Category: Rant

I have a PCI USB 2 card, which I use to plug in external USB 2 hard disks for backup. I have one external disk that I’ve been using for months now, and it’s been working fine. Some months ago I bought a second drive, with the intention of swapping between the two, and keeping one in my desk at work as an off-site backup. It worked for a while, but then started failing during backups. I’d lost the reciept, so I ended up selling it locally to somebody under the understanding that it may fail, and if they don’t like it they can return it.

The day before yesterday, I bought a new drive to try again. I stuck it in and backed up about 200Gb to it. Then I simulated 7 nightly backups all without incident. Last night, our power glitched for about 3 seconds, which was long enough to knock both the external drives off, because they’re not on the UPS. This morning I power cycled them and mounted them both, and did another nightly backup. But in the middle of backing up to the second drive, it started failing in a very similar way to the old drive. It started with:

Mar 15 07:51:30 allhats kernel: lost page write due to I/O error on sdb1
Mar 15 07:51:30 allhats kernel: sd 18:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to device being removed
Mar 15 07:51:30 allhats last message repeated 47 times
Mar 15 07:51:30 allhats kernel: sd 18:0:0:0: rejed 18:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to device be
ing removed
Mar 15 07:51:30 allhats kernel: sd 18:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to device being removed
Mar 15 07:51:30 allhats last message repeated 1154 times
Mar 15 07:51:30 allhats kernel: __journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_frozen_data
Mar 15 07:51:30 allhats kernel: EXT3-fs error (device sdb1): ext3_get_inode_loc: unable
to read inode block - inode=7897505, block=15794191
Mar 15 07:51:30 allhats kernel: journal commit I/O error


Two external hard drives, both of which caused these sorts of problems under load. Hmmm. I’m starting to wonder if it’s not the disks. Maybe it’s something about the USB controller. I need to test this somehow. I wonder if my work computer has USB 2?

• If you’re about to start something dangerous (like an aptitude upgrade on your dom0), and you set up an at job to reboot it if it causes the box to lose network connectivity, don’t forget to atrm it if everything is fine afterwards.
• reboot in an at job doesn’t do the right thing – my box was still responding to pings but I couldn’t get to it at all. Next time try shutdown -r now

I tried to install this OpenID Comments for WordPress plugin. My luck with with WordPress plugins is about 50% success, and most of the ones that fail seem to be ones suggested by Jen. Or at least my biggest other failures have been with various plugins that attempted to embed my Gallery, and Jen seemed to have no trouble with hers. (I got it to the point where it was throwing off “duplicate primary key” errors, but no closer.)

This time, it looks like it would go off to LiveJournal, get successfully authenticated, but when it came back instead of putting the comment on the post it was posted to, it was putting it on the same non-existent blog URL as in the “-1 comments” debacle. The “-1 comments” thing was caused because LJXP was sending off the entry to LiveJournal before the comment number plugin knew what postid it was, but I hacked the code of both plugins and made it work. This time I looked for something obvious, but with no luck.

Maybe somebody can suggest an OpenID WordPress plugin that works?

Mail from my list server (list.xcski.com, ip 74.202.84.134) to [your customer] is getting bounced with the message:


<[your customer]>: host domain-relay.mspring.net[198.185.2.85] said: 550 Dynamic IPs/open relays blocked. Contact <openrelay@abuse.earthlink.net>. (in reply to MAIL FROM command)


And when I try to email the address that it says to contact, I get a further bounce:

<openrelay@abuse.earthlink.net>: host madm-corleone.atl.sa.earthlink.net[207.69.200.218] said: 550 Unknown local part openrelay in <openrelay@abuse.earthlink.net> (in reply to RCPT TO command)

First of all, I’m not an open relay. Never have been, never will be. And unlike you, when I have an error message say “Contact:”, I make sure the email address actually exists. Can you bozos please fix your open relay check, and fix your bounce messages?

There is a really interesting blog called “Strange Maps” that I syndicate on my RSS aggregator page. Unfortunately, while the content of the page is intelligent and interesting, the author evidently knows fuck all about the web. Recently, all his entries have been formatted using <h1> tags, then with <span style=…> tags to set the fonts back to something more reasonable. Since my aggregator strips formatting tags like <span> so it can impose its own format, this leads to some ugly results on my page. Another time, he made his entire post in red. When I try to explain what he’s doing wrong, he doesn’t seem to understand. I suspect he must be composing his posts in Word or something worse (if there is anything worse than Word) and pasting them into WordPress.

How can I get through to him to stop doing this?