For a long while one of my servers “crashed” weekly. Every saturday at 3am the load would just spiral up and everything would become unresponsive (still working but slow) – everything was waiting on disk I/O. I kept putting off checking why this happened, and just rebooted the machine manually every saturday (lazy lazy). After a while I found out it was at 3am, so it had to be a cron job. I then noticed that one of my other servers also had a high load at 3am, but less high and it recovered.

Today I did some thinking and checking, and to blame was.. me! I had configured smartmontools to do a weekly long selfcheck at 3am on all 4 disks in the software RAID5 at the same time. This apparently took so much speed away from the disks that the machine didn’t cope.. Woopsie.

Note: hobby environment of course, real production I would have spent more time figuring it out 🙂

RIP 3DRealms – you won’t be forgotten 🙁

WTF WTF WTF.

Thanks to the Scarlet Drama Show Of The Month apparently TV Vlaanderen DVB-S users suffered lack of access to their (TVV) channels for hours on end. Great redundant infrastructure in top quality datacenter guys…

But more into my own zone, WTF is Telenet doing again… Apparently it’s being talked about on the TIK and Userbase forums already, but there seem to have been some changes put into place. Firstly, Telenet cut off FTA on the former In.DI network, leaving everyone not using their decoder out in the cold. I’d suggest swapping to TVV but the statement above does not inspire much confidence.

Then, apparently they now scramble more channels then before on the regular Telenet network as well. Suddenly my DVB-C PCI card in my Myth box became even more useless than before as the channels I was able to view (eg ARD) are now encrypted. Apparently only Arte and TVE are FTA now. I read that since monday (which was NOT 20 april, Telenet guys) the VRT channels are FTA including Radio stations and HD channels.

Unfortunately I can’t verify this as my card can’t pick up the transponder they’re on 🙁 I have VRT over DVB-T, but that’s not all the channels that are available on DVB-C so I’ll have to look into what’s happening here with the tuning. In any case, I’m deeply sad about this whole thing.

Dear Telenet, Just give me the godsdamn boxkey or FTA all the channels that I can get over analog connection and I’ll forget you suck donkeyballs.

If you’re using smplayer and want to watch something on your second monitor, the video window will most likely stay black with the default settings. Setting your video renderer to “gl” resolves this issue.

If you suddenly find your KDE on Ubuntu Intrepid without working keyboard focus and no window decorations (essentially, no window management functions), try getting to “system configuration” from the menu and check Appearance > Windows. If it says something about being able to load kcm_kwindecoration.so because of a missing libkephal.so, apt-get install kde-window-manager. Although it will already be installed, “somebody” fscked up dependencies.

Beste Nederlanders en Vlamingen,

“Paranoia” is een zelfstandig naamwoord. Hoewel het in de Van Dale ook bestaat als informeel synoniem van “paranoïde”, lijkt me dit niet geschikt als vervanger, en al helemaal niet in gedrukte artikels of op TV.

Graag vanaf nu weer “paranoïde” gebruiken, dank bij voorbaat.

Installed Debian Etch yesterday (I need a linux kernel with xen and vserver for now, and Lenny doesn’t have one) then upgraded it to Lenny. Afterwards the Xen tools wouldn’t start anymore and produced the following error:

# /etc/init.d/xend start
 
Restarting XEN control daemon: xendTraceback (most recent call last):
 
File "/usr/lib/xen-3.0.3-1/bin/xend", line 40, in <module>
 
from xen.xend.server import SrvDaemon
 
File "/usr/lib/xen-3.0.3-1/lib/python/xen/xend/server/SrvDaemon.py", line 17, in <module>

 import xen.lowlevel.xc
 
ImportError: /usr/lib/xen-3.0.3-1/bin/../lib/python/xen/lowlevel/xc.so: undefined symbol: Py_InitModule4
 

You can solve this in 2 ways. First, the silly way:

rm /usr/bin/python; ln -s /usr/bin/python2.4 /usr/bin/python

Or, the way you’re supposed to:

apt-get install xen-utils-3.2-1 
 

ISPam, notorious spelling- and grammar fail site, complains about wrong translations on a .nl site of a French hosting company. As someone so eloquently put it: "pot, kettle, #000000" … :rolleyes: