Crashes Solved?

The last few times the system has hung, I noticed a trend.  Each time, without fail, there was a pop-up balloon noting that the wireless network had reconnected (the system is on the wired network, but uses a “secure” ad hoc 802.11b “point-to-point” network to route the wired network to a wireless camera).

This wireless NIC had a Marvell-based chip.  I have several of these.  I hate them all because they are proprietary and don’t work worth a damn with Linux.  Apparently this is yet another reason to despise them.

I pulled it and replaced it with a RaLink RT61 based card.  If you want to run Linux wirelessly, RaLink is the only way to fly.  It’s been fully supported in the Linux kernel for a few years now and the drivers are in active development.  You never need to mess with that god-awful ndiswrapper abortion (don’t get me wrong, ndiswrapper is a very slick hack… it just shouldn’t exist).  Unfortunately, RaLink cards are hard to find.  I’ve been burned twice by “errors in photography” where the box or the online illustration clearly shows a RaLink chip on the card, but when you open the box the damned thing has a Marvell chip.

It’s been running all week without a hitch.  I’ll give it another week and if all goes well I’ll start un-doing my previous attempts at “fixing” the problem, especially that extra gigabyte of RAM I removed a few months back.

In other news, CoDeeN servers continue to disappear.  There are now only 34 active servers left in the database.

Hard Drive Problems

The 80G hard drive turned out to be a corker.

The weekend after I installed it I bought a 500G drive. Sheer coincidence. After the 80G died every night for about 3 or 4 days I moved everything over, diddled the drive letters and now we’re back in business.

That was yesterday.

Tuesday, it died while I was at work. I spent most of the day trying out my Disaster Recovery Plan (don’t tell my boss), which, as it turns out, leaves much to be desired, although as luck would have it the database backup ran just before the system crashed. But I was missing a few core utilities and only managed to run about four updates. When I switched back into production I didn’t bother bringing the updated database over assuming I’d get the data again, but we were down to less than 500 proxies so I ran the resurrection script and brought it back up to over twelve hundred.

That huge increase in the number of proxies prompted me to take a look at the recheck code. I think I have fixed that issue but we’ll just have to see how it goes.

Meanwhile, as I was going over my DRP, GoDaddy decided to migrate the Web site to a new server, so everything sort of worked out.

So… back in business and back in maintenance mode.

Back UP!

The box overheated.

In January I pulled three fans out to make the thing a little quieter. 

So today I put them back in.   

Goes DOWN…

Left home at about 7:40 this morning and by the time I got to work the system was down, so there are not going to be any updates today until around 6PM.

Sort of scratching my head here wondering what the problem could be, but it just so happens today is the dreaded The Day After Patch Tuesday.

I’ve been hammered numerous times on Post Patch Wednesday, so I have shut down automatic updates on every WIndows machine I run.  Or so I believe.  The Linux machine that does all the updates to The List is an Xubuntu 6.10  VM on a Windows XP host system… I know, serious problem there, weakest link, all that… I may never learn.   At the moment the host system has fallen off the network, probably with a “Reboot Now?” dialog box ready to be clicked.

Anyway… that’s what I’m hoping has happened.  That’s the optimistic outlook.  I’ve already had more hardware failures than I care to admit in the last year.  Don’t ask about backups.

Stay tuned.