Disk Failure. Or Not.

I switched on my workstation this morning and was greeted with a ton of errors from one of the disks. Thank goodness for RAID! The obvious, initial conclusion was that the drive had failed. However, further examination showed that one of the three RAID1 devices shared across the drives was still working. While this condition is possible I suppose (I'm not exactly sure how), it cast doubt on the obvious conclusion.

I spent the next two hours looking for other possible hardware problems. The only other suspicious possibility was that the SATA adapter was pulled out about 1-2 mm of the slot on the unsecured end of the card. Again it's not enough to be conclusive. I ran the SMART tests on the disk and they passed. Unfortunately only failing these tests is considered conclusive. The RAID devices rebuilt successfully. This is a lengthy process and accesses the entire drive, so it should have triggered any hard failures.

In the end, the safest thing to do is buy a spare drive. Just in case.

Round To It Project

I'm experiencing some really odd corruption on one of the file systems on my desktop system, where I store my video files. I fairly certain it is not a hardware failure since the drive tests show no errors. The tests is not conclusive of course, but coupled with the fact that the corruption occurs in only one of three partitions of the drive, and that it is a RAID1 system which should detect errors between the drives, a hardware failure looks less likely. I have a strong suspicion of what the source of the problem might be, but I'll talk about that another time after I've investigated a bit further.

Anyway, since I need to move the video files elsewhere, I decide to build a server to house my media files. It's one of those "round to it" projects that has been on the back burner for a couple of years already. I have an old CPU box but I need to add some drives. Given my tight budget, I tossed a few ideas around but it all came down to the cost of the drives (I want a RAID) so the full server was the best long term solution.

Don't You Just hate It...

Got an email from a customer yesterday describing a hanging application, a database client. They were able to replicate the problem on two computers. When I went to investigate today, guess what? Yes of course, the problem has completely vanished and is not reproducible at all. I know something went wrong yesterday because there are errors in the PostgreSQL logs, but there's nothing that leads to the next clue. Dead end.

Don't you just hate it when computer problems mysteriously fix themselves? You just know they are going to come back later.

Chrome OS

No, I'm not going to gush about how wonderful Chrome OS is. One, there is more than enough being written about it already. Two, I haven't tried it. Three, I don't really care enough to try it.

I believe that computers became truly powerful with the advent of with microcomputers. I don't mean powerful in terms of performance. The microcomputer gave individuals the power to use computers as they pleased and in the complete privacy of their homes. Before the microcomputer, what you were allowed to do on a computer was determined by the policies of the institution that owned the computers.

Chrome OS is leading us back to that world, and it make me a little sad. Yeah, I know I'm being overly dramatic, but I don't think that I am wrong either.

The Phillips Machine

I saw this story about a hydraulic computer from the 1950s called the MONIAC. The computer tries to model the economy using water to simulate the flow as funds. It is interesting as a mechanical system but I wonder: would it have predicted the current economic problems?

There is also Wikipedia article which is more detailed than the videos linked in the above story.