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Large Drives, Partitions and Ubuntu

Posted by bb on Tuesday 11th of September 2007 at 12:36 pm.
Filed Under News, Rants

How to partition drives >2Tb and how to have more than 4 partitions on a large drive array.

We struggled with this for a very long time. I had to collate information from many different sources and I thought it might be nice to collect it all here in one tidy little post that may save someone else the trouble of pulling their hair out and suffering replies in help forums like ‘Not exactly a beginner’s question is it?‘. How the hell should I know? I’m a beginner you cunswup!

Firstly you will need to change the disklabel to gpt. I used parted for this but I must stress at this point – DO NOT USE PARTED 1.7.1. This is the version that was shipped with my 7.04 install and to the best of my knowledge is still the one included with 7.1. IT IS BROKEN. Nice of them to update it in the install package since 1.7.1 was released in May 2006.

I installed parted version 1.8.8 – available here. And this is how I did it ….

I have 10 x 500Gb SATA drives configured under and Adaptec 31605 card to run as a single large 4Tb drive (1Tb lost for redundancy). I wanted to split up the drive into 6 partitions. Using parted 1.7.1 would allow me to do this, but as soon as I rebooted, the extra partitions (sdx5 sdx6 etc) were lost. They would not even appear in /dev/sd??.

All commands are executed in the context of root@uberserver:~#, you may need to sudo some commands if you are not root.

apt-get remove libparted parted
apt-get install uuid-dev libncurses5 libreadline-dev build-essential
wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parted/parted-1.8.8.tar.gz
tar zxvf parted-1.8.8.tar.gz
cd parted-1.8.8
./configure
make

*************************************
I got an error at this point on my system

/usr/bin/ld: /usr/lib/../lib64/libuuid.a(uuidgen.o): relocation R_X86_64_32 against `a local symbol’ cannot be used when making a shared object; recompile with -fPIC

so I had to use make CFLAGS=-fPIC CXXFLAGS=-fPIC
*************************************
make install

And that was that 😀 From the command line I typed parted and this greeted me :

root@uberserver:~# parted
GNU Parted 1.8.8
Using /dev/sda
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type ‘help’ to view a list of commands.
(parted)

From the parted command line I set the disklabel to gpt which resulted in this error (due to having previously tried this with 1.7.1)

Warning: /dev/sda contains GPT signatures, indicating that it has a GPT table.
However, it does not have a valid fake msdos partition table, as it should.
Perhaps it was corrupted — possibly by a program that doesn’t understand GPT
partition tables. Or perhaps you deleted the GPT table, and are now using an
msdos partition table. Is this a GPT partition table?
Yes/No?

I replied yes and removed all my existing partitions. From there I mkparted the new partitions and rebooted. And what do you know … they were there when I rebooted!

I would like to thank publicly philipMac for his post here which I followed mostly to get this working. I would also like to thank rhican for his help troubleshooting the compiler error. Also Xa0z for his patience whilst I constantly wiped out his hard work by generally buggering around with partitions!

I would also suggest that since 1.7.1 is broken, that perhaps it’s not such a good idea to continue to ship it with default installs – or at least allow a working one to be apt-get’d if possible. Maybe the developers could put something on their site even? Until users don’t have to jump through hoops to obtain fixes for simple problems, I fear it will retard the acceptance of Ubuntu into the mainstream.

And speaking of ‘tards, a little fuck you to the cunswup I mentioned earlier. I explained my lack of experience and I had no idea if it was a beginner’s question or not. The very least you could have done, instead of just shitting in the thread and running away leaving your oh-so-witty turd behind, would have been to reply to the response I left -Was I in the wrong place and if so how do I get this fixed.

Behaviour like yours does not endear a community to someone who is frustratedly hunting for what should be a simple solution. I really hope next time you have a problem someone does the same to you. And by God I hope it’s me! Fuck you very much you idiot.

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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UberServer LIVES!!

Posted by bb on Thursday 30th of August 2007 at 9:19 am.
Filed Under News

Yesterday, at about 4 Budweisers past 6 O’clock, Ubuntu 7 finally booted on the UberServer 😀 🙂

A very nice Linux consultant called Keith came round and spent a good 5 hours trying (ultimately unsuccessfully) to get UberServer to play ball but he did leave me with the right direction to go in to get it up and running finally.

I didn’t know how long these things take to fix/get up and running and I have worked in Tech Support long enough to meet the types that come out on-site and tell you that your IRQs are scrambled and out of order and upsetting the DMA frontside bus which is generating line noise on the PCI Express. I even met someone once (back in the days of 486’s) that told me the difference between a 486SX and a 486DX was that the DX could have an internal modem!

All credit to Keith, he came round with the understanding that if it wasn’t working when he left, there would be no charge. He worked tirelessly for 5 solid hours and made great progress. He left in such a state that I, linux n00b of n00bs, could continue and finish the install. He was meant to only be here for a maximum of 2 hours and spent well over 5. And when he left, he said it wasn’t working so there would be no charge!

However, I will be asking for an invoice, because as I said, I’ve worked in the industry long enough to recognise good work. And good work should be rewarded. Cheers Keith!

At this point in time (several hours before beer O’Clock) Merlijn is installing all sorts of softwarey goodness so we can get it all up and running.

Shell accounts are available to all #GC members! Or will be when it is set up!

Onwards! 😀

(No Ratings Yet)

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DVD Creation Canceled

Posted by bb on Wednesday 22nd of August 2007 at 11:54 am.
Filed Under Rants

No that is not a typo – that is the error message I keep getting from ProShow Gold v3.00.1974.

Why am I mentioning this? Well it is because apparently it is quite a common error message and the best advice I could get from the interweb was to disable an option within the program. I even looked on the ProShow Enthusiasts forum.

There are a few things about this that bother me.

1. $80 for the full version. You can’t even spell your error messages correctly!
2. It doesn’t work properly so rather than investigate what the problem was, you (and your enthusiasts) suggest just disabling a function.
3. Emails to your tech support go unanswered 🙁

Now I’m not a software programmer – but the fact that disabling the function stops the problem, indicates to me a very good place to start looking. So I did. And the problem was with DirectShow (quartz.dll). Using Sherlock,  Codec Sniper and DirectShow Filter Manager meant that I could correct the problem in a few minutes.

Now what are the chances that this is the same problem other people are having (since 2006)? Pretty good I guess because the problem relates to video thumbnails which use … video codecs like DirectShow … *sigh*

Yet you still expect people to spend their hard earned dollars/pounds/euros/smarties on your product when the problem has existed for over a year and emails to your techsupport are left unanswered? Let me explain to you what happens then- FrustratedUser(tm) gets hold of a debugger to try and track the damn error down himself. On the way to finding the problem he notices the registration routine and saves himself $80.

Of course, that didn’t happen here – honestly 🙂 It’s just a what-if type scenario. You know, like what would happen if you found the blacklist of names and serials in PLAINTEXT in a DLL (with a cunningly renamed extension … oh noes … wh4t j00 going to do now h4x0r?)

Sheesh.

(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

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UberServer Update

Posted by bb on Thursday 2nd of August 2007 at 12:07 pm.
Filed Under News, Rants

UberServer is nearly ready to go online. A little behind schedule but still … hey ho.

The main reason for the delay is the morons at NST who failed, quite spectacularly, in every department except the ChargingOfTheCreditCard. Promised delivery for the 19th, come the 26th it still wasn’t here. Getting a call back from Jamie Williams was like getting blood out of a stone.

It’s on its way… The Driver has it on his truck… The Driver is nearly there…
The Driver says there is too much traffic to make the delivery!!!

WTF? The Driver wants to get himself another job if the very presence of traffic deters him from doing his job. Alternatively Jamie, you should learn not to lie to your customers. Else we cancel our orders and then we get the bank to chargeback the credit card payment you took and that costs you extra money. All because you decide that returning customer’s money is not a priority before you fuck off on holiday!

Cunswup.

Righty – how is UberServer looking? Hardware wise … pretty damn spanky even if I say so myself!

Here are some piccies of the birth of UberServer

Read more

(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

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Skill can’t beat luck

Posted by bb on Thursday 2nd of August 2007 at 10:45 am.
Filed Under Misc

A Tale of Texas Hold ’em Tragedy.

They say a picture is worth 1000 words

I have to say ‘fair play’ to Inferno for soundly beating me up on that hand – at no point did I suspect even a flush, let alone a straight flush (unsurprisingly at odds of 72192:1).

But I am a big enough man to say ‘Well Done!’ …

You lucky son of a bitch 😛

(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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1st Cunswuppy Supplier

Posted by bb on Thursday 12th of July 2007 at 10:54 am.
Filed Under Rants

Already the UberServer has had it’s first delivery hiccup. I hoped to post about positive, happy, huggy things but no … this is not my lot in life.

So.. big shouts out to ebuyer who managed to accept my order for a UPS, then two days later send me this email :

Unfortunately the above item on your order, has incurred a price discrepancy, this is due to the item being wrongly advertised on our website, therefore cannot supply this item of the price previously advertised.
The new price excluding VAT is £600.00

I am aware that pricing discrepancies can happen. This is not my major gripe. Though I haven’t a clue what would have happened had I ordered next day delivery … I wonder if they would have come round and said … err, ummm, ooops, may we have it back please?

The problem I have is twofold. One is the 66% increase in price. That puts it from cheapest (and then, only by a few £) to completely and utterly ridiculous. The only reason they got the order in the first place was the free shipping and now they almost double the price! Secondly is the delay – they confirmed the order at 15:00 on the 10th, and finally tell me on the 12th that the price is wrong. Fair enough the price is wrong – but something, somewhere should have happened immediately allowing me to order from someone who had it in stock and are prepared to sell it to me at pretty much the same price.

if ($salesprice < $buyprice){ Alert($Someone, “Potential undercost sale”);}

Ebuyer, I salute you for your cunswuppery. It takes practice to be this shite.

On the other hand, competent companies such as TMC, deliver on time, on budget and ship exactly what they said they were going to ship. </plug>

I’m off to dribble over my server chassis. I’ve re-ordered the UPS from Scan – at a cost of £30 more including shipping. Not an ebuyer £197 difference.

Not entirely unsurprising really. Cunswups.

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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UberServer is Ordered

Posted by bb on Wednesday 11th of July 2007 at 11:59 am.
Filed Under News

Well it’s all ordered. Rather than go for an off the shelf solution, Merlijn and I decided to spec it out ourselves and build my new server ourselves. With Inferno’s help when they come over later this month.

After the previous server fiasco, this is of course a risky strategy but I think we have t3h sk1llz to pull this off.

We set ourselves a budget of £5k (exc VAT) and for that – this is what we have managed to get with a little bit of wheeling and dealing :

Dual Xeon 2Ghz
16Gb FBDIMM PC2-5300 RAM
5Tb Caviar Storage
300Gb OS drives [Raptors]
1Gb Switch
2200VA Rackmounted UPS
Hardware firewall with VPN
Adaptec 16 port RAID controller
8 Port KVM
Sound-proofed 15U Cabinet

and much much more ….

I would like to claim a slightly larger role in designing this than I really had, however most of the research and effort was put in my my good pal Merlijn. His wizardly google-fu helped track down the best bang for buck (at least we like to think so) and checked to make sure everything was compatible and would talk to each other. Unlike me who kept wanting to scrimp on stuff like drives, motherboards, memory- just so I could go Quad Core instead of Dual Core. So thanks for keeping me on the straight and narrow. <mutter><mutter>

As it all turns up, I’ll be taking some photos – I’m hoping it will look a little like this :

But since I’m helping put it together, I’m guessing it will probably look more like this

At least I will have Inferno and Merlijn here to help me put it back together and fill in the warranty forms!

I’ll take pictures of the stuff when it arrives and try and keep this bit up to date as we work on bringing UberServer online around the 23rd of July. I hope. Else perhaps this blog will serve as some sort of testament as to how come there is now a very large crater where my office once was!

I will also, as is my wont, moan and bitch about the bad suppliers but for one week only I will also be praising those suppliers that go above and beyond the call of duty. To start with I would like to thank Chris over at TMC for his help with our server chassis that we ordered from them.

Very sexy little number – but Chris has been very helpful, offering to throw in all sorts of cables that we (read:me) may well have forgotten about. So here is my plug for TMC.

If you need a server chassis, or any other high performance server and storage building blocks – call Chris at TMC.

There – who says all I do is moan on this blog.

Fucking knee jerk reactionary government lickspittles.
That feels better 🙂

(2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)

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A tad more serious …

Posted by bb on Monday 2nd of July 2007 at 11:26 am.
Filed Under News

“First They Came for the Jews”
By Pastor Niemoller

First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.

The above is a well known poem, oft used to illustrate how people react to government/state impositions on personal liberties. Recently we have had a couple of supposed ‘terrorist’ attacks in London and Glasgow.

I find myself in the awkward position of asking … “Terrorists? Really?”

I find it hard to reconcile the recent events as anything other than terrorism in the strictest sense of the word. And the fact that it is being spun as Terrorism (with the capital T denoting proper terrorism) worries me.

The IRA didn’t find the problem of detonating a car bomb insurmountable. In far too many places in the Middle East car bombs are a near daily occurrence. Yet we manage to get

The nightclub bouncers said they saw a silver Mercedes being driven erratically before it crashed into bins. They said the driver then got out and ran off. A huge hunt is under way for the driver.

In Glasgow we get a couple of idiots who set fire to their car and tried to ram it into Glasgow airport … through the bollards – managing only to get themselves arrested and burnt at the same time. And causing little or no damage to the bollards, placed there (rather unsurprisingly) for the sole purpose of preventing morons driving flaming jeeps into the terminal.

We also have The Sun praising a clamper (that towed a 2nd car away that could have possibly been something to do with it, maybe) as a hero because

“I could smell petrol but the assumption was the driver had broken down and abandoned it.”

Somebody tows a car because they think it has broken down, not knowing that there was anything different about the car apart from being an easy target for towing – he’s a hero? Come on people!

And soon enough that most useful of buzz-phrases (2nd only to pedophile in whipping up Joe Public into a mindless frenzy) – ‘Al Qaeda’. Again – really?

Does this sound like Al Qaeda? To me it sounds more like some fanatical idiots who failed to pay attention in bomb making 101. Does anyone seriously believe that Al Qaeda lacks the necessary know-how to build a working car bomb? This does not sound like organised Terrorist cells. By all accounts they haven’t even got all the components necessary to cause anything more that a large fireball and at best a few casualties.

The driver would have had a higher body count if he had driven the car into the pub through the front door – I used to work next door to Tiger Tiger and that place heaves at night. And the cretinous cunswups in Glasgow would again have achieved a higher body count had they aimed for the bus stop outside the terminal (or it may be a taxi rank – I can’t remember).

But again, sure enough, the government spin machines and red top papers come trotting out with the if this and if that possibilities to show what could have happened if x and y and z had all happened. Yes, if the bombs had been built correctly, if they had an ‘oxidizer’, if they had a working detonator arrangement … something bad may have happened.

BUT – it didn’t. But by God the media and the government are doing their best to scare us that something might have happened that was really really bad.

Bearing in mind that our current government has managed to introduce a new piece of legislation for every day they have been in office and that there is normally little or no heed to the thoughts of those that new laws would affect is taken when considering them – it is hard not to make the leap across from a couple of wingnuts chancing their arm for 72 virgins to needing new laws enacted for our protection from the growing ‘Terrorist threat’.

These days laws appear rushed through with no thinking behind the ramifications because of ‘Terrorism’. Privacy rights are being stripped away under the pretence of “if you have nothing to hide – why do you mind”. I don’t see the need for more laws based on a couple of half witted attempts at ‘terrorism’ – one can never legislate for the lone idiot. Lately it has appeared to me that more and more effort has been put into making the recent attempts in the UK seem part of a wider, more cohesive Terrorist attack. Talk of 90 day detention periods, national DNA databases and other ‘initiatives’ speak volumes to the creeping invasion of government oversight into our lives.

What will happen now? More restrictive laws ‘for my own good‘ based on a ‘manufactured’ Terrorist threat?

We’ll see if this is the case this time – I hope not, but fear so.

(16 votes, average: 4.81 out of 5)

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The Devil’s Used Tampon of a Hotel

Posted by bb on Thursday 28th of June 2007 at 11:09 am.
Filed Under Rants

On our rescue mission to find the world’s cutest dog, and to visit Mrs bb’s father’s grave for Father’s Day, we were lucky enough to spend some time at The World’s Worst Hotel.

I think it was probably the people who worked there that made it such a shitty experience.

We had a meal in the restaurant when we arrived and there was this GodAwful screeching noise throughout the entire meal. It seemed to be the breakfast cabinet thinggy [please note – this is not the one in question, just a picture of one] which was empty yet still turned on. We asked if there was anyway we could stop this awful noise at which the waitress kindly replied “I don’t think so, it does it all the time”.

I’m sure it fucking does do it all the time you dozy bint, it’s because it is on all the time. Turn it off, piercing noise stops. Simple.

The next morning we came down to breakfast and had a full Welsh breakfast. This is apparently identical to a full English breakfast apart from the fact it doesn’t come with any sauces (tomato, brown etc). When we asked for tomato sauce the restaurant manager looked at us as if we were insane and said “We don’t do tomato sauce here”.

WTF? You are a restaurant. You are serving bacon, sausage, egg, beans, hash brown … and you won’t serve tomato sauce?

To make matters worse, now that the breakfast thinggy had something to cool, it was borderline ecstatic to have work to do and let us know by screeching all through the meal again. Imagine if you will trying to eat when someone is dragging their fingernails down a blackboard all the time 🙁

We had our morning showers (with a shower that went hot/cold/hot/cold and only came out of half of the head) and went about our business for the day. Wisely we ate out at a lovely Indian that evening.

We get back to our hotel room and find that since we were quite a way from the stairs, it was obviously too much effort for the maid to make it all the way down to our room and do anything, so we had no soap, no shampoo etc and the towels were still damp. As it happens, Mrs bb is very tidy so the room didn’t need making up.

We asked at reception for some more soap and shampoo but were told that this was, of course, impossible since they do not replace them when used. God help anyone who stays for longer than a few days and doesn’t bring their own supplies.

The next morning, as we went down to breakfast, you’ll never guess what we saw on a table just outside of the restaurant … a big bowl of tomato ketchup packets (and mayo, mustard etc)!!! The guy in the restaurant couldn’t be arsed to even tell us where to get some – he just flat out lied and said “no, we don’t do it”. We are fit, able bodied indivduals quite able to serve ourselves from the screeching banshee of a breakfast thinggy so would have had no problem fetching it ourselves if that was what was required to obtain some. But no, the lazy cunswup of a manager couldn’t even say “condiments are on the table over there”. You lazy fucking fuck.

It was at that point we had a revelation – the eternal screeching from the breakfast bar was not a noisy fan, nor were the pulses of hot/cold/hot water from the half functioning shower random.

The screeching was the noise of a 1000 tortured souls trying to get something that resembled service in the hotel industry’s equivalent of the Devil’s Asshole Devil’s used tampon. The breakfast bar was really a portal to another dimension! The overwhelming pain of dealing with Beaches Hotel surly staff had become so much that it was leaking through via an eternal screech!

I think the pulsing of the shower was morse code for “You dumb fuck – fancy booking into this hotel – it shall only bring you pain. Leave while you still can”.

And if you think the website looks nice, you’ll notice it only has a couple of images … that’s because the rest of it looks like this :

So all in the The Beaches Hotel, Prestatyn gets a hearty bb_hotel_rating : 0/10.

(4 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)

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Welcome Nell

Posted by bb on Thursday 28th of June 2007 at 10:35 am.
Filed Under News

We have a new addition to the family – a bouncing baby girl 🙂

Her name is Nell and she is a 12-14mth old Husky/Collie cross that we rescued from North Wales. She is quite simply the most adorable dog in world (with Tycha coming in close 2nd).

I am, without doubt, the world’s biggest softy when it comes to animals and even if Nell turned out to be this ugly we would have still loved her with all our hearts. As it turns out – she’s pretty cute.

Click on pictures for full size Nell Goodness 🙂

 

What I fail to understand, so very completely, is the mentality of the person(s) who would abuse a dog like this and then leave it tied up to a lamppost to starve to death. You are sick, very sick. If I ever find you, you will be even sicker.

I am not by nature a violent individual, but I would wake up every morning with a spring in my step if I could go to work and inflict anywhere near the same level of suffering on those responsible. I would make Hostel look like an episode of the Teletubbies and every night I would sleep so soundly you wouldn’t believe it.

Any-hoo, this post is not about the terrible, terrible things I would do to those responsible, it is a celebration of having such a loving dog in our house.

To Nell!

(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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