Category: Rant

Email in my inbox this morning:

The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon:

Device: /dev/hda, 1 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors

For details see host’s SYSLOG (default: /var/log/messages).

You can also use the smartctl utility for further investigation.
No additional email messages about this problem will be sent.

Looked in /var/log/messages, and I find:

Jan 11 04:10:19 allhats kernel: hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekCompl
ete Error }
Jan 11 04:10:19 allhats kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=105859162, sector=105859101
Jan 11 04:10:19 allhats kernel: ide: failed opcode was: unknown
Jan 11 04:10:19 allhats kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev hda, sector 105859101
Jan 11 04:10:22 allhats kernel: hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
Jan 11 04:10:22 allhats kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=105859162, sector=105859109
Jan 11 04:10:22 allhats kernel: ide: failed opcode was: unknown

Ok, 4:10 am was about when yum was installing new software, or maybe it was when the nightly backup was running, but I guess something was hitting a part of the disk that hasn’t been hit in a while.

I’ve started running the nightly backup every 2 hours. When I get home tonight I’m going to have to try the WDC diagnostics, and fsck to see if that will fix it. If it doesn’t, I’ve got a 180Gb drive on the shelf. That’s the one that didn’t get along well with Fedora Core 3. It passed the WDC diagnostics, so it was probably just an artifact of the way it was partitioned, so hopefully partitioning it and formatting it will fix whatever ailed it.

This could be a very long night.

Can somebody please tell me why Word v.X, with one document open but not being actively edited, should take up 30-50% of the CPU time on this machine? All I want to do is look at the documentation for this file format, not make it dance about the screen.

Hmmm. I wonder if I could save it as html or something and look at it with a tool that wasn’t written by evil monkeys on crack?

I volunteer my time to administer the news servers at The National Capital Freenet in Ottawa, mostly because after GeoVision shut down it was my main place to read news. After the last minor crisis in the news servers (caused by the regular sysadmins adding a new modem pool and a new netblock without telling me), somebody was bitching and moaning about how the news administrator doesn’t live in Ottawa, and therefore doesn’t attend meetings and “doesn’t really know what’s going on at NCF these days”. And it was pointed out that the reason the NCF doesn’t have a news administrator who lives in Ottawa and goes to meetings is that nobody wants the job, and every time I try to quit the entire board of directors and half the members beg me to stay. So somebody asked what it would take to become a news administrator. What follows is a list I quickly wrote off the top of my head.
Continue reading “So you want to be a news admin?”

In an internal design discussion document, I wrote about whether we should prevent customers from being “dumb-asses” . I only used “dumb-asses” because I originally wrote “ass hats” and was trying to think of something milder. It didn’t occur to me after I sent it that I probably should have said something more like “stupid” or “not acting in their best interests” or something. But that’s the price you pay for reading bash.org when you’re at work.

Ok, no progress today on getting my email address and phone number listed in the corporate directory, so no internet access. But on the plus side, I can no longer log into the Lotus Notes system, so that’s one good thing that’s come out of this.