The Pain

This is what I have to deal with on a daily basis.

The Royal Screw

I found that the Swedish Bricks tire was loosing air to the tune of 10 PSI per week. Fast enough that I threw the tire pump in the back of the car, though not fast enough to cause a panic trip to the auto shop.

I finally got around to inflating the donut and pulling the tire. A process that is somewhat laborious as my floor jack lives in the basement, and hauling 60 lbs of iron up the stairs is miserable and dangerous, and but otherwise quick, now that I can attach sockets to the cordless drill to spin off loose nuts.

Inspection of the tire yielded some camber wear, but an otherwise very new looking tire.

Then, I found this.

An Ice Pick and a Hammer, Please.

Massive mystery headache attacks man's head at a frequency of approximately 0.02 hertz.

Somehow, he survives.

Lame Burnout

The NAS is on the fritz again.

Could it be the ATA controller is gone?

Maybe the end of the road for this box.

Unexpected

I didn't expect the debt deal to go well. It really couldn't have had a positive outcome, the more I think about it.

I have been expecting the stock market to correct from some time.

I am expecting that government works are about to face an ocean of pink slips.

I am expecting the house market to continue to crumble.

I am expecting an ongoing troubles with national debt in many nations.

I was totally not expecting NASA to find photographic evidence suggesting the possibility of liquid water on Mars. That's totally amazing and unexpected. While I think this bears further study before calling it water for sure, it's an extremely interesting and exciting find. Suddenly, I find my feelings about human spaceflight have shifted a bit into a more permissive mode.

Totally fascinating.

Internal Combustion

Or, the death of a Seagate Momentus ST94011A from a combination of old age and heat death.

Given that the NAS was not really a critical system, I've had all kinds of time to attempt to figure out what is going on.

Using mprime to attempt to overheat the laptop (while booted from a xubuntu livecd) proved that the motherboard itself was fine. Factoring primes for days simply showed that the system could, when pressed, drive up the electric bill and heat the room even further that the 100°C heat days were.

Examining the SMART logs from FreeNAS, the boot drive has far exceeded it's spinup/spindown count. Something I feared would happen since the NAS tended to wake the drive up frequently to write log data to it. However, it still seemed to boot and read/write data well enough. Just now and then, it would kernel panic, crash, and reboot.

Returning to linux, I've been fiddling with badblocks as a tool to test the drive. Curiously, badblocks would write to the entire disk, but then crash when verifying with a cryptic "%killed" message.

Very odd. I can find little information on what a badblocks crash actually means: the program provides very little in debugging information. Some experimenting has revealed that badblocks can be made to crash by testing too many blocks simultaneously (%badblocks -b 4096 -c 999999999999999), causing it to exhaust available system memory. My original tests used 256 megs of ram with the -c flag. When I scaled down to ~32 megs, the crashing stopped. Possibly the available memory of a virtual memory free livecd boot was the culprit.

Running successive passes did turn up failures after a few hours
(% badblocks -b 4096 -c 32000 -w -v -p 10 /dev/sda )
leaving interesting messages in /var/kern.log and barfing a exhaustive list of bad sectors. I interpret this to mean the controller on the disk is fried.

I picked up another old PATA drive out of the pile and assembled it into the machine. Another day of stress testing, then we should be back in business.

Let the Yeast do the Work -Breve

Look really close:

Do you see it?

We made beer.

Real beer.

And it came out great on our first try.

Freaking amazing.