Category: Rant

Car still leaking oil, computer still not reading second hard drive

In My car, the mother and My car, again, I’ve written a bit about my car, which is leaking oil in a totally un-Toyota-like manner. I took it after that weekend where it used 3 quarts of oil, and they did some sort of consumption test, and told me I needed to bring it back again. That was today. In the meantime, I was determined not to put any oil in it – I wanted them to see how much oil it was losing, and if it ran out of oil and siezed the engine somewhere between here and Oshawa, hopefully I’d get a new engine out of the deal.

No such luck, unfortunately. So I brought it in today, and they say it lost a half a quart of oil in the 600 miles I drove between then and now. That is, to me, excessive. They say that probably just the rings that they put in a month or two ago haven’t seated properly yet, and as they seat the oil consumption will go down. Ok, that’s almost believable. Our flying club once had a plane where they put the rings in one cylinder upside down and so instead of scraping the oil back down into the sump, it was pulling oil into the cylinder. I’m scheduled to go back in a week for another consumption test. Unfortunately I won’t be doing any major long-distance driving in the car in that week. Too bad, another 3 hours at 80-90mph like when I go to Ottawa or Whitby is probably the only way to show excessive oil use in a short time.

On the plus side, now that I have service records of them working on this complaint during the warranty period, if it doesn’t get any better I can pursue a claim even after the warranty period expires.

I’ll rant about my damn hard drives in another post.

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).