Yeehaaa

Ever since we moved to the US i wanted to see a rodeo. It's the all American thing I thought, and I was right. Luckily a couple of weeks ago there was a rodeo nearby. California doesn't seem to be the homeland of rodeos. I bet Texas is different :-)

I had the luck to go to Bill Picket Rodeo. It's an all-black invitational rodeo. I bet I could count on my two hands the number of non-black members of the audience! At first it was a bit intimidating, but I had a great time. the MC was great, was talking during the whole show. There was no boredom either. Something always was going on. I like how they involved the people watching as well: kids from 6 to 11 could chase calves and the ones getting the ribbon off their tail win a price.

If you have the chance, don't miss a nearby rodeo, that's my advice.

Some pictures to illustrate:

B*tch, I'll kill you dead!

If you have [adult swim] on your TV you need to give a try to this show: Black Dynamite. It's on air every Sunday night, and I'm sure the channel is full with repeats, in case you missed the first couple of episodes. it has its own kind of humor, and I think it's brilliant. One word: whorephanage ;-)

NTFS vs. RAID1

Ever since hard drives are not that expensive and even cheaper motherboards come with on board RAID support I mirror all my hard drives. It saved 'my life' twice already, so even right now I have a bad experience I'll keep on doing this.

The first time it saved my life was in my previous desktop system. It served me for 7-8 years long. In the last 2 years it got a new pair of hard drives, as the ones I had (mirrored) became smaller and smaller in size. And of course as they were that old they started to be slower, too. With HDD prices going down I thought it's a good investment to keep my machine running. When I migrated my data over I realized that the drives were in a bit worse condition than I thought and it was really time to replace them. If it wasn't for RAID1 I would have lost all my pictures, music etc. long ago!

The second time it saved me was in my Seagate NAS. The new desktop I spent €1000-1200 onis in a nice looking case from Thermaltake. Micro-ATX... Meaning there's no room for anything in that case. It was a stupid idea I know now... So I needed disk space and I wanted a network attached storage and I happen to choose Seagate BlackArmor. Bad choice, but what can I do now. After 5 months one of the drives died completely. I have it replaced under warranty, and again RAID1 saved me, as the second drive also had all my data!

Over the weekend I realized that RAID1 helps you with hardware failure, but it's a curse for logical failures. I happen to run out of the 2TB on my NAS so being disappointed in its performance, this time I got and eSATA unit from Western Digital (MyBook Studio II). First thing I did I set up RAID1 on it. I've been trying to update its firmware ever since I got it, but the update program never seemed to find the unit (even though I followed the instructions), so I gave up. I think that just stroke back yesterday. The NTFS file system's MFT (Master File Table) got screwed up. Both the primary and backup. And as it's RAID1 it got synced over to the second disk. Damn!

I've tried all the tricks I've found on the internet without any luck. So there's nothing left here to do: restore the files. I was searching for tools online and purchased to cheapest solution: Restore Ultimate for $29.99 So far it seems to do the trick. In about 6-7 hours it scanned the drive and found the files. Even the ones I deleted long long time ago. Luckily the 2TB drive had only about 500GB data. At the moment I'm copying the found files to another drive. It's running for about 10-12 hours now, but it looks promising. All the digital photos I took over the years would have been gone otherwise, so I'm really grateful for BitMart Inc!!!

I don't think it's a hardware failure. Must have been a bad correlation of many the things (eSata, older firmware etc.) Probably an algorithm logic hiccup that is not handled well caused all this. I couldn't really find articles online what would make both the MFTs to blow up, but one would think there's some safeguards built in... Even RAID controllers could identify something like this and would report and error and would not corrupt the second drive. Somebody didn't test the algorithm well enough...

So I'm annoyed but not devastated thanks to my $30 investment that seems to work. And one more thing I've decided: if I'm in the need for getting more disk space, I'll build a cheap Linux machine and put it in a big case with lots of hard drives and that will be my file server. I don't trust these small external drives any more. I would probably need a UPS too for that machine, to safeguard the disks on them. Linux doesn't seem to tolerate hard reset very well... I've already made some calculations. From $1000 I could create a 4TB RAID1 array in that machine and expanding it would be easy too.

Routing the sh*t out of it

Here's a story why I will never have Linux on my machines at home. Maybe there'll be one exception: when my external hard drives are full I'm going to build a file server. These external boxes are slow and expensive and worthless.

So I have a web application that needs two IP addresses. Certain things are only available on one NIC (Network Interface Controller) why other stuff is only available on the other NIC. Don't argue with this. Smart people thought this is the way to go, so be it.

Now my machine (virtual) happens to be on DHCP on a server under my desk. These under-desk servers are on a separate switch as the development desktops. I realized that I can't access this VM (virtual machine) on its second IP but only the first one. From my server and from other's server I had no problem pinging this second IP thgouh. Strange... Google-ing and talking to people with more advanced sysadmin background I learned something new: since subnet is blahblahblah, and the correlation of the stars and the universe is expanding Linux for questions on NIC#2 answers on NIC#1. It's like someone gives you a call on your mobile and you answer the call with your land-line phone... Probably there's a logic to it, which I'm not worthy to understand.

So after all this misery I've found a website that explains what to do. Quite complicated, but I started doing this. Then when I was about to create a second routing table and tried to figure out what to type in there based on the example on that website it came to my mind that there has to be a better way. It's the 21st century for god's sake! GUI is the magic word even on Linux!

So I typed 'init 5' opened the GUI console, and some fate has been restored:

1. Click on the little network icon
2. Edit connections
3. Click on eth0 then click on Edit
4. Click on IPv4 Settings
5. Click the Routes button
6. Thick 'Use this connection only for resources on its network'
7. OK, Apply
8. Same for eth1

Magic has been done.