This afternoon the airconditioning units of the NMV room at Versatel Nossegem (where I have my kit colocated) all failed together (yes, clustering is great, so you can all go down at once!). This made the temperature rise from a nice and fresh 22°C to 65° in some places of the room.

In the meanwhile everything’s restored, but I just had a server act up a little in such a way that I had to powercycle it to get it back into gear. After this I could clearly see there were some disk problems causing above acting up. Apparently the heat had given my second disk (in software RAID1) some delusions of grandeur:

hda: Maxtor 6Y080L0, ATA DISK drive
hdc: ÿ, ATA DISK drive
hda: max request size: 128KiB hda: 156250000 sectors (80000 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=65535/16/63, (U)DMA
hda: cache flushes supported
 hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4
hdc: max request size: 1024KiB
hdc: 18374966859414961920 sectors (143554428589 MB) w/32640KiB Cache, CHS=65535/255/63

143554TB of IDE disk, with 32 megs of cache! Aircon failures clearly improve your harddisks, I can highly recommend them! 🙁

I’ve got some Core 2 Duo-based servers since a while and thought I’d play a bit with frequency scaling. The board is a Supermicro PDSMI+ and the CPU is an Intel Core2 Duo E4400, running at 2GHz. However, when I modprobe acpi-cpufreq, the CPU frequency drops to 1000MHz, and indeed if you check the available frequencies in the /sys interface, all I see is 600, 800 and 1000 MHz. Anyone have an idea why? I guess the module gets it from ACPI tables or so, which are wrong? Or is there something else that needs to be set up… rmmodding acpi-cpufreq restores the CPU frequency to the correct 2000MHz.

Merry christmas, yada yada yada, greetings from Switzerland 🙂

Still hadn’t upgraded some servers to etch, apparently. So did some upgrades this weekend, and got a call today that my webmail (horde 2 imp 3 based) no longer worked. Only displayed a few errors like Notice: Only variable references should be returned by reference in /usr/share/horde2/lib/Auth.php on line 80.

Luckily I found an old blog post which explains what you need to do to make the code newer-PHP-compliant 😀