Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

September 30

So, ah, After Earth. What the hell, Will Smith? Did you have too much money or something? Can you maybe give it to a charity next time?

Drobo is still doing whatever it's doing; at one point the estimate of time to completion was 168 hours. We're down to about 65 or so now, so I find out in the next few days if I've inadvertently trashed a bunch of old data or not. I guess if I've not, I'll be investigating dumping a copy of it in AWS' Glacier...

September 29

Went out to Kylemore Karting with the team. Tons of fun, and managed to clock up a fastest lap (as well as a couple of "offs"...) After that it was food and beers and a walk home and a hangover. Ow.

September 24

Hrm. So along the way I noticed that the Drobo was suggesting I add a new disk, which I've done - it now has a 4TB drive and three 2TB - and somewhat alarmingly the primary partition isn't mounting. This is ... problematic. Now, it's still doing its data protection routine, where it shuffles everything around, and the partition still exists, and the Drobo tools themselves - which are a bit crap on the Mac - aren't reporting any errors, but there's a lot of stuff sitting on that primary partition that I'd very much rather have access to. Last time I swapped in a drive I don't recall it doing this, but I also recall it took several days for it to finish juggling things, so maybe it's just completely maxed out on I/O right now. Fingers crossed.

Most annoying of the above is that the secondary partition is available, with a full backup of the broken server ... from a year ago. The most recent backup is of course on the inaccessible partition.

Ok, so there's this:

· If the lights on Drobo are flashing Green & Amber, Drobo is in Data Protection mode. In *some* cases Drobo will not mount for a short period of time or until the Data Protection is done.

With luck, I'm in "*some* cases". Per the Drobo Dashboard, it will be doing this for the next 90... wait, no, it changed, 134 hours. Guess I find out next week how it got on :-/

Thinking about it, if it turns out to be an outright loss I think it's mainly the server backup and some backups of older waider.ie machines; not catastrophic, but damned annoying. Most of my "active" stuff is on my laptop, which independantly backs up to both the Drobo and S3.

September 23

Hard drive eventually gave out completely. I have backups, I just hate having to restore things... in any event, wound up doing a clean OS Install, something I've been meaning to do for a while, and now I'm attempting to reconstruct things.

Our Kind of Traitor was quite the enjoyable thriller, if you ignore the fact that Ewan McGregor's university professor chose to express his midlife crisis by chasing Russian mobsters through a forest in the French Alps. Seems a bit more strenuous than, say, buying a sportscar. Maybe his salary is too small for that. In any event, a good story, kept me hooked throughout.

Upgraded the laptop to Sierra. I can't actually see the point of talking to my computer (never mind that it'd annoy everyone around me) and... that's about the biggest thing I could see in the update. Oh, and they still haven't upgraded OpenSSL, apparently.

September 18

Day several of several of trying to copy data from failing drive to working drive. After determining that OS X's disk tool wouldn't do the job because of drive errors, I have resorted to using ditto, a tool I've never used in all the years I've had a Mac - so I've no idea if it'll actually do what I want. What it is doing is turning up a helpful list of damaged files/folders that I can use to sort out recovery.

September 15

shutdown
  [-]
  -n    If the -o is specified, prevent the file system cache from being
        flushed by passing -n option to halt(8) or reboot(8).  This
        option should probably not be used.

(my emphasis)

Mhhmm. Used it anyway. Still couldn't shut the damned thing down.

September 13

Booted Mac with sick drive to repair image. Ran disk repair. Nothing. Rebooted back to system disk and it's still complaining. SIGH.

Ordered two drives off Amazon: one replacement, and one spare so the next time this happens I won't be limping along for a few days.

September 12

I wonder why this thing is running so slowly?

disk0s2: I/O error.

OH.

Actually, what's annoying about this is that the drive health is apparently fine, and I've run verifydisk and verifyvolume on it with no errors, and yet.

September 3

Upgraded the MySQL install on the Mac Mini. Picking up the broken pieces now (Python MySQL interface, django stuff that used "storage_engine"...)

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