Never been so happy over bad hardware...

Some time over the last few months, my personal computer at home took a nosedive into disaster. Through power outages and careless monkeying with circuit breakers, it refused to boot to a working prompt, and when it did show signs of life, it looked as if my most precious information was lost forever: my home directory partition. Yes, I know that a filesystem is more robust than that. There's no such thing as a complete and catastrophic failure when it comes to generic issues with home computers. My heart sank, none the less, when I couldn't run the standard file system check (fsck) utilities on the problem partition.

This evening, while the children slept and my wife was out visiting with her sister, I crept downstairs to see what I could do to recover my personal, electronic life of close to two decades. I powered the system off, held my breath, and powered it back on. beep. I watched in anticipation as GRUB announced that it found something bootable. YES! My heart skipped a beat when I saw the display flip to frame buffer and a higher screen resolution. OK. I grinned when the status updates indicated that there were working filesystems on the mirrored hard drives! And there! My chewie partition was alive and well, passing the journal recovery! YES!!!

And then I saw the kernel panic! The hardware is fubarred. It could be the CPU, memory, or the motherboard itself. The last message indicated a video card issue, but with memory or CPU failures, it could be deceiving, a false lead. I wouldn't be able to initiate a system back-up this evening to other media, but I did find out that my old life still lived! The $200 desktop PC I purchased for my children will come in handy for recovering my old life. The two disks won't be able to live in the small form-factor machine, but the hardware will be instrumental in reading the data and backing it up elsewhere.

I have hope again that my folly of poorly administered personal backups may not be a complete failure after all. (I had disparate backups scattered over different media, but nothing concrete or systematic.) What's sad is that I know how important such backups are, and yet I still had the hubris to believe that my little Linux system in the basement would live forever. Or perhaps it was simply my busy life as a husband and father that shifted my priorities.

Could I live without the data on those two hard drives downstairs? A few years ago, I probably would have become a hermit in that basement while trying to recover the old vestiges. Now, I realize I have a little more time.

So, what are plans then for the Wookimus network? The Buffalo NAS device is aging and the firmware buggy. Although Meghan still backs up data to the mirrored drives there, these drives themselves are not backed up anywhere. We've paid for CrashPlan, and I'm actively backing up Meghan's iMac with it. I'm tempted to purchase a RaspberryPi and build an OpenMediaVault host and replace the Buffalo, then install Bittorrent Sync.

I think it's high-time for a new personal Debian laptop. The ASUS UX51Vz-XH71 15.6" Ultrabook Silver Aluminum has caught my eye. It doesn't have as much memory capacity as the MacBook, but 8 Gig is plenty for my own use. It's powerful, light, and I've found evidence of successful Linux use. I know that it contains proprietary hardware, but what doesn't these days. I wish I could be more idealistic these days, but not everyone can be Richard Stallman and still make a living; Yoolong is a bit short on power.

Fall Reflections

Tablets and Computers
So many things to do around the house and in life; just need to take it one day at a time, one task at a time.  Right now, I'm staring at a potential two or three hours backing up hosts and upgrading a workstation and server in my basement "server room" (which is really a table with a couple computers, a printer, and a really old monitor). I love having AndriodVNC, Xvnc Server, and XDMCP/X11 to get a remote desktop on my tablet.  Seems to work pretty well, though I would appreciate a working CTRL key from the keyboard to my remote session.  The same goes for ConnectBot, which has yet to incorporate the more traditional user interface.  For the most part, I think the Andriod 3.0 on the Asus Eee Transformer TF101 Tablet is pretty solid.

Yesterday was a bit of a lazy day...  Wait, no it wasn't!  Yesterday morning, I sat on my work laptop monitoring and managing GovDelivery's digest email process.  We're growing fast and upgrading clients from our older infrastructure to the newer one, and as a result, we're finding quirks with the environment, database, and software.  It's nothing we can't manage, though.  Tor, my boss, and Jesse, my coworker, both put in extra time this weekend, as well as our DBA Joe, developers Billy and Jim, and Systems Engineer Ben.  We have a pretty solid team, and they're able to pull together some effective solutions when we need them most.  I'm really feeling that this team has gelled together well in the last few weeks.

An Afternoon Break
...was in order, and Meghan's sister had a great idea in bringing the families to the Sever's Corn Maze, which sits right next to the Canterbury Downs race track and casino.  Meghan wasn't feeling well, so I took the boys down to meet Katie, Izac, and Maizie.  We arrived around 16:30 and had until 18:00 to run around and explore.  The entrance fee wasn't cheap, so if you plan on taking your family down, give yourselves more than 90 minutes, and remember to bring cash if you want to feed the animals, fling pumpkins ($2/3 pumpkins), shoot corn ($2/3 ears), ride the ponies ($5/person), or ride the Super Slide ($2 a pop).   Food wasn't necessarily cheap either, about what you would expect at a tourist attraction.  When asked what their favorite part of the day was, both answered emphatically, "Feeding the parakeets!" I think the corn pit was a close second, though.

Running, of Course!
After getting the boys fed, cleaned up, and in bed, I changed into my running gear and headed out for a quick run. I'm starting to enjoy my runs again. With this runstreak, things have gotten a bit monotonous. I can only run the same 1.2 and 3.2 mile loops in my neighborhood before I start to get bored. I tried mixing it up last week with a run out at Battle Creek Park just east of the River and south of I94 on Highway 61. I was in no hurry and didn't sweat the details, just enjoyed exploring the park for a couple of hours. Battle Creek has some challenging hills, though nothing terribly long or tall. You get some of the feel that you might have on the Superior Hiking Trail, so this will be a good place to throw in some hill repeats over trees and roots. I only saw a few mountain bikers on the trail, and ran into a group of young adventurers looking for caves. There was one young pre-teen out on the trails all by himself. He was wearing a helmet and backpack, and seemed to be enjoying himself, but I couldn't help but wonder where his parents were. Where was his riding partner? If this had been my son, he would had a serious one to one about safety. There are too many creepy people out there to leave your childrens' future to chance. In any case, I cranked out a 2.44 mile run in a little over 18 minutes, showered up, and turned back to the computer and work.

Back to Work
I spent the night on cleaning up and improving a Perl script hack to purge out queue directories we use to send transactional messages for digest users.  We had come up with a useable quick solution late Thursday night, but when scheduling it through cron, I found it taking far too long.  I also wanted to make it a "real" script in that it needed a "--help", "--verbose", and "--no-act" options, as well as a way to effectively parse input from STDIN.  I like xargs, but if you can avoid the forking cost when examining thousands of files, it's bound to speed up dramatically.  I also found a simple way of cutting the run time by a large factor; I was feeling pretty good about myself.

Dr. Who, Torchwood, and Entertainment
Meghan and I watched the season finale of Dr. Who as I was hacking in Perl; it was awesome!  I will give no spoilers, but I have to say that I'm continually impressed by the quality of acting, the solid story telling, and the engaging format of the series. I can sit down to any of the Dr. Who episodes and watch it as if I had never seen the series before, and fully enjoy myself. Unlike the new Torchwood: Miracle Day, I don't need to invest eight or more weeks into following it. Meghan and I both agree that the change in format is not as enjoyable as the solid one hour episodes with the threads of relationship between previous and following episodes that BBC favors. The American produces seem to think that the only way to gain a following is to make a huge production out of things, make it into a miniseries. I hate miniseries! I'll be happy when this whole T:MD thing is finished. I don't know what I would do without having my DVR, though. I just don't have enough interest in television these days to stay pinned to the couch at the big Network approved viewing times. Yay, technology!

Right now, I'm trying to rub out some dried hot peppers out of my eyes!  Yeouch!  I'm making some home-made, from scratch chili using dried chilis and a five pound top round roast that needed to be cooked.  It is really starting to smell wonderful, but it has another couple hours to cook in the oven.  The stovetop burner is a bit too hot, even on the lowest setting.  I could pull out the slow cooker, which might be a bit more energy efficient than the stove at this point, but I don't want to clean yet another set of dishes. It'll turn out, and paired with some home-made corn bread, I trust everyone will be satisfied. My parents are coming down for a visit, and Meghan is busy shopping. The boys are playing Wii and DS, and the sun is traveling quickly across the sky. Sooner than I would like, our weekend will be over.

I suppose its time to scrounge together some sort of lunch. Mac-n-cheese, maybe.