My Slice of Reality

I’ve played around with Ubuntu alot since it first came onto the scene a few years ago. I even went so far as to use it as my main operating system on my desktop for over six months. However, there was always some silly little issue that drove me away from it (whether fit and polish, incompatibility with some app I required at the time or just general boredom) but I keep coming back like some crack addict.

Until release 8.04.My, what a clusterfuck.

I tried Ubuntu, I really did. I installed you, I spent three days troubleshooting my problems. From the pulse audio bullshit, to the eating of my external drive (are you serious? An operating system should NEVER “delete” a hard drive, even if I was able to recover the partition table later on with the help of some friends) you were one troubled bastard. Apparently, I wasn’t alone either. It was by far the least polished and press ready release I’d yet seen from the guys at Canonical. Suffice to say I dropped that release like a cheap, two dollar bottle of whiskey.

And I must seriously be a glutton for punishment. I decided to install it again. On my laptop. The machine I’ve been using every day. For work.

This second time has been a surprise. The install went quickly, with no errors or issues. So far, it appears that the wireless card was correctly detected and setup. Wait, scratch that. Its detected but apparently I have no way to join a wireless network.

There’s no obvious method to detect or join. Perfect. The screen resolution is also massively off (seriously, you still cant work properly with an Nvidia 7150 Go chipset yet?) but hell…bluetooth works.

Yea, cause thats important right now.

Atleast it properly detected my wireless Logitech mouse. Most likely the forward and back buttons don’t function properly (to be tested) but thats always been the case.

Thankfully, sharing an internet connection through Vista is pretty easy and the laptop’s now setup with atleast a wired connection through the wireless. Not ideal, but it’ll work till I figure out the mess that is wireless on linux. Lord is this piggy backing slow though.

Expect updates soon if I run into more bugs or issues (and Im sure I will)

EDIT:EnvyNG to the rescue. In two clicks through Synaptic and then two clicks through Envy’s interface I have the correct Nvidia drivers installed and running. Ahhhh…1440×900 how we’ve missed you

Today is the eventful day; Service Pack 1 for Vista is finally released. I’ve linked to the stand alone installer page but it’s seeding out through Windows Update now. I’ll be installing later this evening and will update with how it goes in the morning. Wish me luck.

Download details: Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Five Language Standalone (KB936330)

I guess what happens in Vegas really doesnt stay in vegas, eh?

Crashing Las Vegas - The Daily WTF

SP1 for Vista cannot come soon enough. Its ridiculous that transferring 44Gb of data between two USB2 drives (both 7200rpm hard drives) has taken almost an hour. According to the transfer window its sending at 15MB/s. Thats just…wrong. I’m not even going to attempt to transfer the movies folder tonight.

I’m building a fairly high end computer for a friend and to be honest, its pretty much finished. The CPU (Core 2 Duo running at 3Ghz) runs a tad warm for my tastes but I guess 53c while thrashing at Prime95 and ATITools isnt that bad really. Especially not with the stock heatsink.

It also sucks that the 4Gb of memory only shows as 3.2Gb in Vista but that was to be expected. Hell, even the annoying little quarks I’ve run into with the 680i motherboard aren’t bad either; they just took time.

No, by far the most annoying thing I’ve run into was the new NVIDIA monitoring software. Who in the hell though that piece of crap should be published on the internet? Seriously, a spinning collection of your devices with the temperatures displayed below that takes about 2mins to cycle between devices and just plain locks up randomly?

Brilliant.

About a week ago I bought a Seagate FreeAgent 320Gb external USB drive for my Linux box thinking that I could dump my mp3 files to it as well as backup my documents, pictures, et al to it as well. For the price, it was a great buy and I’ve been pretty happy with the performance. However, I noticed that occasionally Amarok would no longer see the music library and would error out all my songs. This was…annoying. Normally I could fix it by just browsing to the drive and magically everything would work fine.

Strangely, it seemed that the drive was offlining itself, automatically, after an extended period of non-use. Apparently, I’m not alone with this issue either. I have to give Diane props for finding the fix but i’m going to repost it here to clear things up a bit.

I’m running Ubuntu, Gutsy Gibbons (7.10) to be precise. This should work equally well for other versions of Ubuntu as well (and other distributions but your method of getting the needed application will vary). First, we need to grab the sdparm package from the repositories. Open up a terminal window and type:

chris@hooby:~$ sudo apt-get install sdparm

You’ll then see some scrolling output as it grabs and installs the sdparm utility which basically allows you to output and modify the parameters for scsi (USB hard drives, SATA drives, and dvd/cd burners are seen as SCSI) devices.

Next, you’ll need to find out what the true path to your device is. If you don’t know it (should be something like /dev/sdX where x is a letter a-x) you can disconnect the drive and reconnect it. Then, run

cat /var/log/dmesg

Which should output something similar to this towards the bottom

[ 14.172000] scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access Seagate FreeAgentDesktop 100D PQ: 0 ANSI: 4
[ 14.196000] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] 625142448 512-byte hardware sectors (320073 MB)
[ 14.200000] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off

Now, we want to check the current status of the drive so run the following

sudo sdparm -a /dev/sdb (substitute your sdX for my sdb)

which will output the following

/dev/sdb: Seagate FreeAgentDesktop 100D
Power condition mode page:
IDLE 0 [cha: n, def: 0, sav: 0]
STANDBY 1 [cha: y, def: 1, sav: 1]
ICT 0 [cha: n, def: 0, sav: 0]
SCT 9000 [cha: y, def:9000, sav:9000]

The “STANDBY” flag is what we’re concerned with. We need to clear that. Now the following command can only be run when the drive is actually spun up but if you did disconnect and reconnect the device it’ll be up and accessible so run

sudo sdparm –clear STANDBY -6 /dev/sdb

There won’t really be much showing that the command succeeded. However, if we run sdparm -a /dev/sdb again we’ll see the following showing that it worked

chris@hooby:~$ sudo sdparm -a /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb: Seagate FreeAgentDesktop 100D
Power condition mode page:
IDLE 0 [cha: n, def: 0, sav: 0]
STANDBY 0 [cha: n, def: 1, sav: 0]
ICT 0 [cha: n, def: 0, sav: 0]
SCT 0 [cha: n, def:9000, sav: 0]

As you can see, the standby flag is now gone. Your drive should no longer go into a sleep mode causing havoc with Linux.

Any window user, from the days of 3.11 on should remember this fun scenario. You come from a night out on the town to find your pc shutdown when you distinctly remember leaving it on when you left. You hit the power, it starts up, and you’re greeted with the beautiful “scandisk” screen as it does a health check on your drive. This was done because, plain and simple, the FAT file system used by (and still used today on some systems) Windows was dumb. File corruption was all too common especially with an inappropriate shutdown or power loss. Thankfully, with the more modern NTFS file system its not quite as needed or as common.

*nix, for all its supposed superiority had the same issues for quite a while. In fact, in Linux, with its generally default file system ext3 you’ll see a similar screen (well, its black instead of blue) come up occasionally. This is fsck, or the file system check, which does pretty much the same thing. It checks the filesystem to make sure its coherent and consistent with what the system is expecting. This can take a short amount of time (journaling in ext3, or ufs (solaris 9+), etc. can greatly decrease the time) especially on larger volumes. In fact, LWN recently had an issue with this when their file server crashed taking down the archives of all the mailing list postings. They didn’t post the size of the archive but stated that an fsck of it took over a week.

I recently had to deal with this at work as well. A customer had a 700Gb array with about 300Gb utilized. Due to a bad startup on the solaris box, the array was seen as “dirty” and so it started to fsck it. And did, for twenty two hours until they killed it. When I finally talked her off the ledge I happened to explain to her that this was quite common and in fact, she probably could have seen a fsck time of a week or more on array that large. There’s other variables as well (file system chosen, file sizes, file numbers, array configuration, etc.) but this seems to be an issue now. If an array of that size goes down there’s little point to fsck it. You’re not really going to recover any errors that might be “lost,” you’re just going to waste a mammoth amount of time.

What would you do, restore a backup taking 5hrs or wait for an fsck to finish which could put your machine out of production for a week?