The Mandelbear's Musings

With disk usage on my main fileserver hovering around 98% after a weekend of recording and a week of editing, it was clearly time to Do Something. And this particular something has been planned for a while.

About a week ago I thought to check, found the "etch-and-a-half" (2.6.24) kernel, and installed it. It seems to completely fix the mysterious hang-up on long writes that's been plaguing me for a year on 2.6.18, so I was finally able to move the Debian mirror off the fileserver and onto the gateway machine, where a 175GB partition has been waiting for just such an occasion.

With 100GB moved, the fileserver is down to 71%; the gateway stands at 68%. So I get to keep my 500GB disks for a while longer; hopefully until 1TB gets under $100.

Adding to the excitement, I found that my mirror hadn't actually been updated since January sometime, when I cleverly renamed the administrative user (because admin is taken now) without renaming its crontab. Oops. All better now.

I've also put in some work on the Tres Gique website.

Disconnecting the mirror drive -- the Maxtor, with errors -- had no effect on the main problem, which still appears to be the Seagate sticking its fingers in its ears and going "la, la, la" while the kernel sulks in a corner because nobody will talk to it.

I'm really unclear as to whether this is a problem with the Seagate drive itself, (there's another one, only slightly bigger, over in the recording box that still works fine), with file corruption of some sort (hard reset after a crash could easily have left some lingering problems on the disk), with SATA drives in general (highly unlikely -- they're working fine on my system at work), or with this particular BIOS (also unlikely).

I'm also wondering to myself whether I should drop back to PATA, or get a 500GB SATA drive. I'm leaning toward the latter, if only because I put my shiny new 500GB PATA drive in an external box and the magic smoke went out. Grump, indeed. Smelled like the magic smoke in the box, so the drive is probably still ok. One hopes.

Plus the fact that I have a pretty full schedule today, so I'm not going to have time to do much work on this, no matter how urgent.

 ...

My inclination is to start by reconnecting the mirror drive, fsck it, and see if I can get a clean backup. Then go to Fry's and get one of the Maxtor 500 SATA's they have on sale. Then we'll see.

10:17 fsck done -- errors on both mirror/ and mirror/home, no doubt due to crashes while writing. Backing up now.