The story of the glitch

September 23, 2005 at 8:13 am · Filed under On the Radar

Man this has been a real pain. Whoever said technology makes life easier should really be held accountable. hehehe. I’d like to try and break this down into laymen terms but it’s rather difficult.

In my machine there were three drives. * Boot / Root drive (sata) * /opt = archive & application file store (eide) * /share = mp3’s/application back ups (eide)

I originally thought that my boot drive was eide and that the drive that failed was sata. I was wrong, but I had already purchased two more sata drives that I could mirror with my adaptec card. This caused my first headache as I would have to move my booting drive off the sata and on to the new ones. Since this server is linux it is possible to do this with a disc copy utility called ‘dd’. That combined with an application called resize2fs would allow me to copy my partitions over to new drives, and then resize them to take advantage of the new space. Sounds good, right? It did go well, until I realized that I had a fake-raid controller that would munge the drives when I went to mirror them. At this junction I was left with a choice, either keep the original boot drive, throw one of my two drives in the machine, no future protection, just more storage, and call it a day, or.. Buy a real sata raid card (3Ware), and do the job the correct way. As I was weighing the decisions and looking over the mayhem inside the opened server I noticed another possible issue.

Heat. The new sata drives were really hot, I mean felt like egg cooking hot. In reflection I should have grabbed my laser temperature thermometer and gauged it, but I digress. Let’s do the full monty I reasoned in my crazy state of mind. I ordered a HW raid controller, I ordered a PCI-Slot fan exhaust card. I picked up a 5.25” bay drive cooler for my original sata drive, I picked up an attachable 3.25” fan that goes right on the base of a new sata drive.

All of this material came in yesterday. I told all those connected to our inhouse system of impeding downtime and went to work at 4pm. This should have been rather easy. Take out all eide remenants, build the machine with dual sata controllers, rig all the new fans and power together, and I should have been looking at a grub boot screen. Of course not.

Welp, when things don’t work, you have to troubleshoot. To troubleshoot you can go at it one of two ways. Strip it all down and build it till it works again, or work in reverse and remove things until it the problem is understood. I generally choose to work at it in reverse because the belief is the problem should be rather high in the architecture. This is a flaw of mine since Murphy teaches me each time it’s something much farther down. No matter what BIOS was telling me, it would not hand over booting to either of my sata controllers.

The only way the drives would boot is if I added my dieing 80gb drive back into the pool. It had a master boot record on it, swap was its first partition (undamaged), and it would bounce the boot straight to the sata drive. I think to myself, fine fine.. I’ll just port my data off my known good eide drive so I don’t have to use the weirdly defunct drive that it chooses to work with now. I move my 120g of data over to the new array, fdisk/repartition the 170gb eide to have a nice little boot partition, activate it, reboot, and nothing. Try a few more configurations, double check my work, nothing. sigh

There are probably better ways to solve this, but the time was around 11pm and I was really seeing crosseyed working all day coming home to work all night. I replaced the large clean eide drive with the dirty/decaying one, blew away the partition that was corrupt and just kept it’s little bootable swap slice alive. The drive serves no purpose but to transfer boot status to the sata real boot drive and everything is hunky dory. I close the case up and get boot errors. hah. Closing the damn case caused an sata cable to come undone and a memory stick to become dislodged. I was about to tear something apart. Kept my cool though, rewired and re-seated everything and it was happy, thank goodness. My heart couldn’t take any more machine mischief.

In the end I’ve got a bad drive acting as a boot slave, 5 new fans, probably 300 CFM more air current, 20 new decibles, and a case which is staying around 29.3’C ambient. I don’t particularly like the configuration but I don’t quite know how to proceed at this time either. I didn’t ask for this problem, and I sure didn’t like bleeding a lot of cash to fix this properly. Whats a technologist supposed to do?

I might tinker some more in the coming days.. I’m just not sure at the moment. Here’s to less problems, and long uptimes!

-a

ps.. That really wasn’t a good laymen speil was it, maybe this should have been said instead. Computer go boom boom, fixing it no startie, pour money into internet, fixie no starie again, percussive maintenance with bat, kludge metal into slot, workie workie!

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Quote: Chinese Proverb

September 21, 2005 at 6:54 am · Filed under Quotations

Great souls have wills; feeble ones have only wishes.
— Chinese proverb

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Technical Glitches

September 13, 2005 at 6:51 pm · Filed under On the Radar

The drive MovableType is situated on is dieing. I lost a portion of my photography archive and a handful of important programs that help us get things done.

Working on a solution that doesn’t break the bank but expect downtime over the next week. I know part of the blog is corrupted in places, watch your step.

What an absolute pita, -a

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SERBC 2005

September 12, 2005 at 8:51 am · Filed under On the Radar

  This weekend Robin and I traveled to Chapel Hill for the finals in the South Eastern Barista Competition. We arrived about 11:30a, enough time to say hello to friends and colleagues before the two hour competitive marathon. Peter, Daryn, Tim, Cindy, and many more faces from CCC working hard to pull the event off. I had a few moments to speak with David Haddock a judge representing Bellissimo, and Tom from Stockton Graham. Everyone was wired and ready for a big day.

  The finalists for the event were: * Leng Abed, Open Eye Cafe, Carrboro, NC * Ryan Goodrow, Murky Coffee, Arlington, VA * Lemuel Butler, Daily Grind, Chapel Hill, NC * Elizabeth Gray, Muddy Waters, Elizabeth City, NC * Claudia Raymo-Quirk, Cup A Joe, Chapel Hill, NC * Mandy Catron, Murky Coffee, Arlington, VA

Every one of these people should be commended for their efforts along with all the others who did not make the final cuts. To get out of your comfort zone, and come in to a competition that requires probably 100% more of your effort than you ever have to give in the shop and then be critically judged on it all. That’s pressure, and it takes guts. Each participant must make 4x4 drinks. Four espresso’s, four cappuccino’s, four specialty drinks. All the while giving a 5-star performance of professionalism in only a 15 minutes. Cake walk right? Hardly. Every step of the way you are being evaluated. As you turn to showcase each set of drinks, technical judges are sweeping in behind you to make sure your gear is still pristine. Four taste judges are critical of your drinks themselves. Then they all have a quiet pow-wow behind closed doors to round out their evaluations with hundreds of points at stake. That’s quite a score card.

In the end, what those of us who were talking thought would win, and those who won, had a bit of a discrepency. However, like Nick Cho of Murky said on his Portafilter podcast, what we see as attendees and what the judges are seeing / tasting will vary greatly. The judges have the entire sensory experience that the audience can’t (or generally doesn’t, depends on the competition) get to participate in. ie: A drink may look phenomenal, but not have the taste characteristics that score high.

SERBC Winners: * 1st: Lemuel Butler, Daily Grind, Chapel Hill, NC * 2nd: Leng Abed, Open Eye Cafe, Carrboro, NC * 3rd: Ryan Goodrow, Murky Coffee, Arlington, VA

Great to see some regional locals take home the first and second, and as always a good shout out to Nick and his crew for putting on a good show as well. The thing to remember about all these competitors is they come from passionate cafe’s. The owners instill in their employees a sense of pride of what they do. Barista’s at their jobs ranged from 2-8 years and that’s fantastic. I hope that as Caffe Nuance grows up that we can participate and bring home our own title in years to come as we will certainly be educating and enciting passion in our employees and locals.

Thank’s go out to Counter Culture Coffee for hosting the event and the plethora of sponsors that helped make this possible. Like Peter said yesterday, Barista competitions are not mainstream so each of the sponsors are doing this because they are interested in seeing coffee develop.

Lastly, I started a new flickr group, Barista Competitions. If you go to these events please add your photos to the pool. Let’s keep these competitions recorded and push them more mainstream.

-a

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Quote: Denis Waitley

September 2, 2005 at 8:55 am · Filed under Quotations

Expect the best, plan for the worst, and prepare to be surprised.
Denis Waitley

Today’s quote brought to us by our good friend Steve

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