My weblog

A friend bought a car, a  1996 Renault megane, The megane has a immobiliser which has to be deactivated for the car to start,even thought you can unlock doors of the car using the key, So while you can get into the thing you still have to press the button on key, To deactiveate the Immobilser… After a few thousand presses the key wasn’t in great shape… But pressing it and hoping for the best sometimes worked (murphy law starts to kick in about now) so it finally died yesterday… When it was needed.. So I did a bit of research and it turns out that if you bring documentation(you own the car etc) + key to your local, in this case Carlow dealer… they will give you a 4 digit number to enter, so the immobiliser is deactivated manually… A new key cost in the region of 150 euro, What a bloody rip off..

Over the past 2 weeks i’ve been getting serious headaches, so I’ve book a Eye test and I hope to change my Glasses pretty soon. I have not replaced my frames in quite some time..

Just a little update!

I am heading off the czech Rep on the monday 16th oct and staying till friday 27th . I fly into Prague and will be staying there for 3 days… I still have to book my hostel, so I better get cracking! Maybe I should plan the rest … I’m going to travel to a place called “Bardejvo” which is near the polish border with slovakia, so I will be using the public transport as much as possible. I’m thinking of going to see the Bone church… That sounds cool, if not disturbing

I’m also looking to pick up a few things along the way and ship them back via the post (well that’s the plan anyway) so I won’t be carrying stuff around. Its weird most people go to czech for the cheap Beer, and Beautiful Women I’ve no idea why I want to go but I’m sure it will be different that anywhere else I’ve been.
I hope to use my blog a a record of my trip.. I just hope i find a internet cafe.
Na shledanou!

The Company I’m working for had/has a need for 5TB of storage, for one of the projects. We already have a powervault 220s which is attached to an 1850, its provides 4TB of storage but that was split between 2 project given around 1.7TB per project. As we are implementing a system called Hobsoft which is a production flow pipeline for feature film’s it became necessary to increase the storage by another 5TB. I gave dell a quick ring I discovered that dell recently started selling direct attached disks that would allow us to have 5TB of storage,called MD1000 which uses SAS disks.

The only problem is that it needs a new type of Scsi card that supports SAS. There was two choices,1. I could change the card in the 1850 ( not really an option, as it was in produciton) . 2. Get a new server, We were offered a 1950,but because it was a new product dell were having supply problem and could not deliver it to use for another few weeks, they upgraded us to a 2950. So as I was using ubuntu on the 1850′s I tried to install dapper(6.0.6) onto the machine. it failed , broadcom nic wasn’t detected,no module for it and the SAS scsi disk were all shown up and it failed to install correctly..

I then decided to try and rebuild the debian installer( all I really need was for it to net boot over pxe) after wrestling with making udebs, I finally gave up when debian installer crapped out because it could not find the kernel… and asking for help yeilded nothing… so I went to plan b, a very nice chap in japan had rebuild the debian sarge CD with an updated kernel etc, which happened to find the Network card and properly see the SAS scsi card and drives attached to it… So after 40 mins of install time I had the system up and running. (it was running kernel 2.6.17.9) the kernel picked up the disk array ~5TB approx.
Trying to partition it with fdisk didn’t work so I had to do it with parted.( must be something wong with fdisk). Running bonnie++ for 12+ hours and nothing weird happening, I’m ok with using this in production. (fingers crossed

My only wish for customising debian/ubuntu was to get the machine working correctly, But with the amount of hassle I endured, It was too much for me…. as I felt that as I solved one problem, 10 others popped up . This is completly nuts….