Skip to content

Blog

That feeling of dread

I’m watching TV this past Sunday, streaming TV shows from my networked hard drive (a Buffalo Terrastation) to my Netgear EVA as my DirecTV is still out. I had noticed that when I hit play, it was taking a much longer time to start the show, but they started, and then halfway through one show it stopped, and couldn’t connect.

Walking into my office, all the lights on the Terrastation are flashing. The web interface came up, and the diagnostics report that one of the hard drives has failed.

Ack. Ugh. Many bad words I don’t want my children repeating.

A feeling of dread. Panic setting in – what isn’t backed up? What am I going to lose? What will my wife think?

I run some more diagnostics, generic drive failure messages. The Terrastation won’t give me status on the raid array because of the drive failure. Why, oh why was I running in drive spanning mode and not in a raid configuration where if a drive failed I’d still be ok?

The Terrastation has 4 160GB drives with the option of drive spanning, RAID 0, 1 or 5. Running a small version of Linux, which I always meant to hack with a custom firmware but never did for SSH access, it has FTP and Samba. I had Samba shares set up storing all my music, photos, videos and backup shares for both my wife and me. The Terrastation streams that content to my Netgear EVA at my home theater, the Sonos music players all over the house, and the hacked Xbox in the family room.

The lost data appears to be minimal – I have a full backup of my music on my desktop’s hard drive, and it looks like I have a copy of most of the photo’s, though I need to double check. Ironically, I lost most of the video’s I’ve downloaded since my DirecTV dish has been down, but that is what Bittorrent is for.

I’m not sure what was in the backup directories, I know I haven’t backed up much lately.

Now the question is – when is redundant backup not redundant enough? Do I want to take one of the extra computers I’m not using and install FreeNAS or Openfiler? My good friend Mr. Holzer recently built a FreeNAS server using compactflash to boot the OS with a bunch of hard drives. The price of external drives keeps falling as well, do I want to just be lazy and buy another one of those?

I hate that feeling of dread – I’ve lost my personal music collection and had to re-rip it at least 3 times now. I know hard drives don’t last forever, and I’d rather be safe than sorry.

Foresight Linux Newsletter Released

Issue 6 (Aug 2007) of the Foresight Linux Newsletter has been released. This month’s issue features an update on the Foresight Linux 2.0 development and release dates, upcoming speaking engagements by members of the Foresight Linux team, and an introduction and overview to PackageKit.

This month’s newsletter is available at http://wiki.foresightlinux.com/confluence/display/newsletter/2007/09/01/ or you can subscribe in your favorite feedreader such as Liferea, Bloglines or Google Reader by adding http://feeds.feedburner.com/foresightnewsletter to your feedreader.

Where'd who go?

I haven’t blogged much in August, and here it is at month end already. Things should be settling down soon (I hope) leaving me more to blog and get back to work on Foresight.

I had a couple trips in August, lots of stuff going on at work, and we’re looking at building a new house, so the month just flew by.

The storm two days ago knocked my DirecTV dish out of alignment – not having TV for a week should free up some time. More on that later, but at least I have HD off air so I can watch the (7th ranked!) Badgers kick off the the college football season tomorrow.

I’m also in the process of transferring all my websites to a new server, so that’s eaten up some time. I spent almost a weekend working on getting apatheia.org moved from my account to a friends who is paying for it now.

More to come soon.

Planning for the inevitable

There is a small chance my website might temporarily go offline for the next week or two. I’ve been working with Site5 to transfer servers and downgrade my services, but communication has been spotty. Unfortunately, my account is technically up this week, and as luck would have it, I will be traveling when that occurs.

If that happens, and my account isn’t extended, I won’t be able to deal with it as I’m traveling for work later in the work. And then I will be very unhappy.

Cross your fingers!

Say it ain't so Mr. Carmack!

With all the good news coming out of QuakeCon this weekend (Enemy Territory, Rage, Q3 in a browser!), there was one point of disappointing news for me as a fan if id Software: id has partnered with Valve to deploy their titles on Steam.

Valve has already publicly stated it has no plans for Steam on Linux. Being former Microsoft developers, who is surprised? But id has always been a cross-platform development company and it’s disappointing to see them partner with Valve on this. But I can’t really blame them, as they deserve kudos for monetizing their catalog titles, and the price point is amazing – $70 for all id titles up to and including Doom3 and it’s expansion. That’s amazing – play all their games from Commander Keen to Quake to Doom3. (Yes, I know I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth.)

Now the bad news – it appears that Valve is using DOSBox to make id’s older games playable, which is GPL, without including specific files, such as COPYING.TXT which makes this violate the GPL.

I saw the original story on Slashdot, and it’s an interesting tale of two communities. The HalfLife2.net forums quickly degenerate into mudslinging, especially on pages 4-7, with one user going so far as to, well, read for yourself:

****ing ridiculous. I don’t know how some of you can brush this off as a mere ‘molehill’ or misunderstanding. You Valve and ID apologists sicken me.

The GPL is essentially the word of God, look at it as the 13th commandment: Thou Shalt Distribute The Source And Any Chamges Made Unto It To All Those Who Ask. When God created Adam and Eve he made it such that when they procreate, each of them combine to make the new item and the source modification is passed on down the generations. It is no co-incidence that Richard Stallman appears as we envisage God to appear for he is a true prophet of our time, a visionary who is putting Gods voice into the digital age.

The fact that these heathens dared ignore Gods word and packaged the games without copying.txt is absolutely unforgivable. They will surely rot for eternity in hell as no doubt you who support them will too.

…Which is an interesting take on the GPL that I haven’t necessary seen before. I’ve heard of GNU zealots, but this might take the cake.

The DOSBox forums are a contrast in civility and logic. Instead of Valve bashing and zealotry, DOSBox developers call out the exceptions, and update the thread when Valve does something good, such as adding back the COPYING.TXT file via Steam. The developers seem understanding of the situation so far, and while major questions remain around distributing the source of Valve’s changes, the DOSBox team seem to be taking a wait an see approach.

John Carmack, id’s lead developer and co-owner, has always been a friend of the GPL – he has led the open sourcing of most prior games once the licensees are done using them, resulting in successes such as ioquake3. I’m hopeful this will all be resolved in a good way. And I still wish Valve would put a Steam client on Linux (and OSX) too.