The Mandelbear's Musings

More links on the T-Mobile/Sidekick disaster.

This article on Engadget is probably the best of the lot -- it blames it on Microsoft outsourcing an upgrade to the storage-area network without making a backup first. You would think... And there may be another disaster in the making, if their $50 all-you-can-eat plan comes out and people who haven't learned from the Sidekick debacle (or know how to run rsync on their Android phones) pile on and suck up all their bandwidth.

And here's Gizmodo saying that, whatever you may have heard from T-Mobile, your data is probably G O N E.

Good luck.

Sun's Project Blackbox -- datacenter in a container - Engadget

We're typically not of the ilk to bust out a post on a Sun datacenter solution or yet another clustered supercomputer, but technically Sun's Project Blackbox is portable -- if you consider a shipping container portable. We wouldn't believe it if it were anyone else, but the gimmick here is Project Blackbox is a shock mounted transportable datacenter capable of accommodating up to 250 Sun Fire T1000s or x64 servers, with up to 7 terabytes of memory and as many as 1.5 petabytes of disk or 2 petabytes of tape storage -- just supply water and power, and the thing will run on its own.

Old-timers may recall the ancient quip about the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes...

My order, of three replacement UPS batteries, arrived from APC this morning. One is for the BackUps 500 I've been having trouble with in the office. The other two went into the two BackUps Pro 650's that I salvaged from the discard pile at work. I may do a little shuffling-around.

This afternoon, after a successful demo (and a fight with balky presentation software that inadvertantly illustrated a talking-point about the superior simplicity of paper as a document representation), I went to the dentist to get my new crown installed. That, of course, puts me across the street from Guitar Showcase, and the Sennheiser HD280Pro headphones I'd spotted two weeks before after the first appointment for the crown. They advertise 32dB noise isolation, and are significantly more comfortable than the Vic Firth 'phones I bought about a month ago -- they have nice wide, deep cuffs, and nothing presses on my ears. Not horribly expensive, either. I may take them in to work; my office there is pretty noisy, and they're comfortable enough to wear for long periods.

Finally got my daily backup script up and installed on the fileserver. Basically all it does is mount the backup drive and all of its partitions (which are identical to the ones on the main drive), mirror each partition with rsync, and unmount the backup drive.

It still needs to be parametrized better -- right now it's specialized for that particular set of partitions.

Sometime yesterday evening I mounted the USB drive, fired off my backup script, and went out for dinner. Made the mistake of leaving the drive online when we went back to Consonance (more about that in a later post) for the dead dog Schroedinger's Cat filk. This morning, I found that the drive was busy, and the locate database updater was thoroughly hung in I/O wait. sync hung, too. I ended up powering down.

After rebooting, I fired up the USB drive and attempted an fsck. It hung, with a mysterious message about a USB disconnect. Urk!

Before I started using the USB enclosure for backups, I used removable IDE trays. In fact, there was one still in my workstation, and another in the suspect USB enclosure. Made the swap, powered up, and ran fsck again. This time, it worked. Hmm. I don't think I ought to trust that USB enclosure anymore. The tray is less convenient -- in spite of the fact that it's nominally hot-swappable, Linux doesn't really support it. And the rack has a fan. Blaugh. Need to start cycling through multiple backup drives. And get offsite backups going.

Top 10 weirdest USB drives. (Via Slashdot.)

The USB thumb is our runner up in the Top 10 weirdest USB drives ever. Having a thumb sticking out of your computer is really, really weird, and it also gives a completely new meaning to the expression "thumbdrive".It looks very realistic, so you can probably use it in some pranks to your friends and colleagues.

Delightfully twisted. The web page says "top 10 ... ever", but I refuse to believe that the human imagination is that limited. This one is apparently a homebrew mod, by the way, but many of the others are available here. I know sushi is more expensive in Japan than it is in the US, but even so...