Call me kooky

This isn’t specificly a ubuntu issue, rather a general problem with linux.  Refresh rates and resolution.  With ubuntu it grabs the highest resolution it can after install.  1600×1200 is not usable, if you ask me.  I can’t really blame linux though, there’s so much crap in the middle.  DDC detection, ramdacs, open/closed drivers, available memory.  I just wish it worked better.  It took over an hour of fucking around to get ubuntu to display 1366×720 on the HDTV.  Granted, the HDTV may not have DDC support but it really shouldn’t be such a mess.

I finaly got around to working on my resume today and OO keeps popping up tool bars.  It’s driving me nuts and I can’t figure out how to turn them off.  ARRRRRRRRRRRGH!

Some time back, debian switched over to exim instead of sendmail.  The upshot, is that exim supports maildir… which is needed for imap.  The downside is that the UW pop3 won’t work with mail dir.  So hey, lets install courier pop/imap and get it all working……  Yeah, it didn’t work.

Not sure what broke but pop3 wouldn’t start at all.  No errors, just not started.  So some apt roulette fixed it.  Now to figure out why mutt won’t send email…..

I finaly got around to getting a UPS for the server.  Prices dropped and I have the time to deal with it….. which I needed.  First, I forgot the outlet in the other room was buried so I had to shuffle things around to get to the outlet.  Then I went ahead and setup a raid1 on the server and dusted the poor thing along with some cable management.  Much to my annoyance, linux wanted to resync blank drives…. for three fucking hours.  And apcupsd wouldn’t work.  Once the sync was done, I could reboot the machine and test my settings for apcupsd which didn’t work.  Turns out debian doesn’t create the hiddev entries by default (old debian) so apcupsd couldn’t even talk to the UPS.  Then there was some stupid bullshit option in the kernel that needed to be enabled…… and I broke iptables (needed for ds wireless!).  I compiled the kerenel more yesterday than I have for several years but everything seems to be working now.

whoooo?
Phosphers

I’ve been playing around with ubuntu a lot and decided to start remaking the old computer into a linux workstation.  To cut down on the god awfull noise I switched over to an old gf2 MX200 card.  It’s sucky, but it’s silent.

Turns out compiz wouldn’t work, it just refused to start at all.  After a bunch of mucking about I found that editing compiz is all I needed to do.  There’s a line in there that specifies the minimum amount of ram needed to run compiz.  Sneaky and simple.  I just changed that to an acceptably low number and compiz starts right up.  The down side is that a few things are just damned slow.  And wobbly windows don’t quite work……right.  They wobble, but not…..right.

WOBBLY WINDOWS,
Phosphers

I had it in my mind to make a raid1 (mirror) drive in the server for backup but was a bit concerned about recovering things if bad stuff happened.  Turns out if you lose a disc you can “stop” the array, then mount the good disc normaly.  Running mdadm’s resync command fixes up the new disc nice n’ easy too.  I’ve heard software raid is just as easy on windows but I question it.

I went to login to my sprint account to grab the photos from my cell and I had to redo all the goddamned login information.  Mind you, I’ve been using the same login stuff since I got the phone but nooooooooooo now I have to change everything.  And to piss me off further the user name HAS to have a number in it.  Stupid stupid stupid.

Update:  The pictures page has been redesigned too, and when you fail a login it posts a message which obscures the login fields.  Fantastic.

Further pissings:  It takes forever for the page to load, so now a ten minutes task is well past fifteen.

There’s no submit button on the page……

Listening to Three dead trolls “welcome to the helpdesk”.  I never had to deal with such inept callers but it reminds of how calls went.  Fishing about for the necessary information to fix the problem and some of the funny things callers do.

When I was working at nintendo I got into the habit of listening to the adam corolla show in the morning.  Now that I’ve finaly got my sleep cycle back to halfway normal I’m awake when the show is on again.  My alarm clock is crappy and sucks, so I figured I’d listen live to the streaming radio.  But I can’t.  The goddamned player won’t connect, I can’t even get the fucking stream information to load it directly.  WHAT IS THE POINT OF HAVING A STREAM WHEN IT WON’T WORK?!??!?!  I might have to write them an email or something.

Stewing in the corner,
Phosphers

This was frightfully easy to get working.  I had some qualms about setting up the raid array because it’s usualy a mess to get things working.  Not this time!

Enter dmraid….

First to see if dmraid finds the array/controller at all;

root@phosphers-desktop:~# dmraid -s
*** Active Superset
name   : nvidia_dfebefhj
size   : 1250284800
stride : 128
type   : raid10
status : ok
subsets: 2
devs   : 4
spares : 0

Yup, even notices the raid10!  Now to check if the devices are showing up correctly;

root@phosphers-desktop:~# dmraid -r
/dev/sdb: nvidia, “nvidia_dfebefhj-0″, stripe, ok, 625142446 sectors, data@ 0
/dev/sdc: nvidia, “nvidia_dfebefhj-0″, stripe, ok, 625142446 sectors, data@ 0
/dev/sdd: nvidia, “nvidia_dfebefhj-1″, stripe, ok, 625142446 sectors, data@ 0
/dev/sde: nvidia, “nvidia_dfebefhj-1″, stripe, ok, 625142446 sectors, data@ 0

Another yep.  As a side note, once dmraid was installed and activated the first time I never had to touch it again.  Nice and easy.

Now to the confusing part.  Since the 2.6 series of kernel does some fancy new stuff the partition information ends up in /dev/mapper.

root@phosphers-desktop:~# ls /dev/mapper
control  nvidia_dfebefhj  nvidia_dfebefhj-0  nvidia_dfebefhj1  nvidia_dfebefhj-1  nvidia_dfebefhj2  nvidia_dfebefhj3

Whole bunch of stuff.  The numbering is what threw me for a loop.  Notice the -0 and -1?  Those are the stripe sets, and what I tried to mount first to no avail.  The non dash numbers are the actual partitions, and once I understood that it was easy to get things mounted.

Normal sata2 disk;

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads:   7958 MB in  2.00 seconds = 3982.14 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:  208 MB in  3.01 seconds =  69.17 MB/sec

RAID disk/s;

/dev/mapper/nvidia_dfebefhj:
Timing cached reads:   9068 MB in  2.00 seconds = 4538.92 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:  332 MB in  3.01 seconds = 110.32 MB/sec

Just a bit faster, which is fine by me.