you heard

Posts in category FreeBSD

Hard drives hate me

Jan20
2007 3 Comments Written by jamesoff

Last week I finally got my ~terabyte storage finished!

Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ar0s1d    677G     99G    571G    15%    /raid5

It’s less than 1024GB thanks to drive manufacturers using dodgy calculations, and also it’s RAID5, so I lose a disk’s worth of space (250GB). Seem to be doing a reasonable job of filling it up though ;)

This morning, though, I was greeted with the this email:

This email was generated by the smartd daemon running on:

host name: yomi.jamesoff.net DNS domain: jamesoff.net NIS domain:

The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon:

Device: /dev/ad0, Self-Test Log error count increased from 0 to 1 `

Arrgh :argh:

At least that’s the system drive rather than one of the new ones, but now I’m going to have to buy a new system drive and prepare to migrate over to it. At least thanks to having plenty of space, I have full dump(1)s of the drive so even if it does die before I replace it I can recover fairly easily.

Posted in Hardware, Sysadmin

New UPS installed

Oct30
2006 Leave a Comment Written by jamesoff

This weekend I installed my new UPS, an APC SmartUPS 700 which I got by part-exchanging one of my old BackUPS 350CSes (CSen?) which had a dead battery. Although I ended up spending slightly more than planned by doing that, I’ve ended up with a much better setup. The 700 is enough to comfortably support yomi and tomo (server and desktop) in the study for about 20 minutes. The other 350 is now under Roz’s desk in the lounge running her PC and also the DSL router. Overall I have better runtime than I would have had with my original plan of fixing the 350 and buying another one for the lounge.

I also got apcupsd setup on my two machines so that the server monitors the UPS status, and the desktop picks the status up from the server. apcupsd also works on Windows so when I’m booted into Windows for gaming it still looks after me. Unfortunately, if the power fails this won’t actually work as the network switch in the study isn’t currently UPS’d, so the desktop won’t be able to communicate with the server. I’ll be fixing that soon. I also want to see if I can get apcupsd to talk to the 350 so Roz’s computer can shut itself down in a power failure too. Oh, and I want to make my desktop shut down faster than the server to give the server more runtime.

I think I’ll scribble a howto page for jamesoff.net after I get it all sorted :)

Posted in Hardware, Sysadmin

amarok 1.4 on FreeBSD

Jun13
2006 2 Comments Written by jamesoff

Hooray, I got amarok 1.4 compiled and installed on FreeBSD 6.1.

To make it work I had to disable XMMS stuff and the MusicBrainz bits, but I don’t use XMMS and MusicBrainz isn’t too important to me.

If you want to make it work, you need to:

./configure --prefix=/usr/local --without-xmms --without-musicbrainz

Then:

rm libtool && ln -s /usr/local/bin/libtool .

Then:

gmake

And cross fingers.

Once it’s compiled successfully (I hope), then just

sudo gmake install

I did this without pkg_delete’ing my amarok 1.3.9 install and it doesn’t seem too upset – although it will complain about mismatched checksums when I do, I’m sure. Hopefully the time I do that will be to upgrade to 1.4 in ports though.

Newer Entries »