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Rescanning your disks after creating a new Areca RAID volume through the CLI tool
Date: July 8th, 2009 by SiD3WiNDR
Categories: Linux

Once you have created a new volume in the CLI tool, Linux does not automatically see the disks. To remedy, use the following:

# echo “- – -” > /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/scan

If one of the volumes was still initializing when you did that, it will have been detected by the driver, but not assigned a device node. In that case, performing the above ritual after it has been initialized will not help. You first have to remove the device again, then rescan again:

# dmesg|grep 0:0:
scsi 0:0:0:3: Direct-Access Areca ARC-1260-VOL#03 R001 PQ: 1 ANSI: 3
scsi 0:0:0:3: Attached scsi generic sg4 type 0
# echo “scsi remove-single-device 0:0:0:3″ > /proc/scsi/scsi
# echo “- – -” > /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/scan
# dmesg|grep 0:0:
scsi 0:0:0:3: Direct-Access Areca ARC-1260-VOL#03 R001 PQ: 1 ANSI: 3
scsi 0:0:0:3: Attached scsi generic sg4 type 0
scsi 0:0:0:3: Direct-Access Areca ARC-1260-VOL#03 R001 PQ: 0 ANSI: 3
sd 0:0:0:3: Attached scsi disk sdd
sd 0:0:0:3: Attached scsi generic sg4 type 0

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Changing Hudson’s base URL
Date: July 8th, 2009 by SiD3WiNDR
Categories: Software

If you’re running Hudson from the Debian package, with the built in Winstone servlet server, and want to serve the application on a specific path rather than the web root (when using it in combination with Apache and reverse proxy), edit /etc/default/hudson and add e.g. “–prefix=/hudson” to the commandline parameters.

Yes, they named it prefix.

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Boogle
Date: July 7th, 2009 by SiD3WiNDR
Categories: Interweb, Rants

Dear Lazyweb,

Is there an extension for Firefox that makes it stable puts quotes around every word in a google query you do? I’m getting sick and tired of a search engine trying to “improve” my searches by polluting the results with matches that have nothing to do with the query thanks to changing the search words (eg junos->juno, newest->new, etc). If not, anyone feel like cooking one up? I will be eternally grateful, or will have to switch to Bing™ :(

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Upgraded to Jaunty
Date: July 4th, 2009 by SiD3WiNDR
Categories: Linux, Rants

Yesterday, I upgraded my Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10 laptop (fresh install) to Jaunty 9.04. Turns out this is a typical non-tested Ubuntu upgrade, as literally everything broke. My wifi is non-functional with the 2.6.28 kernel delivered with 9.04, luckily downgrading to the 8.10 kernel made it work fine. Purged linux-generic and all its descendants, so that’s “fixed”.

Next to that, I logged into KDE only to find the main panel missing. Having no clue how to fix this nor feeling like googling (especially since at that point my wifi did not work), I moved my old .kde out of the way and had it create a new one, so it worked again. Copied over some rc files for frequently used apps so most config could be saved, luckily.

When I “unplug” (turn off) my internal bluetooth adapter, or the laptop goes into suspend meaning the bluetooth sleeps too, the “KDE4 Bluetooth Framework” crashes. Somehow the bluetooth system tray icon still works though, it’s just odd.

I get most notifications a few times now, once in a tooltip popup from the system tray icon, and once in a generic yellow rectangle from KDE, containing the exact same text. How’s that for thoroughness!

The network manager icon no longer shows wifi strengh, it’s now a very ugly icon with some kind of antenna with radio wave circles around. Uergh.

KDE4′s battery manager icon is really fugly, and I mean “FUGLY could have done it better myself in mspaint in 20 seconds FUGLY”. Luckily, apt-get install kpowersave gets me the old power icon back with a way more useful hover tooltip, so I could remove the battery monitor applet.

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25 years of Tetris
Date: June 6th, 2009 by SiD3WiNDR
Categories: Games

While we’re talking about old games anyway…

25 years of Tetris Google logo

And I’ve even been playing it yesterday! (on the Wii through HBC ;) )

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Here are the details of your new cake
Date: June 6th, 2009 by SiD3WiNDR
Categories: Games

… or was it case? The Chief never spoke very clearly in Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego.

After playing with Adlib Tracker in DOSbox a few weeks back, and rediscovering Wolfenstein 3D on the Wii’s homebrew channel, I checked out a few soundtracks and clips of old games on Youtube.. today I mounted my hard drive contents of Ye Olde 386 Days into DOSbox and off we went.. Pinball Fantasies really is one of the best pinball sims ever.

If there’s anyone else who gets a fuzzy feeling when hearing (in no particular order) “Lotus 3″, “Jazz Jackrabbit”, “Wolfenstein 3d”, “Prehistorik/Moktar/Blues Brothers”, “Halloween Harry”, “Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis”, “One Must Fall 2097″, “Civilization”, “Epic Pinball”, “Stunts”, “Boppin”, “Doom”, “Blake Stone”, “Duke Nukem 2″, “LSL/*Quest”, “Rise of the Triad”, “Galactix/Raptor”, “Screamer”, “Test Drive 2/3/Grand Prix Unlimited”, “Carmen Sandiego”, “Wacky Wheels”, “Winter/Summer Challenge”, “The Lost Vikings”, “Red Baron”, “Transport Tycoon”, “Prince of Persia 1/2″ or “Lemmings”, we should maybe get together for a retro night/day/weekend ;)

I really like the Titus guy(s) … when you start their game after 2000 it throws a “YAYYY My game is still working in 2009! Programmed in 1992 on a 286 12MHz. Enjoy oldies!” :D

(Apogee/3DR/iD rock..)

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1970′s restrictions in 21st century games
Date: June 5th, 2009 by SiD3WiNDR
Categories: Games, Rants, Wii

Some game developers seem to be really stuck in the 70′s … early 80′s perhaps too. For example, Electronic Arts’ Need for Speed series does not allow you to have a player nickname longer than 8 characters. In the early days, your name was on the license plate, so I could see some reason into having it fit. But since a few years this is no longer the case, it just says NFS. Boo. (note: perhaps in the latest game this may have changed). There are many others who do the same thing.

Yesterday I played Marbles Balance Challenge on the Wii. Enter player name.. ok, there’s a bigass window to enter it in, should fit at least 50 letters in there. S .. i .. D .. 3 .. W .. i .. N .. D … what? WHAT? 8 character limit? Ok, my fault for picking a 9 char nick (which is actually 10 but reduced for IRC purposes), but what the heck? It’s not like the Wii memory can’t handle this… my analog watch probably has enough storage space. I could of course opt for “Tom” but meh. I don’t see the difficulty in allowing longer player names.

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Usability
Date: June 1st, 2009 by SiD3WiNDR
Categories: Rants, Software

To the moron who bound ctrl-down to Lightning in Thunderbird, please roll over and die and/or make me an option to disable this. (possibly there is, but I don’t know where, as there are no real settings for key bindings).

Update: it seems the Mozilla guys are still as great in fixing bugs as they were before – I wonder if this one will also break records in not being fixed (10 years+ anyone?)

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Handy man tool
Date: May 24th, 2009 by SiD3WiNDR
Categories: Home

I’ve had it for ages now, but only used it for the first time yesterday: the Anti-Bohrstaub-Aufsatz für Staubsauger ! Very handy stuff, even sucks itself to the wall, and no drilling dust at all to be found! Recommended, and cheap. Thanks to my darling wife for the present ;)

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Thinking before you configure
Date: May 9th, 2009 by SiD3WiNDR
Categories: Computing, Software, Stupid

For a long while one of my servers “crashed” weekly. Every saturday at 3am the load would just spiral up and everything would become unresponsive (still working but slow) – everything was waiting on disk I/O. I kept putting off checking why this happened, and just rebooted the machine manually every saturday (lazy lazy). After a while I found out it was at 3am, so it had to be a cron job. I then noticed that one of my other servers also had a high load at 3am, but less high and it recovered.

Today I did some thinking and checking, and to blame was.. me! I had configured smartmontools to do a weekly long selfcheck at 3am on all 4 disks in the software RAID5 at the same time. This apparently took so much speed away from the disks that the machine didn’t cope.. Woopsie.

Note: hobby environment of course, real production I would have spent more time figuring it out :)

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