Monthly Archives: October 2005

United States Postal Service

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In some ways, the USPS amazes me…mail gets delivered to my house almost everyday without me having to pay to receive it. However, at times, the inability to do the simple task of delivering my mail annoys me. A few weeks ago I noticed that our normal carrier wasn’t delivering the mail and mail was coming at odd times (like 5:30 pm) when it normally comes around noon everyday (I can hear the letter carrier put the mail in the mailbox that’s next to our front door). Then I noticed the replacement carrier not wearing a uniform and then was confused about where the mailbox was on a neighbor’s house. This neighbor’s house has the same layout as ours and the front door/mailbox are in the same spot. Not rocket science to find it. We also started getting mail for someone else that was in a different zipcode about 10 miles away; same street address, different street. On Tuesday, I had it with this mess as we got mail for both our neighbors (one on the same street, one on a different street) and called to file a complaint. Yesterday, we got a note in our mailbox from our normal carrier; she was on vacation for a few weeks and apologized for the mess that was created. She said that the replacement carrier is the worst she has seen in her 16 years with the USPS. I’m glad that the regular carrier is back and maybe mail delivery will be back to normal.

This isn’t my first run in with the USPS. When I lived in Oregon, I moved once and kept getting mail forwarded to me that wasn’t mine. After a bunch of calls, I found out that the way the coding for forwarding worked was based on some combination of part of the street address and zipcode; someone else’s forwarding got confused with mine. I finally stopped my forwarding order to fix that problem. Next, I didn’t have any furniture in the front of my house and after about 8 months of getting mail without problems, the post office stopped delivering mail completely. The letter carrier thought the house was vacant. I got it started again, but then it stopped again for the same reason. I got tired of that. Luckily I finally moved and didn’t have to deal with that again.

How hard can it be to sort mail and deliver it? Must be harder than I think.

Universal Remote Control

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We now have 5 remote controls to control the TiVo, TV, Squeezebox, AM/FM Tuner, and Sirius. That’s a lot of junk to deal with, so I decided to try out a universal remote. The Logitech Harmony 520 got decent reviews and seemed to be one of the least expensive programmable universal remotes. After a few tries, I finally found it at Wal-Mart. At first, setting it up seemed like an immense chore with the devices mode, activities, etc. It’s nice that it recognized all my devices, but it is extremely confusing to setup. After playing with it for awhile, I think I am finally getting the hang of it and setting it up the way I want. The fact that you can configure the buttons differently in “Device” mode” vs. “Activities” mode had me really confused. In most cases, I want them the same. In addition, the automatic activities it sets up aren’t exactly what I want and there doesn’t seem to be a way to really customize them, so I have to setup a generic activity and start there. However, doing this, I have to reset all the buttons I already configured. I think after some more configuring, I’ll start to like it. The real question will be if my wife accepts it.

RAM

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So I went back to The Chip Merchant to exchange my RAM. The guy said that it was unlikely that both RAM modules were bad and went off to talk to his tech.He came back and said that my report of bad RAM wasn’t the first and there appears to be an issue with the combination of RAM, motherboard, and processor they sold me, so they gave me a different type of RAM and told me that the DDR 400 could only operate at 333, but the BIOS’s setting of Auto should detect it. I popped the RAM in, set the BIOS to a RAM frequency of 333 and will cross my fingers. It only took me a few days of futzing around to come to the same conclusion.

Stable server?

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Now that my server is rebuilt, my problem is that it keeps crashing kernel panicking and I saw segmentation faults all over the place. All roads point to hardware problems. So how do i solve this? Well, first off, my old memory modules work in the new machine. I installed one of them (512 MB) and the machine seemed to stay up all night with one exception. I noticed that it had rebooted at 5:32 am. In all the other crashing, it never once rebooted. That got me thinking that the UPS I plugged the machine into (an old one) wasn’t powerful enough and a surge that put the system on battery failed to move it to battery and the server restarted. At least, that’s what I hope happened. So I got to thinking, how could 2 brand new memory modules fail. I remembered that when I was handed the memory, they were in adjoining pouches. I checked the serial numbers and they were 12 apart meaning that they most likely came from the same batch and if a batch was bad, both modules could be bad. So this evening I used a program called Memtest86 which supposedly thoroughly tests RAM. I popped in each new RAM modules one at a time and after less than a minute, each module showed thousands of errors. Then I put both in and after 20 minutes I saw 500+ errors; I’m not sure why the results were different with 1 vs. 2, but it convinced me that there was a real problem. I then tested my 2 old memory modules (slower, but the same capacity) and after an hour, they showed no errors.

Now I’m running the server with the old RAM and will see what happens. On Monday, I’ll go back to The Chip Merchant and get the RAM replaced.

I wish all this just worked and I didn’t have to futz with it.

Server Recovery

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This sure has been a nightmare to get my server running again adequately. I got almost everything working yesterday and today I tackled converting to software RAID1 so that I have a mirror. With most Linux tasks, there is some help on the web. A co-worker pointed me to a document for “crazy sysadmins”. I didn’t think that applied to me, until I re-read it several times and realized that it is almost what I need. I followed the directions and was stoked that things were going smoothly. Then came the hard part, rebooting. I always have problems with grub, fstab, etc. After much Google searching and futzing, I figured out the solution…I had to rebuild the ram disk image that got loaded so that it knows to boot off the RAID. This normally wouldn’t be necessary, but the default Fedora Core 3 install used an LVM volume and the old initrd file was based on that. So, I figured out that:

mkinitrd -v –preload=raid1 –fstab=/mnt/newroot/etc/fstab initrd-2.6.12-1.1378_FC3.img 2.6.12-1.1378_FC3

worked. It’s hard to tell from the documentation what is going on, but if you don’t specify the fstab file, it uses the current active one which happens to have the LVM mess in it.Just to make sure I didn’t screw anything up, I removed the original drive and setup a clean drive as the second drive for the RAID (I bought 4 drives with the idea that 2 were for the RAID and 2 were hot swappable spares).In about 40 minutes when the drives finish mirroring, I’ll restart the server and see what happens.I’m now convinced more than ever that sysadmins (at least those that run Linux/UNIX machines) don’t make enough money. It is extremely frustrating to have a server crash and then to have trouble restoring it. I also forgot to mention that one of the times I was restarting the server, it tripped my UPS and somehow killed the UPS. The UPS definitely has enough capacity for the server, but something went haywire and I have to get the UPS replaced. A new one will be here in 5-7 business days. I do have a spare, but it’s significantly smaller.