Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to obsessivewoman!!! Have a great one!!

Grrr

Apparently an updated kernel is not enough to keep the fileserver from occasionally freezing. Memory or disk problems? Grumble. Wasn't planning to buy either just yet.

Mommy, where do servers come from?

To say that this parody of a 1960's children's sex-ed book is over the top is a total understatement. But funny? Definitely.
( page image behind cut )

(from Gizmodo. Looks like a digital camera rip-off at CES. There's a version at http://www.stayathomeserver.com/book.aspx, but it's all flash, slow to load, and the page images are smaller. Oh, and the last half of the book is missing. Well, what do you expect from Microsoft?

Grumbles

The fileserver froze on me this morning, and again this afternoon. Best guess has always been drive spin-down; this is apparently a known problem with some newer SATA drives and some older kernel and possibly BIOS configurations. Various attempts to fix it with hdparm failed miserably. Installing acpid, while clearly necessary, didn't help either.

The current attempt uses a newer kernel (2.6.21) from 64studio.com. It certainly improves the results back from hdparm -i, but it's not clear that I was able to keep the drive from powering down. We'll see. The fact that a similar drive has been happy under UbuntuStudio (2.6.22) is encouraging. I can go that route if I have to; Ubuntu's not that far off of Debian.

If it stays up for a day or two, I'll start thinking of other places to use the 500GB IDE drive I bought at Fry's on my way home from work. If it doesn't, I get to start thinking of other places to put a couple of 400GB SATA drives. Preferably someplace where I don't mind running a bleeding-edge kernel.