Fileserver

Before I left for San Diego, my fileserver's northbridge fan and heatsink became separated. It's really worse than a divorce, in many ways, because things are all fucked up, but there's still hope, which means uncertainty, lots of work, and very careful handling of electronics. OK, so I don't know much about divorces.

The lack of heat transfer away from the chip kept my fileserver from booting. Since I've already complained about my loud northbridge fan, I chose to take the opportunity to replace that noisy piece of hardware. I already had a spare fan from somewhere, so I went to the hardware store to find screws long enough to secure it. At the hardware store, I had the bright idea of comparing the screw holes of the two fans and found that they didn't line up. That's when I made the coolest discovery of the week: Krazy Glue comes in a small bottle with a tiny brush built into the lid! I glued the fan to the heatsink, and it stuck almost immediately.

When I got home, I couldn't find my isopropyl alcohol. I was able to get some last Friday night, though, and I set out to clean the bottom of the heatsink and the top of the northbridge heat spreader. I remember isopropyl alcohol working much better than it did. I had to cut the thermal paste off the heatsink, for the most part. Perhaps thermal paste is just that horrible compared to thermal grease. The important thing is that I could now keep my northbridge chip cool.

Doh! The power cord for the fan doesn't reach! I had to pry the fan off the heatsink and re-glue it, rotated ninety degrees. A little thermal grease later, and I was ready to plug my motherboard back into the rest of the computer.

Everything is working mostly. The only weird things are related to mdadm and the raid, I think. The automatic resync operation seems to fail. The first night, I had "watch -n 1 cat /proc/mdstat" running, but I woke up to stack traces being dumped to the screen every second instead of the nice md status. I tried again, but came back later to find the same stack traces showing up every once in awhile. So, I loaded the graphical interface to try and catch more information - but the error stopped. The resync also stopped at 8% and refused to go any further.

I decided that some write activity might wake it up, and started up some bittorrents. They worked well for a few tens of MB, but now my fileserver seems to have rebooted to an initramfs prompt and automatically started a resync. It's currently at 6.9%. I'll see what happens at 8% before I go to bed, and will update as things progress.

Update: 1:49 AM: resync is at 9.6% and going strong.
Update: 9:21 AM: resync is at 64.9% and going strong.
Update: 12:14 PM: resync is at 85.9% and going strong. I'm getting bored waiting for this.
Update: 3:16 PM: resync is done. Things have rebooted, and I will begin some bittorrent stress testing shortly.
Update: 10:23 AM: Fileserver is still up after a couple days of heavy I/O. I'm happy!

Computer Upgrades

I placed an order on Newegg yesterday for two more 750GB hard drives for my fileserver. I'm very excited because they arrive tomorrow! Newegg is fast! I'm thinking of making a trip up to Microcenter at some point in the next couple of days to get a new north bridge fan. I figure as long as my machine is going to be off while I add new hard drives and the like, I might as well get rid of the one loud fan that's in the box. I still need to figure out exactly how to expand a linux raid5 array, but that should be fun. Also cool: my hard drives were each part of a combo deal, so I get two free USB drives - one is 2GB and the other is 4GB. Perhaps I'll actually use one sometime.

I also did some research for my next primary machine while I was shopping. I've picked out a likely case and memory, but beyond that I ran into some troubles. There wasn't any clear best choice on processor/motherboard/graphics combinations. In the end, I decided that since I won't be buying a new machine until at least June, that I'll postpone any research until then, too.

The only lasting decision I made was to name my new computer Nora. In fact, this will be the first computer I will have named. I chose the name when it immediately popped into my head when Newegg asked me what I should name the wish list of parts I'd created. So, I'm not sure what the significance is yet, but Nora has some potential to be special.

Linux, Ubuntu, and My File Server

My file server has been ill recently. It's been freezing. It has other problems, too, like a loud northbridge fan, but these seem minor in comparison to failing to function at all.

Well, after having it freeze on the login screen, without the screen saver on, I noticed some screen corruption. This says to me that it's graphics related. It's hard to tell if it's drivers or hardware, or a combination. I'm not a fan of manufacturers overclocking their boards by default. Instability is the result. One explanation for the suddenness of the increase in freezing frequency is miscellaneous updates to Ubuntu. Or, perhaps my GPU is just gradually melting and becoming less stable. The problem here is that when booting in Windows, things remained unfrozen for three days before I tried Ubuntu again.

Either way, I figured a good way to test the graphics card problem would be to run in command line mode for awhile, and see if things freeze. Getting Ubuntu to run in command line mode isn't terribly easy, though. Most linux distros have runlevel 2 mapped to command line mode. Ubuntu has levels 2-5 all mapped to the same standard experience. So, I had to do an "apt-get install rcconf" and "sudo rcconf" and then find a site that talked about what each service does.

It makes me feel inadequate and a bit sad that I'm such a linux newbie. I think I'd be embarrassed if I ever had to have conversations about linux with a real techie. Luckily, at work, I have the excuse "I work on .NET, which is Windows only. So, I need an answer for Windows. Oh, I have a linux file server at home, though." I am simply ashamed.

Also, I've had this damn thing for many months, now, and I still haven't even installed apache. I meant to have this thing functioning as an FTP server, website, and collaboration tool for family software projects. I need to get on this, and soon. Once I buy a house, anyway.