Adam Monsen

Tried out software RAID in Fedora Core 5 the other day. RAID 1 with two identical 80GB drives. And when I mean tried out, I mean I unplugged the power cable from one of the drives while using the system. My coworker Chuck didn’t seem convinced that software RAID was acutally working unless this stunt was performed.

Madness, you say? True, true. Not something one should try at home. Not even silly old me. Luckily, it worked! I cut power to the second drive in the array during a full system upgrade. After a ton of IDE errors, the RAID subsystem eventually removed the faulty drive from the array. The upgrade proceeded without so much as a hiccup. Full recovery worked flawlessly after I powered off, plugged the drive back in, rebooted, and manually issued the command “mdadm /dev/md0 -a /dev/hdb1″.

I found this post about “bumping locks” quite fascinating. Here’s a video of an excellent presentation by TOOOL (be sure to check out the ultra-secure locks shown at 1hr, 34min). Thanks to Mark for the meme. Executive summary: your front door lock is probably useless!

Also in the lazy-day hopper: I finally got a decent video/audio input stream on Linux using a Hauppauge WinTV PVR-350 and the ivtv driver. I stumbled upon this annoying workaround that won’t be too annoying if I don’t have to reboot often. Executive summary: leave the computer powered off for ten minutes. :-P

What’s keeping me up tonight?

1. Still trying to set up the MythTV box. Hopefully the Happauge WinTV PVR-350 will help once that arrives.
2. How do you Destroy a Hard Drive?
3. Subversion. One cool feature my boss showed me today at work was using TortoiseSVN to create a repository on a Samba share. No svnserve/apache needed!

Good night!