Category: Rant

Oh, that isn’t good.

I was trying to tar a bunch of stuff off a USB backup disk onto the new machine, and it suddenly started throwing all sorts of errors and couldn’t read any drives, not even the root drive to find the shutdown command.

First thing I’m going to check is moving the drives around, because I accidentally put the two new drives in the third and forth slots instead of one and two, so I’m going to fix that. If that doesn’t help, then I’m going to just turn of the Adaptec RAID controller and try a software RAID. If that doesn’t work, I don’t know what I’m going to do. Probably return the hardware and start again.

IT’S ALIVE!

The GoogleBox lives!


Yes, after 4 days of downtime, my illustrious yellow 1U server has been revived from the dead. After it died, I asked the colo provider to power cycle it, and they said it didn’t come back up. I asked them to yank the box, and I picked it up and brought it home. Expecting a power problem, I first tried yanking all the hard drives and memory, but even then didn’t get any beeps or other activity. So then, I tried yanking one of the CPUs. I must have gotten lucky, because removing the #2 CPU got me a couple of POST beeps, and when I put back the memory and the hard drives, it booted just fine.

I’ve had this box since January 2007, and the CPUs are dated from 2001, so I guess it’s time to replace it. I ordered a slightly newer box off eBay that has twice as much memory and 4 SATA drive bays. With two 1Tb drives, it will have much more disk space, but more importantly the empty drive bays mean that if I need to expand, I can add newer bigger drives when they become available. I’m considering using software RAID to mirror the two drives, because even 1Tb is bigger than what I have now and I’m not hurting for space. And with lvm, I can plonk in two new 2Tb drives when the time comes, migrate the volume groups to the new drives, and yank the old ones. All the remains now is to decide whether to build a new OS and get everything working on it, or just restore from a backup and continue the upgrade path.

While I had the box home for a few days, I took the opportunity to do a long-delayed upgrade from Debian “etch” to Debian “lenny”. I didn’t want to tackle that remotely because there was a significant chance (and it happened several times) that I was going to get it into the situation where I needed to intervene at the Grub stage, and I couldn’t do that remotely (because the cheap colo facilities don’t give you remote boot consoles like the expensive ones do.) The biggest hassle of this upgrade was that I had to do some messing around to get a console to appear, changing the boot options on the box itself, and also the getty lines in inittab of each of the guest “domU”s. The second biggest hassle was that I had to install “udev” on all the guests so that ssh could work. Also while they were home I took the opportunity to make a backup of the whole thing, including the guests that don’t belong to me. Normally I just back up my own. That should make setting up a new box a lot easier.

I got all the fixing and upgrading and backing up done early this morning. I brought my box over to the colo company office at 10:15. And waited. And waited. And waited. I had a “ping -a” running so I’d know as soon as it came back. And I waited some more. The business office is the other side of town from the colo facility, so I figured there would be some delay. The company that used to own those racks would let me go out to the facility with them, but these guys bought the business from that company and they’re anal about security and won’t let me go. Well, it turns out that their scheduled visit to the colo facility was at 10pm – nobody told me that, of course, until after I’d started panicing that they’d all gone home for the weekend without racking my box. But here it is – they racked the box, phoned me to say it was powering up, and now I’m connected again. Hallelujah!

Chrome – still not great

Update: A few hours after I wrote that, I decided to quit and restart Chrome to free up some memory, and now none of the extensions I installed are showing up.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my experiences with Google Chrome on the Mac. At the time, Chrome on the Mac was lagging quite far behind the Windows version. Supposedly now it’s all caught up, and so I’m going to revisit my previous complaints:

  • It frequently lost the text cursor in text input fields, especially on GMail.
    • Still happens.
  • It seemed much slower and more likely to corrupt the display compared to Safari in Google Wave.
    • I haven’t been using Wave, so no comment.
  • It had a bad habit of undocking a tab on the slightest provocation.
    • Still happens.
  • The fact that the tabs take up space in the window frame means that you’d frequently undock a tab when you were trying to move the whole window.
    • Still happens. There is a tiny bit of real-estate near the “+” to open a new tab that is still available, but it’s a pain to grab.
  • It doesn’t have a “Reload all tabs” option. Supposedly there is an extension to that, but in order to use extensions I’d have to upgrade to the latest development build. That’s more work than I’m willing to do when it has all these other problems.
    • I found an extension that will reload individual tabs on a schedule rather than the whole window on demand. That’s actually nicer than having to reload everything manually. It’s not bad, except when your computer goes to sleep you have to restart it by reloading all the tabs individually. Plus when it reloads on a tab that is on a different Space than the one you’re on, it will switch back to that Space, but that’s a Spaces problem not a Chrome problem.
  • It doesn’t recognize or tell you about RSS feeds. In Safari or Firefox, any page that has an RSS feed displays an icon, and if you click it, the OS opens the feed in the currently configured RSS reader. The functionality is so ingrained in browsers that many pages don’t seem to have any other indication that they have RSS feeds. Once again, I’m told that Chrome has a plug in for that. Once again, too much trouble.
    • The only RSS plug ins I could find will add the RSS feed to a web based RSS reader like Google Reader. There is no support I can find anywhere for the OS-defined RSS reader. So I’m experimentally putting NetNewsWireLite out pasture in favour of Google Reader. Not bad, but not great.

So over-all, it’s got a few user interface annoyances, but the really big sticking points have been taken care of by plugins. And I was happy. Until today. And that’s when I discovered that Google Chrome is utterly useless for a web developer – there appears to be no way to make it reload your javascript file that you’ve just changed unless you go to “File->Clear Browsing Data”, uncheck everything except “Empty the cache”, click “Clear Browsing Data”, and wait, and wait, and wait. In normal web browsers, you just have to hit shift-reload on your page and it will reload that page and all the attendent files, including CSS and JavaScript files. That’s it, I’m switching back to Safari (or maybe Firefox) for the page I’m developing.

Oh, plus the built in “Developer Tools” in Chrome suck in comparison with Firebug, but that’s apples to oranges since Firebug is a plugin.

Hosting again

My colo box, which I bought used on 10 January 2007, hung last night and needed to be rebooted. That’s the second time in 3 months, after nearly two years of flawless service. I wonder if it’s time to replace the hardware?

And once I open the discussion about whether to replace the hardware, I open another discussion in my mind: is it time to go back to Linode or some other VPS provider? I left Linode years ago because they didn’t have enough RAM and hard disk for what I needed, but over the years what they provide for the same amount of money has been growing and growing. I currently pay $100 a month for my colo space – I subdivided the box into three Xen domUs, and of the two guys who rent the other domUs, one of them pays me pretty regularly and the other guy sometimes remembers to pay but usually forgets. I don’t think either of them are making very extensive use. So essentially I’m paying $70 a month for 1Gb of RAM and 100Gb of HD for apps, and 370Gb for a music collection. Well, the music collection isn’t all the important, and for $60 a month at Linode I could get 1Gb of RAM and 50Gb of hard disk. Evidently adding another 50Gb of disk would add another $25/month to that, which isn’t optimal. Anyway, I’ve got to consider my options here before spending another $500 on a used colo box.

Facebook

The Facebook “Suggestions” box, which normally shows me people who know somebody I know or groups that a Facebook “friend” or two has joined, is currently suggesting “We can find 1,000,000 people who DO believe in Evolution before June”. There are only two problems with that:

1) Evolution is a fact. It doesn’t matter if you believe in it or not, it just is. The only people who are swayed by arguments about whether something is true or not by how many other people “believe” in it or not are idiots. The world didn’t suddenly start orbiting around the sun because a majority of people “believed” Galileo and Copernicus, it was always that way. And it didn’t stop doing so when Galileo renounced his theory under torture. And anthrogenic global climate change isn’t going to go away if you stick your fingers in your ears and go “LA LA LA I DON’T BELIEVE IN YOU”. (I’d say that idiots who can be swayed by majority belief arguments aren’t worth arguing with, but unfortunately they hold a lot of political power in this country.)

1a) As a scientific fact, I don’t think “evolution” deserves that magisterial capital letter.

2) The fan group, rather than presenting facts or arguments about evolution, is actually more about making fun of people who believe in one or more Gods, especially Christians. So maybe they should state that as their purpose, instead of making it about evolution, a scientific fact that many theists, even Christians, understand is true.