Category Archives: Technology

Hard Drives Hell

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Oh boy … talk about a bad day for hard drives.

Thursday evening I noticed my laptop was getting REALLY sluggish … I ran uptime (part of the MKS Toolkit, which I can’t do without) and found out my system had been up for 15 days straight without a reboot. Almost a record for a Windows machine, I think. So I decided to reboot the system.

I started the reboot process and noticed it was taking a VERY long time to boot … so I powered off again and ran diagnostics. The hard drive was failing. Unfortunately, because this hard drive was an upgrade I purchased from Dell, it was not covered under my laptop’s warranty. And, even though Hitachi offers a 3 year warranty on the drive, Dell only gives a 1 year warranty.

Oh well, hard drives aren’t that expensive … so I figured I would swing by Frys after work on Friday. I was confident that I had a solid backup of the system, that was only a few days old.

During the day on Friday, someone told me that the midrange.com archive server was very very slow. I checked it out and saw that that system (gondor) was showing disk errors on the 2nd hard drive. Oh joy, another drive to buy at Frys.

I went to Frys to get replacement drives … I wasn’t super happy with the selection (although they had a huge quantity of the drives they had available). I ended up getting a 100gb, 5400 rpm, Seagate PATA drive for the laptop and a 300gb, 7200 rpm, Seagate SATA drive for gondor.

Getting gondor restored wasn’t a big deal … it gets backed up on a daily basis to a usb removable drive.

The laptop is a different story … as Windows doesn’t really have the best backup mechanism I rely on Norton Ghost. It’s always worked OK for me in the past.

It’s in the process of restoring right now … it’s VERY slow going, but I have high hopes.

Luckily I keep the Quicken data files on a LAN drive, so I haven’t lost anything there.

Update … 5:30 pm … oh boy, talk about a long day.

I had to do the restore from the Ghost image 4 times … I couldn’t get it to restore the image and allocate the extra 20gb to my primary Windows partition.

I ended up just restoring the partitions with the same size they were before the failure. I’ll have to get a partition resizing utility in the next week or so so I can resize the partition to allocate the new space.

[tags]Windows, Hard Drives, Backup, Norton Ghost[/tags]

Modem

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I found this modem in my dad’s den today … it’s an Everex EV-941 …. I think it’s a 1200 baud modem.

Yeah, you’re right, my dad is a packrat.

But I love him anyway.

[tags]hardware, modem, antique[/tags]

Watchdog

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I need to figure out how to setup a watchdog timer on my linux systems.

While Ginny and I were out on a mini-vacation this weekend … gondor, my main web server, went weird on me.

It would respond to pings … but none of the servers would respond. I could telnet into the specific port, and it would connect, but the server itself would not respond.

So we cut our vacation a little short and came home (Gondor is kind of important) … when I looked at the system it wasn’t locked up (which I didn’t expect, because it still responded to some things), but it wasn’t doing anything.

Nothing serious was showing up on syslog, but the system was still hung up.

I ran a bunch of diagnostics, which didn’t indicate any problems… so I’m pretty much at a loss. Diagnostics were run on memory, the main-board, and the hard drives. I should note that one of the hard drives is making an odd whining noise … which indicates to me a potential problem … but the diagnostics didn’t indicate a problem.

Once I can figure out how to get a watchdog running, if the system goes weird on me again, it will at reboot itself. Not a prefect solution, but workable until I can figure out what is going wrong.

[tags]Linux, hardware, diagnostics, Dell, watchdog[/tags]

Phishing Response

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Today … like most days … I received phishing spam … nothing new about that.

Just out of idle curiosity, I clicked on the link they indicated (a bogus E*Trade site) to see what it looked like … this is a screen shot of what I saw …

afraid-org-banned-user.jpg

I have to tip my hat to Joshua Anderson, who runs afraid.org … his response to the phishing attempt was absolutely the best thing that could be done.

I wish other service providers responded in similar fashion.

[tags]phishing, spam, security, isp, tos[/tags]

Net Neutrality

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Ok, I don’t watch the Daily Show all that much … but I usually get a good laugh when I do catch it.

I found this clip, however, on the internet that’s pretty darn funny … it corrects some of Ted Steven’s … um … ‘errors’ that he made when describing what the internet is.

Watch Links

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No, I’m not saying pay attention to hyperlinks … I’m referring to the links in a watchband. 🙂

I recently purchased a new watch from Amazon.com … it is a Casio Men’s G-Shock Atomic Solar Watch.

The watch arrived last Friday without incident … but the watchband, which is metal and has removable links, was far too big. No big deal, all I had to do is remove some of the links to make it the right size.

Problem is, there’s no instructions on how to remove the links… and it’s not immediately obvious how you do it. Clearly you have to slide the pin down (I’ll add a picture of the link later) to get it out, but without a really tiny screwdriver, it’s impossible.

I checked the Casio website to see if I could find anything … but there is nothing but a PDF of the watches manual available.

I find their support number and give it a call … the guy I talked to indicated that they could email me the information on how to remove links. I say great … I’ll keep an eye on my inbox. He replies that it probably won’t be until Monday that the email is sent … because the person who sends email is out of the office today.

<sound of a jaw dropping>

I reply (with an appropriate level of incredulity): “What? You can’t send the email? Doesn’t your system just have the ability to send email directly?” I’m informed, that their system does not have that ability … and the only person with email access won’t be back until Monday.

Ok, I say, but I really think you guys should move into the 20th century.

After I hang up, and play with the watch a bit more, I’m able to figure out how to get the links out … and the watch is comfortably on my wrist right now.

To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever had a situation where a technologically oriented company (as I’m assuming Casio is) wasn’t able to send email on demand. IBM, Dell, Compaq, even Yakima, have all been able to send me information immediately via email.

Update: Tuesday, 6/6/06 (auspisius date, to say the least).

Casio finally sent me the instructions … they sent a file named “RESIZING” … and informed me that I could open it with Adobe Acrobat or any Word Processing program. Of course without a file extension, it will be hard to open the file with any program.

[tags]Time, Watches, Casio, Watchband[/tags]

Say NO to Backup MX’s

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Word of advice … with a few exceptions, there is absolutely no need for most organizations to implement backup MX’s. In fact, if they are not setup and managed very carefully, they can cause significant harm to an organization.

In the past week I’ve had two people on my mailing lists get their subscriptions suspended because their companies backup MX’s were not configured properly.

For those who don’t know, a “Backup MX” is a mail server that can accept mail delivery if the primary mail server is not available. A domain’s DNS records have “MX” records that list the mail servers in order of priority. Sending mail servers will try to connect to the first receiving mail server on the MX list, if that connection fails, it will try the next, etc.

Why are they not needed and, more importantly, why can they cause harm?

  1. Not needed
    1. Most sending mail server will try to deliver mail for a few days (generally around 5). Even if your mail server is down for a whole weekend, the sending server will continue delivery attempts.
    2. Unless your organization is expecting a massive amount of email (and I’m talking about thousands of mail deliveries per second, the kind a major national ISP might get), most mail servers are more than capable of handling the load … and the extra work involved in maintaining the additional servers probably isn’t worth it.
  2. Why harmful
    1. If not configured properly, mail delivered to the backup MX might not be accepted … thus causing non-delivery errors. This is what happened to the subscribers to my lists. Their primary MX was accepting mail, but the backup MX wasn’t. The rejection messages were being processed by the list software and their subscriptions were suspended
    2. Backup MX’s are often not as spam & virus resistant as primary MX’s. For this reason, spammers and virus writers often target backup MX’s instead of primary MX’s.

In the end … backup MX’s do have their uses … but only if implemented where absolutely needed and managed very carefully.

Oh, and by the way, if you are having problems sending mail from a different system than your primary mail server … it’s not because you need a backup MX. It’s probably because the other system needs to have a reverse IP name setup in DNS. Many mail servers are configured to reject mail sent from systems that do not have reverse IP dns entries setup.

[tags]SMTP, mail, email, Mail Servers, MX records, DNS[/tags]

Stupid Outlook

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Sometimes I really hate MS Outlook.

Yesterday I had to run a test that Cindy, one of our QA people, was having problems with … she was trying to test our issue tracking system against a DB2/400 database, but were getting a system error from the iSeries.

She emailed me the instructions … they was pretty straight forward …

log on to test system
open a command shell
cd into the testing directory
run
. ./setup.script
command parm1 parm2 parm3
command parm4 parm5

Unfortunately, Outlook removed some line breaks and it looked like this:

log on to test system
open a command shell
cd into the testing directory
run
. ./setup.script
command parm1 parm2 parm3 command parm4 parm5

And so I couldn’t run the command properly because the parameters were wrong.

I wasted about 2 hours last night trying to figure out why the test procedure wasn’t working.

And, yes, I did find the option to disable that particular behaivor.

[tags]Outlook, QA, Testing, Work[/tags]

Frustration Abounds

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I had a very frustrating day at work today … nothing was working right … even when it did work right, it wasn’t supposed to.

I’ve been trying to track down a bug in some software that only manifests when we put the system under a very heavy load. Unfortunately, a heavy load is very hard to simulate.

Luckily, our QA has a pretty solid test framework that will simulate 18 users performing 10 transaction each all at the same time.

Problem is, I can’t debug when the test framework is running. If I try to run the test framework in my debugger, there’s enough delay added by the debugger AND additional latency in the communications that the error I’m trying to fix doesn’t manifest (not to mention that the server I’m interacting with doesn’t have as much of a load on it).

My only option is to add logging code to the software and run the test framework over and over and over again.

I ran the test framework a few times in the morning and saw the error … I wanted to add a bit more diagnostic code to extract more information about the failure.

I ran the test framework again THREE more times … and not once did the error manifest.

I know the error is there … I just don’t know what I need to do to fix it yet. And if I can’t get it to manifest, I can’t refine the solution.

Darn frustrating.

[tags]Work, java, debugging[/tags]

Restart Required

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Gahhhhh!!!!

Sometimes I hate Windows (more than sometimes, actually)!

Of course, I also hate software installers … especially those that require you to restart Windows after installing something … but don’t tell you before hand that it will (or may) be required.

What I hate even more than that … is installers that require a restart … but don’t give you an option to NOT restart after the install.

I just had to re-install the PocketPC “ActiveSync” software … and, after it finished the install, it informed me that a system restart was required … and I should click the “OK” button to restart.

Of course there was no way to avoid doing the restart … so my options were to let it restart (interrupting my work) or let the installer sit there for a few hours until I could take a break and do the restart when I was actually ready to. The 2nd option ran the risk of me accidentally clicking the OK button when I didn’t mean to.

Software vendors … GET A CLUE … only require a restart when it’s really necessary … and ALWAYS give the user the option of restarting later.

Phew, glad I got that off my chest. I’m better now.

[tags]Windows, installers, software, restart[/tags]