I’ve had a tough week, technology-wise. Over the course of the last three days I’ve had two relatively new hard drives fail, a gigabit switch started having some ports go slow and a servo that controls the throttle on an RC airplane went nuts. I think it may be time for some time away from the keyboard.
I believe my new saying for hard disks should go something like this:
“There are no such things as good, dependable or safe disks. There are just disks that have failed and those that will fail.”
On the recommendation of some people on the Internet, I bought and tested a Samsung F1 Spinpoint 1TB SATA drive. It seemed great: it was big, fast, very quiet and energy efficient. Windows seemed to like it and a couple of my other PCs with very finicky SATA controllers took a shine to it as well. After about a month or so of using it I decided to purchase 5 more, 4 to put into my ReadyNAS storage box and one “spare” to use for shuttling data around. I also convinced a partner of mine to pony up for an additional 4 drives for his NAS. All seemed right in the world.
About two weeks ago I started noticing my ReadyNAS box getting slower and slower when trying to copy files from it or put files on it. It also has a web page where the admin tasks get done, and most days I was fortunate to see that page in two to three minutes after trying it. Great, I thought, some kind of firmware mess up (the box can offer and upgrade its own firmware) has happened. So I slapped on a new version of the firmware, rebooted the NAS, and then nothing. Truly nothing, as in no web page, no network shares, no ping returns. A few more reboots and things appeared to be working, so I left it alone to worry about it another day.
In the meantime I reformatted my main PC to be a full time Windows 7 x64 RC1 machine, so I fed it my existing Samsung 1TB drive to run from. That worked for about 24 hours, then Win7 just stopped responding. Thinking that I fouled it somehow (it happens, I go nuts on new installs from time to time) I hammered the whole install and did it again. This time around it lasted for about 6 hours before Win7 coughed up an error message that roughly translated said:
“Dude (it’s California, work with me here), this drive is busted and you should back it up. Oh, and I won’t let you write to it any more. Have a nice day.”
Flash forward to June 19, just 24 hours after the desktop drive was rejected by Windows and now the NAS just disappeared. I checked it to verify that it still had power but beyond that it did nothing but sit there and blink. Reboot and try again. The NAS works, but very slowly. I finally get the admin web page up to view what the matter might be. To my surprise there are no alerts in its log of “very bad things” that happen on it when I’m not looking, but there is another page where I can see the raw details of each disk’s S.M.A.R.T. report. This is where all the scary data is on errors, retries and the like. Imagine my surprise to find that one of my disks, labeled “2″ by the NAS, has gone off the deep end with over 100K of errors in less than a weeks time. I shut the box down and pulled that drive, replacing it with that “spare” Samsung I had been using as my portable disk. 26 hours later the NAS is up and running and it seems happy again, but I’m not so sure.
Along with my panic and rage, I notice that a few of my machines are running slowly when connecting to each other on my network or talking to the Internet. That’s odd, I say to myself, since I often have self referential conversations, my network is all Gigabit Ethernet enabled save for a few older devices. I check the gigabit switch and find that at least two of the ports are lit at 10/100 speeds. The PCs confirm this and I sit puzzled. It worked last week, I thought, but now it’s gone and slowed itself down for no reason? A quick check of the Internets using some Google-foo and I have my answer, this Netgear 8 port switch, the GS608, has a history of dying slowly and taking one port at a time down to a crawl. It just decided to make itself known to me while I’m fighting my hard disks.
Normally, three big failures at once is plenty, but since this is my life I had to make it more exciting. I drove off to the RC airfield to fly my “reliable” airplane and the servo that controls the throttle goes nuts. It decides there are two settings: full on and off. Stranger still is the fact that this has never happened on any airplane I’ve had before and after tinkering with the airplane and changing nothing it “cures” itself. Knowing the week I’ve just had I packed everything up in the truck and took my toys home.
I’m not sure what the moral of this story is supposed to be, other than when I seem to have bad luck in a portion of my world it happens in clumps. I’ll certainly want to be extra careful the next time I get in something fast and dangerous to go somewhere… come to think of it my car was just in the shop for a safety system malfunction. Hmmm….
Two different events conspired to make today suck: an email purporting to be from the FBI and US Mail from a former employer telling me that my identity may have been stolen.
The FBI mail is the typical Internet scam, but this time with more legit looking information and 50% less bad grammar. It tells me that:
your e-mail address was among the e-mails that won this year promo award of UK National Lottery, that is the fund that was transferred to Africa , and it has been recovered.
Of course, I completely forgot about that lotto ticket I picked up when I was in London five years ago. How silly of me, and how wonderful that the FBI took the time to track it down for me. I’m sure someone will fall for this but it’s just another hoax in my inbox.
This second one is more serious. It seems that a former employer who will remain nameless contracted with an accounting firm which had my personal identification (and that of others) on a laptop. That laptop was stolen and the firm, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, says it had all kinds of security to keep my information safe, and that I shouldn’t worry. Sounds fine until you read the next paragraph:
… as the laptop was in use at the time of the theft, we cannot be certain that these security measures were enabled.
So now I’m told that someone can go out and masquerade as me, creating new bank accounts, credit cards and personal loans and that all PWC can say is sorry, we’re not liable? I realize that the 21st century was going to be new and exciting but I didn’t realize that personal or corporate responsibility wasn’t one of the 20th century carry-overs. Shameful, I say.
I readily admit that I am hard on computers, I really do break them on a regular basis while seeming to find the absolute limits of what they are capable of. So with more than a little trepidation I installed the Release Candidate build (7100) of Windows 7 and set it to work scanning my overly large and complicated media library.
As a primer, it should be noted that my music library alone is somewhere over 30,000 songs and many of them have horribly broken tags that I refuse to fix, left over from many, many sessions of ripping the original CDs over the years. Every version of Windows Media Player ever released has choked on them at some point. ITunes is beyond worthless, freezing and locking up during the scan process and never fully recovering. Winamp has long since bit the dust and even the mighty VLC goes down for the count when so many tracks are added to its “media library.” My hopes for WMP 12 doing any better were very low.
Imagine my surprise when, after mere hours, it responded by downloading album artwork and behaving very snappily when searching through the volumes of tunes I have given it. Better still, none of these tracks were located on the PC where Windows 7 resides: they were on a network attached storage device, the Netgear ReadyNAS. Searching for tracks: quick. Playing tracks: near instantaneous. Exploring the library in Media Center: darn right blissful. All this from a Microsoft product? Color me impressed. My next run at it will be to fire up another system and try streaming from one W7 system to another, both inside and outside the home network. The nets say it’s possible, but we shall see.
I have recently had the great displeasure of participating in three different levels of grief and suffering with three different technology companies. All three were so terrible that I felt compelled to write about it and post the results here, in the unlikely hope that someone might learn from my pain. So here it goes…
Adobe: decided that it is OK to hang up on my calls twice for support to activate a product that I had purchased, transfer me between two different call centers and different support staffs in India, force me to repeat the same trouble-shooting steps no less than 8 separate times, and to, in the end, blame me for causing a problem which could only be repaired by tweaking their own registration servers. Just to get Photoshop to run.
HP:spent the better part of three hours bouncing my call between different call centers, different divisions of the company, taking over remote control of my PC, forcibly causing the loss of installed drivers and patches and lecturing me extensively on how I knew nothing about computer hardware to troubleshoot a problem, only to claim that the “outgoing phone lines are down” so that they couldn’t call me back for three days. In the end, I relented and used the combination of the Internets free help (from other poor, tortured HP owners souls) and a Linux boot CD to restore functions to my USB ports.
AT&T: sent me around and around in circles for more than a week, trying to explain to me that “new services are available in your area”, but then deciding that no service has been improved, but that they can save me money if only I would switch to a new plan. This led to nearly a week without any working DSL service, a series of confused support technicians, a promise of a new DSL modem that never appeared and a considerably more expensive bill than I started with for the same level of service I had before. Extra pain points are awarded for having the local repair truck workers tell me that in 30 days or so fiber will be available in my area that will render all of this moot.
On March 9 I was fortunate enough to get some track time at the famed Laguna Seca Raceway in Salinas, CA. It was an interesting experience to say the least, and very different from driving at Thunderhill for past events. As a key point, it was remarkably cold at the track, never getting warmer than about 55 F, making the car develop as close to full horsepower as I’ve experienced but also making the tires a bit slippery for the first few laps.
As for the actual track, it seemed, well, small. At Thunderhill there are over 3 miles of ground to cover but at Laguna Seca it is just a bit over 2 miles. That might not seem like much, but when the course is constrained and there are 25 cars on it each session, that’s not much room to move around. The biggest challenge I had was trying to find enough open road to actually hit the throttle and go. Every few turns I caught up with the crowd and was stuck at the slowest speeds I’ve ever experienced on a track.
The car variety was fairly good: lots of Corvettes and 911’s as usual. The poorest example of a track car was the Toyota Prius that showed up in my group. It drove a scorching 48 MPH on most of the course and seemed to give up after the first session, thankfully. There were some Mini Coopers, again, not the fastest thing on the track. A good collection of Audi A/RS 4’s and BMW 3’s and 5’s were also around. Some older vehicles like a Ford Mustang Mach I, some kind of strange Lotus car and some older RX7’s and vintage racers were also around. There were also two race setup Dodge Vipers in attendance. The three unique cars this day were the Ferrarri F430, the Lamborghini Gallardo and a “D” spec racer with a Kawasaki motorcycle engine in it that just tore up the track.
All in all, it was a good experience to learn the lines of a new track, get into new driving situations and generally get to feel a new track setup. The bummers were that there were way to many slow drivers in my group and the sessions were much shorter (15 mins) than they are at Thunderhill. I would probably go again but I’d want to move to a faster group. A quick view of some of the sights and sounds of Laguna Seca can be found in this short video I put together, so take a look.
Quick update: for pictures of that day that I didn’t take (or purchase) look here.
Over the past couple of weeks I have been copying large amounts of data back and forth from my desktop PCs and my ReadyNAS in order to facilitate clearing some local hard disk space and to really, honestly begin scheduled backups. Today while copying a particularly large file (greater than 2GB if you must know) I found that the transfer rate to the ReadyNAS was a measly 10 MB/s. I have a gigabit network setup and this represents less than 10% of the available capacity. Obviously something is up.
I have my full-time, every-day PC running Vista with SP1 and for the most part this is a very stable and good performing platform. I have thrown a lot of modern hardware at it, including 4GB of DDR2 RAM, two NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards in SLI mode and an AMD Phenom 9950 quad core CPU, so Vista can really go fast. However, to test out the theory that Vista might be taunting me I fired up one of my spare PCs running Windows XP with SP3. Sure enough, transferring files to and from the NAS with XP works fine at over 22 MB/s. Something must really be hosed with Vista, IMHO.
So, off to Google I go in search of answers, and low-and-behold I found this article at ZDNet explaning what I feared: Vista thinks it is smarter than me when it comes to prioritizing what needs to get done on the PC. Whenever the media sub-system in Vista is active with either audio or video playback the network connection gets crunched down to its lowest level. No matter what I tweak, disable or alter Vista will not transfer at a respectable speed unless all audio and video sources stop. This includes playback inside of a browser such as IE7 or Firefox. I take a deep breath and sigh.
So now I must sit in silence or play music on a separate PC if I want full network capability on my main work machine. For this fine, new feature I award Windows Vista the “Poo of the Day” award. I’m sure more of these awards will follow soon enough. Windows 7 can’t get here soon enough.
When your computer begins to slow down and then do strange things, you really do need to pay close attention because it is trying to tell you something. In my case Vista was attempting to communicate in a very inept way that it had been attacked by some malware and was in the process of going down the drain.
First I noticed the hard drive LED flashing rapidly all the time. Next I found that the machine wouldn’t stay in sleep mode any longer. Browser windows would pop open for no good reason. It was time to make a trip to my old friend MSConfig and enable the clean-boot options. Only after booting into Safe Mode with everything disabled (and my system all but useless) did I find the culprit files hiding and renaming themselves in the Windows/System32 directory.
What followed were many reboots, the forced termination of IE7 and Explorer.exe, a reload of some critical OS files from DVD, then a determined and lengthy process of online virus scanning. Only when all of these processes were completed was the threat finally removed. I must once again return to my old paranoid ways: never install anything from the internet directly onto my critical PC AND always keep some kind of security (the dreaded User Account Control) turned on to slow down an attack.
And to think I was worried about being bored this holiday week. Shame on me.
I was in a mood today to make my music listening habits a bit more social, but I found that my two current music services, Pandora and Slacker, don’t naively support sending data to Last.fm. No problem, I thought, some enterprising hacker out there has solved this problem already. Right I was, and now you too can have the scrobble ability if you use these two services AND also use Firefox with them:
So long as Firefox continues to be friendly with these plug-ins I’ll be using them to share the music. That said, I’ll be impressed if this integration works for more than 6 months. Time will tell.
October is here and that means another trip to Thunderhill to track the C6. This year was no exception, and although I’m tired and a bit sore the car and I are no worse for wear, so far as I can tell. The stats of note for this round of driving are as follows:
Average gas mileage: 8 MPG
Top speed achieved: 121 MPH (when I managed to look)
New things learned: Skipping the cool down lap means cooked brake fluid (and no brakes)
Sad fact: The gas gauge read empty at just 124 miles… while lapping another car, thus ending my driving for the day
I could find no new cool cars at this track day to take photos of so an artsy pic of my car and helmet will just have to do this time around.
September 15th, 200810:41 amGeneral, RantsComments Off
For those of us living in the republic of California and owning older vehicles, we have to put up with an annual mandatory visit to a “certified” SMOG test station to see if our vehicle is still “legal” to drive on the road. Unlike safety inspections found in other states, however, this test is nothing more than a way to extract additional money from your pocket if you wish to keep driving on the roads. It works like this:
You first pay about $90-ish for the registration and license fees
Instructions tell you to go and SMOG test your vehicle for “a nominal fee”
The SMOG test station finds ways to have their costs add up to $65 or more
If your car doesn’t pass the “test” you have to pay the $65 again once you figure out what’s wrong
This setup seems like a way to fleece those folks who, like me, mindlessly follow the rules set forth by the state. I’ve seen cars with current registration stickers which clearly spew forth a toxic stew while driving, so am I to believe that the DMV feels these furnaces of CO2 pollution are OK to drive on the road? Meanwhile, if you haven’t replaced your car air filter in a couple of years you fail the test and another $65 is removed from your pocket.
All of this silliness is almost enough to make someone move out of state, or at least put their vehicle registration elsewhere. Sheesh.
