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GPF, Hardware, Internet, Personal, Technology
When it rains, it pours…
January 20th, 2009 (3 years ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core

Here’s a clarification of my recent Tweet about Diana. Sometime over the weekend Diana, our primary Linux box that serves as the backbone of our home network (DNS, file server, internal Web server, SSH gateway, SVN repository server, etc.), gave up the ghost. I only discovered this yesterday evening, so I haven’t had much time to diagnose the problem. It’s almost certainly a hardware issue. I’m thinking it’s the power supply or the motherboard, as when I try to power her up, nothing happens. The power light comes on, I can watch the CPU fan twitch like it wants to start spinning, but otherwise nothing else visible occurs. No output makes its way to the monitor so there are no error messages to follow.

At this point, I’m not sure of the status of the hard drives. My hope is that they’re fine; the obvious problem appears to be occurring before they even start to spin, as if they’re not getting any power (and that’s why I suspect it’s a power supply issue). The good news is that Demeter, her predecessor, has been sitting idle and collecting dust and has since been rapidly pressed back into service. I should be able to slip Diana’s disks into Demeter, check their integrity, and hopefully recover the data. That’s the core thing right now, getting the data off; hardware is replaceable, data is not. The only hitch is that Demeter is old enough that I’m not sure her BIOS will read Diana’s larger disks. Demeter’s current HD is already larger than her BIOS supports, though, and Linux seems to work fine in this situation, so I’m hoping that won’t be a problem. A worst-case scenario might be to throw a live Linux distro into Athena, our current “alpha” Windows XP desktop, and try to grab the data that way. (Diana’s disks are in ext3, which obviously Windows can’t read.) Both Demeter and Diana have EIDE drives while Athena uses SATA, but I’m almost certain Athena also has legacy EIDE on the motherboard somewhere; if not, I’m hosed there.

Why might this be a concern to you? Well, for one thing, Diana was one of several redundant backup locations for storing my my high-resolution original strips. Fortunately, everything from Year Nine and back has already been backed up to multiple DVDs stored in multiple physical locations, while Year Ten’s files are stored across three redundant drives (two in separate physical machines and one external USB drive). More importantly, Diana was my SVN repository server, housing all the source code for the GPF site. I have working copies of that repository in multiple locations so I’m not hurting there, but with the repository down I’m stuck manually keeping those working copies in sync. The biggest problem that may affect you guys is the humongous time sink this will be for me to repair/replace Diana and get all our internal mechanisms working again. With my day job, two hours of commute, and toddler patrol vying for my time, my comic production schedule is severely squeezed as it is. This is probably going to impact that buffer I was forced to take a hiatus in December to reclaim as I wasn’t able to increase my production, just maintain the status quo.

For those of you who might care, I’ll post updates here when I can. More frequent cries of frustration will likely come through the Twitter feed. If the comic will be severely impacted, you’ll get something in the GPF News. So keep watching those RSS feeds.
Personal, Technology
Geeky Christmas loot
December 31st, 2007 (4 years, 1 month ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core

Sorry for the dry spell, all. With the holidays I’ve been largely offline with the exception of keeping up with my daily webcomic reading and uploading new comics into the queue. (Yay!) I hope everyone had a happy holiday, no matter what holiday(s) you celebrate, and I wish everyone a slightly premature Happy New Year (or, if you celebrate Chinese New Year, either a very belated one or a slightly advance one).

Firstly, in case you haven’t seen it or don’t subscribe to the RSS feed, make sure to check out the latest GPF News post. Some important updates are mentioned there. I’ll expound upon one of those in a separate post here.

I thought I’d share with you my list of “geeky Christmas loot” for this year. I don’t do it to brag, but more just to share. I always like hearing about other’s newest geek toys, and I love sharing the same with others. So maybe if I share about some of my new playthings, others will chime in and share as well.

Perhaps my favorite gift this year was not one that I received, but one that I gave, and technically it wasn’t even a Christmas gift. My wife (“kmd” on the forum) has a birthday in December, and I always try to make it special for her. Being a December baby can be tough as many people either buy you one slightly larger gift to cover both the birthday and Christmas or worse, completely overlook your birthday altogether. So I try to make her birthday extra special, take her out to a nice dinner, and just give her as best a day as I can. This year, I gave her one of the brand new third-generation iPod Nanos. One of things that made this special is that it appeals to her geek side; she too is a programmer, and sometimes I know she feels “overshadowed” by me in all things tech among folks who know both of us. It’s also significant because most of her geeky gadgets are my hand-me-downs; when I get something new (like a new Palm), she usually ends up getting the old one. So now she has a brand-new geek toy all her own, as well has her entire “Weird Al” Yankovic collection in her pocket wherever she goes. (I also got her the one “Weird Al” album she didn’t have on CD, so now she has his entire discography in digital form.)

As for me, my geek gifts were numerous and plenty. My parents had a definite Doctor Who theme: I got the third series of the new Doctor Who; the transition between two of my old-time favorite Doctors, Tom Baker and Peter Davison; a Tardis 4-port USB hub; and a “You Never Forget Your First Doctor” T-shirt. There were several other DVDs amongst the list, including one of Pixar short films. My wife surprised me with a terabyte(!) external USB hard drive (because you can never have enough disk space).

But probably the credit for the most unexpected and most played-with gift this year has to go to my sister-in-law and her husband. For now I’m suffering from an affliction I only heard about while growing up: Nintendo thumb. I am now an owner of a Nintendo Wii.

Well, I guess I’m having less problems with “Nintendo thumb” as I am with “Wii shoulder”. I’ve suffered tendinitis in my left thumb for quite a while now (it kept me from drawing for an entire month back in 2002) and I actually think the workout it’s been getting from the Wii has been somewhat therapeutic. But several hours of Wii Sports, especially bowling and baseball, had me running for the pain relievers the next day. Man, am I getting old. I’m doing better now, though. I never had a popular gaming console while growing up (or an unpopular one, for the matter); while most of my friends were playing with their ColecoVisions, Intellivisions, or NESes(eseses), I was hacking away in BASIC on my Tandy CoCo. (Gee, that didn’t date me at all, did it?) So this this was an entirely new experience for me. We quickly ran out and purchased a second controller (“wiimote”) and “nunchuk” and added a game or two to the ones that accompanied the system as separate gifts. The system has been loads of fun, although I must admit I’ve done far less comicking this past week than I had hoped.

So… what nifty geek trinkets did you get/give this holiday? And do you have any suggestions for utterly awesome kick-butt Wii games that I supposedly must absolutely, positively have or my life will be incomplete? Dump core below.