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…..
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.
So I finaly got around to installing ubuntu 7.10, which made a big difference. Instead of having to muck around getting compiz/beryl installed I just clicked a few times. Hell, ubuntu even told me I needed the nvidia binary drivers to make the most of my hardware. A very nice touch.
I haven’t yet figured out how to get the dashboard/widgets working yet, but most of the compiz eye candy is working just dandy, and fast, on this setup. So fast, I had to slow the effects down so I could see them happening!
Much tweaking still to be done. It picked up my soundcard with out any help, but it doesn’t like the raid array which I fully expected. Also, the default movie player kinda sucks. Lots of flickering when the mouse is moved. Not sure if that’s compiz, or just the player.
I have this dell Keyboard at work zhat has one major flaw. It is szylish. How is this bad? It does not line up with the wrist rest. IT wobbles when placed against the wrjst rest. I’ve resorted to using a pen to fill in the gap and keep the keyboard stable.
The other day I was at goodwill when I saw a box on a lower shelf. It turned out to be a lide 20. For 20 bucks I figured it was worth the risk. It was in the original packaging, right down to the manual. It even smelled new! And it works. My only complaint is that it is rather loud and a bit flimsy when compared with the lide 35.
My biggest problem with technology is that it’s often overly stupid. For instance, to get pictures off my cellphone I have to upload them to a server, login, then download them. STUPID! I haven’t counted all the steps necessary but it’s over 5. That’s 4 too many.
People just want the content not the crap. For instance, this website is pretty stripped down. The most intensive part is that image on top. It allows you to get to the content quickly. I usualy use scribefire to make posts. Why? Because I don’t have to click a bunch of stuff in the wordpress panels to get to where I can right. I only have two categories, and I don’t really use all the other stuff so scribefire is quick and easy.
I encounter this at work too. We have some software you need for our hardware, which is fine except the software tries to do too much. The hardware itself you can buy in any store from the company that makes it, install the damned thing and be up and running in no time. But our software with our hardware has to be special and lock things down to our products. That’s fine, I understand why but christ it’s always a pain to get working because the software is trying to be too smart.
Supposedly apple products work a lot better in this respect, but I know apple likes to “lock you in” to their product line. I can go for this if everything just freaking works. When products from the same company don’t mesh it makes me very unhappy.
This whole post was spurred on by the fact I just started playing with opera mini 4. It has a pretty nice “overview” mode, the problem being it’s impossible to read and a little difficult to manage. Though it is pretty neat in use. Fortuneatly opera has a “fit to width” option which does away with the fancy stuff and makes it readable in one quick, easy, simple, step. Kudos Opera.
Yeah, I think about these things,
Phosphers
Been trying to enter a RMA for a bad drive. Just a few of the fun things I’ve dealt with so far.
I’ll email them, maybe I can iron all this out. GRRRRR.
Update: I wrote most of this post when I was rather pissed off, so it’s a bit sketchy…. then I forgot about it entirely. The email I did get back from seagate was obviously a form letter and had no revelance to the question I asked. Yay for shoddy customer support. I eventually got it all ironed out and got the drive RMA’d. The drive arrived and I blogged about it here.
I’m writting This from my Ds. It’s pretty usable for blogging. I just need to work on my penmanship.
bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh
