– ext2 doesn’t have a journal 

– ext3 is so "default". AND it gets b0rken just as well; on my home fileserver there were errors and fsck.ext3 exited with a SIGSEGV. Yikes. Upgrading to the 1.39-1.40 release from Sarge backports made that go away, luckily, but it’s still icky that it just broke like that and kept on humming along at the same time.

– XFS turned out to be really, really slow with many small files.

– ReiserFS only gave me corruption, headache and a murderer as an author 😉

– ZFS? Quoting Andrew Morton, "I haven’t seen a patch for that yet, but it’s very welcome!" 

What to do, what to do… 

Yummy 🙂 This is Dedibox ‘s colocation facility. They put 2 Via 2000+ CPU boards in custom 1U rack chassis, and lots and lots of them; and offer el cheapo dedicated servers.

At 23:31:30 UTC on February 13, 2009, a celebration is expected as the Unix time number reaches 1234567890 seconds. This day happens to fall on Friday the 13th on the Gregorian calendar.

At work, Mobistar delegated our reverse DNS to a zone with a slash in it. I didn’t even know this was legal in DNS but apparently it is, and BIND and PowerDNS serve it perfectly. I installed PowerAdmin to manage my PowerDNS records with a GUI (MySQL INSERT/UPDATE was becoming a bit tedious), but could not create a domain nor any entries below it (after creating the domain through MySQL), because it wouldn’t accept the / as a valid character. I cooked up a small patch (don’t know if it’s complete, I just know it works for me) which you can find here .

Okay, that may be a slight overreaction, but there’s surely a surge of new versions fixing security holes these days ;(

A great article which I’ve been pointed to a while ago was based on something I wanted to do myself for a while already. Everyone keeps seeing movies where the computers do the strangest things (this includes CSI and others) in the strangest ways where anyone working in IT keeps scratching their heads 😉

Be sure to also check out the first 2 links mentioned in the post for more funny top 10’s: What code DOESN’T do in real life (that it does in the movies)

Why is it that every time you need to restore something you realize there’s something missing to be able to get back in business quickly? One of my virtual servers disappeared after some disk trouble (no idea where to or why?!) and it seems some directories were wrongly excluded from the backups… So a little bit of puzzling was required. Hopefully one day my backup strategy will be perfect! 😉

Last week I spent some money in "gamer-izing" my computer case. It’s a nice Silver Lian-Li aluminium thingy, a bit less nice-looking because of 2 white/beige Plextor DVD & DVD-RW front bezels… So I spent some cash via Ebay on 2 nice aluminum bezels , a nice thermometer/fan monitor display , a few Akasa blue-led fans and a sidepanel with plexi so you can see inside the case (woops, some cleanup needed ;)).

Friday we had some time to kill at Mediamarkt , and I ended up walking out with 2 Samsung SyncMaster 920N 19" TFT monitors… Now I really got the über-PC 😉 (Unfortunately I already have a dead pixel on one of my monitors, so I’ll have to go back to MediaMarkt some day soon).

Been trying to fix up an installation for the last few days now. SLES9 on a box with an 8 port Areca SATA controller in it, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 as OS (will run Oracle). Areca supplies a driver floppy to use with the installer; all very nice. However, the SuSE installer does not copy the driver module into the initrd (even though it is regenerated on install, and even set to be loaded on boot in the config!), so after the installer reboots you get a kernel panic saying it can’t find the root fs. Which is correct, since the module isn’t loaded. Areca has some details in their README about "do this when the SuSE installer reaches 70%: press Ctrl-Alt-F2 and …", but the SuSE installer reboots automatically without question or warning, and by the time I could follow their instructions (some files needed to be on the disk first) I couldn’t fix it up before the thing rebooted by itself. PITA. Rescue mode gives kernel oops when I try to mount it the XFS filesystem on it. Debian Install CD finds the controller, but I cannot chroot into it (to run LILO) since the system is 64bit and the Debian one is 32-bit. Argh.

I love Debian, and the Areca ISO from tienhuis.nl … 

Seems I’ve been playing a lot of games this week. Well, not really "a lot" but still more than the last 2 months or so. Last sunday I played Age of Empires 3 for a few hours, getting my ass kicked by the computer players 3 times in a row (:(),  somewhere this week i played The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion for a bit over an hour (just to see how hard it was for my graphics card, a Radeon 9600, to keep up), yesterday a good 2 hours on Need for Speed: Most Wanted , and just now a good 4 hours on OpenTTD (rocks!). SiD3WiNDR Transports is doing very well at the moment 🙂

Now that this extended weekend is here, I feel like I’ve got some time to relax… I actually got tired of the computer completely yesterday evening! :p