I hate computers, computer hardware, and everything to do with them. All hardware sucks, mine just sucks a bit more than others.
Got a bit of an extension to my project, in the fashion of “they’re really busy so they won’t notice that it’s not done until monday”, though I planned to get the last couple of features finished up last night anyway. My box crashed, which is kinda unusual, but nothing I was too worried about. It comes back up and freezes on boot, just sitting there with “mounting local filesystems”. End result of the story is that something might be wrong with one of my nice 3x80G drives that form my /home RAID5 partition. It’s almost like one of them is blocking something, and not letting operations go through. When it comes up to reconstruct the raid array it goes normally for a while, then after a certain point (sometimes it seemed to be 2.5%, sometimes somewhere else, it just sits there like this:
[====>…………….] resync = 21.6% (16910628/78150592) finish=19148.9min speed=53K/sec
it hasn’t changed in a while. Any time I try to go into the /home directory (where the array is mounted) it just freezes, I can still hit enter, but it’s like it’s waiting for something else to finish. I’ve tried different kernels, and various other things. One of the drives has in the past made click-click noises of the drive head parking/unparking (maybe) but it’s never seemed to affect the performance or given any indication of any other problems (error messages, faults in the drive or data) so I’ve ignored it.
I was thinking it might be power, and calculating it out I see I need something like 480w on the high end… but it’s never been a problem. I tried disconnecting my floppy and CDROM drives to save a bit but the same problem comes back. I thought it might be heat as well, but neither the drives nor MB seemed overly hot, nor reported any really high temperatures. I left it sitting to cool down, had a fan on the open case, and even left it turned off overnight, but this morning when I tried the room and box were cold (actually, the room was a very pleasent temperature), but the same thing happened.
This, or something like this, did happen a few months ago, but it went away after I threatened the drive with an RMA, and there hasn’t been issue since. When I get home tonight I’ll try disconnecting drives from the RAID one by one (can’t do a hotremove for some reason) and seeing if I can determine which one is at fault. If need be I can run the RAID array in degraded mode and use the “spare” drive to store all the data on the RAID (assuming that none of the drives are bad of course). This sucks even more because one of the things I was planning to do last night was to back up my code and home directory onto CD. I am pretty confident that the data is all right, but it’s a pisser nonetheless. Being that this is delaying me getting my project finished sucks even more. Almost enough to make me say “to hell with it” and buy a new box + power supply and hope this all just goes away. Maybe convert to a real laptop as my main machine, move to the mountains and not deal with computers ever again. Can’t afford that though.
Then this morning at work the database is giving me grief, changing it’s config files without anyone touching them and giving lovely error messages like ” This connection has been terminated by the administrator.” (no I didn’t). Seems to be back up and going now though. Perfect for a last day.
Well, theoretical last day. I still haven’t gotten an official hiring letter yet, though I’m assured that “99% sure that on Friday I’ll be able to say officially [that you’re hired]”.
Fingers crossed that today, tonight, and this weekend are better, less troublesome, and have all my computer bits working properly.
On an upside, I got to bed before midnight (though I didn’t get to sleep until after), and slept through my alarm (6:51am) till 7:40am and discovered I still had time to shower, eat breakfast, read through my list of comics, and get to work on time. Wonder why I don’t have my alarm set for 45 minutes later.
Heading out to see X-Men 2 tonight with a bunch of folks. Yay.