More updates

A few things going on that I’d like to note down.

I had an interview with a company that was put onto me as a perl programmer today, and it went well. We have an agreement in principle for a 5-6 month contract for three days a week (to start anyway, to allow me to deal with my other work as well). However, it is in theory full time work, so things around here will be a little less stressful money wise. Yay.

Just got back from a fantastic christmas dinner at my parents place. Both sets of uncles were here, even the one from Ottawa, which meant my little cousin was out who I hadn’t seen since she was small enough to hang and swing on my arm. She’s all growed up now, well, 16 anyway, and a sweet kid. No doubt a terror for my poor uncle though 🙂 Mom cooked a great goose or three, and that combined with red cabbage, stuffing, potatos, gravy, and the works made a great and filling meal.

We get to do it all over again on Christmas day though, only at local-uncle’s house.

Last of all, ufies is down after 4+ months of completely happy uptime. I have no idea what is going on, the hardware should be good (there were errors on one partition, but that is what RAID is for, and it seemed to be working exactly as it should have been), I mean, that’s why the box was so swanky in the first place, to eliminate hardware as a problem. Basically the box bogged down this morning, and then completely died around 6:30ish. I called the co-lo around 9 or 10 and they rebooted and it came up fine. There was a message that there were some errors on one of the raid drives, but it was reconstructing the data using the spare properly. I had a meeting at noon (more on that in a few) and when I got out of it the box was down again. I couldn’t get a hold of anyone so I left a message at the co-lo and Tom was nice enough to reboot the box around 6pm, when it stayed up for about 30 or 45 minutes before dying again.

The CPU and network logs don’t show anything hugely strange, except for some excess CPU usage in the time between when it was brought back up and when it died (possibly due to the RAID reconstruction). It was wondered if there was maybe something wrong with the drive and then when it was done reconstructing, and then accessed, caused the system to die… The thing is when it died around noon it was about 2.4% into redoing the second raid array, and it takes about 60minutes to finish, so it was done with the first one for long enough that it should be ok.

I’ll be talking to someone who can reboot the box tomorrow morning, and possibly (probably) go down there with my new hard drive (just in case it is a hardware problem) to see if I can debug it from the console. The thing is it doesn’t sound like hardware (much), and almost more like a Denial of Service. Coincidently the night before it was taken down someone who was causing trouble on TDI forums had their work IP banned. I’d assume that the co-lo would notice a DOS attack, but who knows.

sigh

Yes I am ranting to get my stress out 🙂

Oh, and in a funny twist Ottawa-uncle is a big TDI fan (as is his boss) and they both know/knowof both Fred and the Forums. Kinda neat.