 --add /dev/sdb1 and it rebuilt overnight and everything looks ship shape and Bristol fashion. Hopefully I won’t be getting any more “degraded array” emails, and hopefully when I reboot it, it won’t stop at the “initramfs” prompt waiting for me to fix whatever is wrong.

Oh, I also fixed a problem with Google Chrome occassionally freezing. I looked in my .xsession-errors file and it was filling up with messages that said “ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:957:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) The dmix plugin supports only playback stream”. Googling that found that I had to start Chrome with google-chrome --disable-bundled-ppapi-flash to disable the built-in Flash. Fortunately when you do that it uses the Adobe Flash plugin that was installed for FireFox so everything keeps working as before.

I’ve got to say, I’m really loving KDE. It really works well and looks good.

USB drive was frozen up this morning. Possibly the unexpected power down yesterday (guys hooking up my gas grill threw the wrong breaker and powered down my office as well as the furnace) reset the hdparm parameter, or it wasn’t an inopportune spin-down that caused the freeze up. Just in case, I removed the pm-tools package to prevent the system from trying to do any power management (I hope).

After my wipe and reinstall experiment, there are still a few little glitches (above and beyond the fact that I’m still running my RAID1 in degraded state because the disk it’s supposed to be mirroring to is being replaced). One of the most annoying was my hourly “rsync to the external hard drive” – my own home grown equivalent to “Time Machine”. About once a day it was freezing up, usually during the first big access to the drive, which is a “rm -rf” on the destination directory. And once it froze up, it really froze up – there would be dozens and sometimes hundreds of processes that wouldn’t end and couldn’t be killed, most the hdparm and smartctl commands that munin issues to detect the drive status and temperature. The only way to get those processes to end was the turn off the external USB cradle. This didn’t happen before, so I don’t know what’s going on. But I suspected that something is being more aggressive about spinning down idle external drives, so I issued the command “hdparm -S 0 /dev/sdd” and that seems to have solved the problem.

Other glitches – the dvd player application exits as soon as you start it. Also, I just had a notification in the system notifications area that there were upgrades to install, so I clicked it and it brought up the updater app, but when I clicked “Install all updates” it told me it couldn’t because I hadn’t authenticated. I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to prompt for your password and authenticate you first. So I installed them from the command line using aptitude. Nothing I can’t live with.