It’s quite scary sometimes how search engines appear to pick up your links so quickly. (Unless I just happened to catch the spider crawling my web site at just the right moment). Now I seem to feature in Google Blogs somewhere at the top of the list, and all kinds of other stuff. Of course, I had to do something to screw ’em up – I’ve just changed the URL of my “Full Size Blog” … :) Try again Google! :)
Monthly Archives: July 2011
Going Postal Social
I was fortunate/unfortunate (please delete as applicable) enough to receive an invite to Google+ yesterday. I thought (even though I eventually cancelled my account on its competitor) it would be fair to give it a try, to see what it was like and whether it would be better than “the other social network”.
I quite like the concept of “circles” in G+ (and something I’m sure that “the other site” will be emulating fairly quickly) in that it appears possible to restrict certain postings to certain people – as long as there aren’t any bugs in the G+ code, I suppose. One more thing that I like about G+ is that it seems a lot “simpler”. As far as I can see, you can’t install apps into it, which for me is a plus because (talking to my various social networking friends) is one of the big distractions. As you might expect, it’s quite closely tied in with other Google services and I can’t find a way to change my primary email address to my “proper” one (unlike my gmail one which I hardly ever use)
So… first impressions are okay, but obviously time will tell whether this (a) becomes really popular and (b) what the privacy implications are. And I still need to read the terms and conditions properly…
New Humax firmware
New Humax firmware recently out for my HDR-Fox T2 — and it’s got some fixes, but also some new features. The big one for me is that it can now act as a DLNA server as well as a client, so I can watch my recorded programmes on my PC. Which is quite cool, and I expect I’ll get bored of it soon and go back to putting myself in front of the telly as I usually do. There is also a YouTube feature on the TV portal now.
You can get the new firmware from the Humax UK web site, or you can just wait for the OTA download to come round on the Freeview HD mux.
How (not to) upgrade your hard disks
This should have been easy. But like everything “important” that I try to do, it ended up as a bit of a nightmare. The problem was simple: 300GB disks too small, need more space. The solution was also simple: Buy three shiny new 3TB disks and fit them, copy data over, job done. Simple? Of course not…
The first thing was, will my computer support them? Some of you will know that Windows really really hates drives bigger than 2TiB in size and the only way to make them work is to (a) use 64-bit Windows Vista Service Pack 1 or later and (b) use a motherboard with a UEFI instead of a BIOS, a compatible SATA disk controller, and a GPT partition table (rather than the old-fashioned MBR style) must be used as well, since MBR partition tables do not support drives bigger than 2TiB. I do not have a motherboard with a UEFI, but thankfully neither do I run Windows on this particular server — it runs Linux (Debian 6.01 Squeeze to be precise). This is a plus, because it means that using GRUB 2 I do not have to worry about any such problems, since it already supports GPT partition tables, and 64-bit LBA, and everything else you need to actually boot a 3TB disk. Everything fine so far then!
So, I went ahead and bought myself three hard disks – one Seagate, and two WD Caviar Green disks, one of which was to be the backup disk. After suitably “de-green”ing the WD drives (by using the idle3ctl utility, available from Sourceforge, which is a Linux version of Western Digital’s own wdidle3 utility) and turning the auto head parking off, I got to work. All four drives were fitted, and I created an EFI System Partition (for future use, as I don’t have a UEFI motherboard yet), a BIOS Boot Partition to store GRUB 2 on (this is necessary with GPT partition tables since there is no ‘spare’ space to store the boot code, so I normally create a 1MiB partition to store that, and the rest was a RAID partition to store the logical LVM volumes. All seems reasonable so far, taking care to align the partitions to MiB boundaries since the Western Digital drives are 4K physical sector drives (but the Seagate one claims not to be).
So, backups done, I shut down the machine, pulled the power, and installed the new disks as SATA3 and SATA4 on the controller so that the existing Maxtor 300GB disks would boot up as normal, which they duly did. Once the system was booted, it was time to configure the RAID-1 array on the new disks, and then to move the data across. I’d been practising this the week before on a kvm virtual machine so that I’d know what to do if it went wrong. Couldn’t go wrong twice, could it…?
Well, yes it could. The first “mistake” I made was to install the old system in such a way that both the / (root) partition was on a logical volume. Normally, this wouldn’t matter, but it tends to matter when you’re trying to move it to another volume. When I tried this before, it seemed to work, but this time something went wrong. I issued the fateful “lvm pvmove” command to move the LVMs from one physical disk to another, everything stopped. Oops. I had started the process and then gone to bed – and when I got up the next morning it was still going and nothing was printed on the screen (even though I had verbose on). What should I do? At worst, I could just restore the backups (even though it would take ages)… I ended up pushing the reset button. The machine then failed to boot, but it did make it into the initramfs (since it couldn’t find the RAID array). This is the bit where I think you’re supposed to panic!
Thankfully, I managed to reassemble the RAID array from the initrams and then ran lvm pvmove –abort to stop any already running moves in process. Personally I don’t think it even got started, so I took the risk and ran the lvm pvmove command again from inside the initramfs (which is probably a good place to do it since no filesystems are mounted at this point). It started. It printed percentages. It was going. And then I had to go to work…
Got home to discover that it appeared to have worked. All the LVs had been successfully moved, or so it said. So the final thing to do was to get the system booted properly, by mounting the root volume and exiting the initramfs, and then (to cut a long story short) checking that /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf had the right info in it, running update-initramfs -u once booted to make sure it detected the new RAID-1 array, then I installed GRUB 2 on the new disks. And rebooted, and held my breath, and ….
Phew! It booted! Thank goodness for that! Then I had to shut the machine down again to fit the hotplug SATA caddy which the backup drive went into, and also the new SATA DVD writer. Once that was done, the old disks were removed, and the new machine was booted.
There was one final challenge – some idiot had set all his kvm virtual machines up so that none of the partition tables on the virtual machines were 4K sector aligned. So I ended up spending quite a few hours sorting that one out – and that’s another (long) story.
But I got it done, and now it’s working, and hopefully I won’t have to do that again for another 5 years… (by which time I expect we’ll all be buying 30TB drives for £100!) And next time, I’ll be using the Debian Rescue disk to boot into before doing the lvm pvmove…
Google+ vs Facebook
There appears to be a lot of hype at the moment concerning the new Google+ service from, well, Google. Is it really the “Facebook killer” that everyone’s been waiting for, or is the hype surrounding it just that?
Currently, Google+ is in limited beta so you (à la Google Wave) need an “invite” to get on it – which apparently I don’t have. At the moment, I have no idea whether I even want an invite – after all, to quote the words of this xkcd cartoon — “it’s not Facebook but it’s like Facebook.”
So, those of you that know me also know that I cancelled my Facebook account (mainly because I read the Terms of Service and didn’t really like what I read); so what is it (if anything) that makes Google+ worth signing up for, that Facebook doesn’t have? Should I even bother? After all, both companies have one thing in common, and that is that they are making money out of your personal data (and mine as well). And this is the sticking point for me; whether I offer my data to Facebook or Google or anyone else, someone else is making money out of that data. Perhaps Google may take a slightly better attitude to data privacy, maybe they won’t.
Will it be successful? Will it overtake Facebook? Does anyone even care? Who knows — I haven’t even got an invite! (But, I suppose, if I ever do decide to sign up, I can always cancel my account just like I did for their main competitor…)