about:benjie

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I have no ID card, passport, drivers license, that will say, for example, I’m a “night person”. I don’t do daylight, I don’t trust daylight, I don’t like it. Many of you are day people, you’re fine with it. Grand! If you’re a day person, night-time leaves you alone. But if you’re a night person, daylight has no such qualms. Daylight will climb underneath the curtains, bounce off the carpet, off the ceiling, off the carpet, off the ceiling into your fecking eyes and wake you up.

– Dara O’Briain
(Live from the Theatre Royal)

Dara, me old pal, you’ve got it spot on there. [Ali-G style, making "N" with fingers] Night-time iz de bezt! [/Ali-G]

I have to work during the day because thats when all the people I communicate with are working! However, I do it from home, with the blinds and curtains shut, and often with the light off too, basking in the light of my LCD monitor, with brightness as low as it will go. Daylight makes me screw my eyes up, forces me to shut one eye, and makes me generally look as if I am in pain. Which I am… strong daylight physically hurts my eyes. For proof of my anguish all you have to do is ask me to keep my eyes open for a photo in bright sunlight. You’ll see me struggle and fail to do so - and even if I do succeed, the photo looks horrible because the rest of my face is contorted with the effort of keeping both eyes open at once. At night time, or in the dark, no such problem, and my eyes work great together. Just not during the day.

If only it was easier to sleep when it is light outside…

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… And told me I can have the TV (LG 42LG6000) at just £699.98 - to match the price at Currys - saving me £49.02 (towards the HTPC )! WHY DIDN’T THEY PHONE ME?! I could have ordered it yesterday (when I phoned them…) and had it 24 hours earlier!

I phoned them, confirmed the sale and paid over the phone, and its being delivered in about a weeks time!

I’M SO EXCITED! AHAHAHAHAAAHAHAHAHAAAHAHAAA (manic laughter… if you need a better impression, ask Jem).

NEW TV! If only I had some stuff to make use of it on - we don’t have anything High Definition at the moment… And I’m not sure we’re gunna get some for a while… Oh well, the screens the important thing, finally I can enjoy the beauty of Wii over component video cable (rather than SCART rubbish), and have an insanely large computer monitor! I wonder if I have the spare parts around to make a makeshift low-powered media PC. We really need a desk to put it on.

SO EXCITED!

… is great! For those of you who don’t know, I got married last month (and then spent 2 weeks on honeymoon in Athens!) - it was fantastic, though very very hot. During the trip we kept a moblog - which you can view here (little point repeating the content on this blog!). We’ve now moved into our new flat, unpacked, got a kitten, Artemis Gillam (seen here curled up next to my keyboard), and FINALLY have internet again, and now are both back to work. Yay.

Hopefully soon we’ll have our new TV (a 42″ LG 42LG6000 LCD 1080p TV, John Lewis are currently price-matching it for us with Currys (£749 -> £699.99)) which I am sure will be the subject of many blog posts in the future whilst I try and build the perfect HTPC for it (running MythTV of course!) and pimp it out with compiz, allow controlling of it from a Wiimote, and all that jazz. Sounds like fun! Hopefully I can get a little more hardcore in my hacking of the OS (as it doesn’t have to be stable in the short term, unlike my work PC) - and this is also the perfect opportunity for me to brush up on my python skills, rather than doing everything in PHP! (When you know one language so well, its hard not to neglect all the others, even if they are technically better in many ways…)

Whilst we’re on the subject of the TV - though I have not received it yet, there is one thing I was surprised to find when I went and viewed it - the TV, when on it’s stand, is *very* wobbly. A gentle touch of the finger is enough to move it up and down (though not rotate it on it’s stand) - and it wobbles for a good few seconds before coming back to stationary. Compared to other similarly sized TVs of other brands it is very noticeable - however it does not seem to be about to topple over, even when you are a little more vigorous with it, so I suppose it is nothing to worry too much about… The kitten should not be able to do it too much damage!

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It has bothered me a little for a while that the MythWeb (part of the fantastic MythTV package for Linux) aspect ratio is hard-coded to 4:3. Most of the TV that I watch (received over Freeview (DVB-T) in the UK) is in 16:9, so watching it back on 4:3 is a bit of a pain. Thus I was motivated to change the hard coding to 16:9. The process is quite simple:

1. Modify line 102 of mythweb/modules/stream/handler.pl - change “3/4” to “9/16“.
2. Modify lines 35 and 37 of mythweb/modules/mythweb/tmpl/default/set_flvplayer.php - change “3/4” to “9/16” and “4:3” to “16:9” respectively.
3. Modify line 505 of mythweb/modules/tv/tmpl/default/detail.php - change “3/4” to “9/16“.
4. Optional: I also added to the end of line 165 of mythweb/modules/stream/handler.pl (which detailed the ${width}x$height) - adding
   .’ -aspect ‘.shell_escape(”16:9″)
   (make sure you get the fullstop at the beginning!), though I am not sure if this modification is necessary or even beneficial!

There is a minor bug now where the player does not show the control bar at the bottom properly initially, but a click on the preview picture solves this.

I’m currently working on modifications to stream the video in 3gp format to my mobile (a Nokia 6120 Classic), however this seems a lot harder as I have to implement a RTSP server, and have to re-encode all jobs in advance (by using a MythTV User Job) which is not quite what I am after. There is a page about it in the MythTV wiki. I wonder if I can find a cunning way around it…

If this helps you, please let me know in the comments!

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I told you about moving my data over to a RAID1+0 and RAID5 system in this previous post, but, as expected, I never got round to finishing it. Until now, that is…

I went to London on business for a few days, and came back to find MythTV had stopped working. The disk was full, so it had given up, and wouldn’t even let me get in to view the recordings - so I couldn’t even delete some to get it working again! (I wonder why Auto-Expire wasn’t working.) Anyway, this spurred me on to finally finish partitioning/setting up my drives. The process was quite simple, really. The following steps generally assume you are root already (sudo su) because I am a “bad” sysadmin and don’t believe in all this constant sudo malarchy. Following my instructions is, as always, at your own risk. I highly recommend that you read the relevant documentation before proceeding (such as this).

1. Reboot into Ubuntu LiveCD, don’t forget to upgrade the software on the LiveCD to prevent any issues!
2. Disable swapspace (swapoff /dev/sd[abcd]1).
3. Use cfdisk to finish formatting the drives (remembering to change partition types to the hexadecimal “fd” - Linux RAID Autodetect). Be careful NOT to modify ANY of the details of the partitions you are already using for data or you will probably lose data!
4. Reboot back into your real system (not LiveCD - minimizes downtime).
5. Optional: add hot spares to current RAID5 devices (mdadm /dev/md1 -a /dev/sdf5).
6. Create the new RAID6 devices (mdadm -C /dev/md3 -l6 -n6 /dev/sd[abcdef]7).
7. Optional: wait for the devices to finish resyncing (watch cat /proc/mdstat).
8. Turn the new RAID devices into LVM physical volumes (pvcreate /dev/md3).
9. Stop any services that depend on /data (/etc/init.d/mythtv-backend stop; /etc/init.d/mpd stop).
10. Unmount the data drive (umount /data).
11. Add the new physical volumes to the current LVM volume group, “raid5” (vgextend raid5 /dev/md3).
12. Expand the logical volume to the full size of the volume group (use pvdisplay to find out the size [411.05GB], and then run lvextend -L+411.05G /dev/raid5/data).
13. Expand the filesystem [ext3] to the full size of the logical volume (e2fsck -f /dev/raid5/data; resize2fs /dev/raid5/data) - running e2fsck on a 600GB drive does take a while… Took about 30 minutes for me with little else running.
14. Remount the data drive (mount /data).
15. Restart the services you stopped eariler (/etc/init.d/mythtv-backend start; /etc/init.d/mpd start).
16. Remember to update (I prefer to re-create) your initramfs and update grub (update-initramfs -k all -c; update-grub)
17. All done!

I chose RAID6 over 6 disks over RAID5 over 5 disk with one hot spare because it has better redundancy and similar performance. It was added to the kernel at the end of 2003 so I think it should be fairly stable by now.

This process was not too complicated, and all of this can be done with very little downtime (if you are clever/daring, you can even re-partition without rebooting, but that was too risky for me!). You can even do the LVM stuff without taking /data offline! I wouldn’t advise it though.

If this post helps you, please let me know in the comments.

… well, not any more - most of it has melted now - but it was this morning! Snow during April, what is the world coming to? I have a few theories:

1. Global warming is starting to take hold
2. There are actually 53 weeks in a year, not 52, and thus our calendars are wrong and winter comes a week later each year.
3. Government conspiracy.
4. Its always been this way, but we’ve had a few years of warmth that have made us forget the snow in March/April.

Anyway, enjoy the pictures from Gosport!

Image from Wikipedia

Image from Wikipedia

Yesterday I tried to install the latest version of synce in order to get Jem’s Dad’s Windows Mobile 6 phone to share files with Linux (Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon in this case). After managing to get the software installed, I have been very impressed with it, however actually installing it was a bit of a challenge, though the solution is quite simple and I share it with you now.

1. Uninstall everything synce related before starting.
2. Follow the Synce with Ubuntu instructions.
3. pls should work at this time.
4. Follow the SynceVfs instructions.
   Use ./configure –prefix=/usr
   make; sudo make install
5. Heres the important bit:
   cp /usr/etc/gnome-vfs-2.0/modules/synce-module.conf /etc/gnome-vfs-2.0/modules/
6. killall gnome-vfs-daemon

I think that you can do step 5 alternatively by adding –sysconfdir=/etc to your ./configure command in step 4, however I have not tested this.

Once this is done you should be able to just plug your phone (or other Windows Mobile device) in to the USB, and type synce:/// into Nautilus’ address bar. Simple!

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On 5th February, only of my hard drives failed, and my computer started to choke. My root partition was on the failed drive, so only programs that were already in RAM could continue to run, though most of my storage was on a RAID-5 across 4 320GB disks, so that was still intact. Fortunately, due to my 6GB of RAM, swap was not in use also, so this did not crash my PC, but it did leave me in quite a bad position, not being able to run many of the built in system tools, in particular the tools from “smartmontools”. I did what I could to copy the important details over to Jem’s PC whilst my system was still running, albeit crippled.

It turned out that, upon rebooting of the system, everything was fine, and the disk worked, but it didn’t half give me the willies! I vowed then to get my root drive onto some form of redundant storage, and to have a hot spare always on hand. To that end I bought an Icy Dock 5-in-3 SATA cage and 2 500GB SATAII drives. Unfortunately, due to the amount of time I was spending working on buzzspotr.com with i-together, I was unable to actually use these immediately. I finally got round to incorporating them into my system last weekend. It was quite a challenge to do, so I thought I would document it for future reference.

The first thing I did was delete as much data as I could. The main things I focussed on were:

• Old MythTV programs that I had recorded and seen, or that I was not going to watch
• My ripped DVD library (I rip my DVDs to make it easy to get them to play from MythTV without having to get out of the sofa! I could always re-rip them later)
• Old duplicate backups (for example, I had backups every 30 minutes for Blog Friends, which summed to almost 50 GB! I removed all of these except for those from 11:30pm each night)
• Duplicate files
• Caches

After removing all this data I reduced the “valuable” data on my computer to somewhere around 650GB.

I decided that the best way to lay out my computer data would be to have the following:

• First 0.5GB of each drive - swap space and /boot partition. I chose to not make the swap redundant as it is rarely used (and I don’t mind if computer crashes if it HAS to!)
• Next 39.5GB of each drive - RAID1+0 for /, totalling 117GB of fast redundant storage (theoretical peak bandwidth: 1800mbps read, 900mbps write). High priority data here - the root, my home directory and desktop, the mysql databases, the webroots of apache, etc etc. Ultimately everything where speed and redundancy are highest priority. This setup allows the loss of any one, and possibly up to 3, drives, and has less probability of a total fail than RAID0+1. I did *NOT* use the kernel raid10 driver.
• Then 80GB stripes over 5 disks of RAID5, with one hot spare (on the 6th disk) up to the capacity of the 320GB drives, which would all be combined through LVM into one huge partition for lower priority data - music/TV/etc. Note that RAID5 write speed is not great.
• The rest of the 500GB drives are currently unpartitioned, but I might use them as overflow for MythTV, or as hot spares for the RAID1+0

This seemed to me to be the best way to lay out my filesystem, but how on earth could I move my current data over to the new system, and be assured that it would still boot?

My previous setup was (4 320GB drives, remember):

• First 0.5GB swap and /boot
• Then 30GB stripes for RAID5, up to the last 20GB. Combined with LVM, two logical volumes.
• Last 20GB was used for /home on one drive, 64-bit / on another, and a 32-bit / on another. The final drive was blank.

My first issue was how to boot into the Ubuntu LiveCD, and still have volume management. I found the best way to do this was the following:

1. Boot the Gutsy Gibbon LiveCD, remembering to set screen resolution and keymap (for some reason, it crashes for me if I don’t…)
2. Open up synaptic
3. Edit the software sources (repositories) - tick all the boxes, and all the updates boxes (gparted is broken on the LiveCD if you try and use it on a completely raw (fresh from manufacturer) drive)
4. Install all the updates (you can leave out obvious things like OpenOffice.org if you want)
5. Install mdadm and lvm2 packages
6. (Optionally?) Run modprobe raid0; modprobe raid1; modprobe raid5
7. Then run mdadm -A -s –no-degraded
8. (Optionally?) Run modprobe dm-mod
9. Run vgchange -ay
10. Now you should have all your RAID and LVM partitions up and running

If you don’t understand the commands, I highly recommend that you read their man pages to ensure that these are the right commands for you. You CAN lose data if you mess this up! I always have to check each command 4 or 5 times before I run it when this much data is involved!

Once I had done that, I had to take the plunge. First I checked each of the NEW UNFORMATTED disks with a long read-write test (actually, I did this before ever rebooting), by running badblocks -s -w /dev/sde. This is a destructive command, please be careful using it! It will erase any data already on the drive.

Once I was convinced that the drives would withstand the 2 days where they would be the critical data point, I partitioned them. Both got the standard 0.5GB and 39.5GB partitions at their fronts, and then sde got 3 80GB partitions, and the rest (220GB) turned into another partition; whilst sdf got the rest (460GB) turned into one large partition. I then copied everything over to these drives (starting with sdf, and then working backwards through the partitions in sde). I then had to take the jump and make my RAID1+0 (which was formed of striping the pairs sda-sdd, sdb-sde, sdc-sdf).

It was at this point I thought I would be clever. If I just deleted the partitions of sda, then the RAID5 would still be holding the data, and I could make my severely cripped RAID1+0 (really only a RAID0 in this idea) by combining sda5, sde5 and sdf5. I could then copy the data over and check if it booted, whilst still having lots of redundancy for my data. Unfortunately, the system would not boot like this (I guessed it was because I had two md0s - one for RAID1+0, and one from the old RAID5, though I was later proven wrong), so I had to give up and take the risk. I deleted the partitions from the other drives, and formed my RAID1+0, and tried to boot into it. It still would not boot. I even chrooted into the new environment and ran update-initramfs and update-grub, but still nothing.

At this point I was a little frustrated, and spent a long time researching. In the end I discovered that the initramfs was not being updated, and it still contained the old /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf. Upon deleting and regenerating the initramfs, I could boot into the system. I quickly rebooted into the LiveCD and did all the other necessary changes (setting up the RAID5 across the 5 available disks (leaving the last disk with the data on), copying the data from sdf onto the new RAID5, updating the fstab, etc). I then rebooted into the system, and (not surprisingly) had to make some quite considerably changes due to the amount of data I had moved to new, “better”, locations. And finally, just 2 days later(!), I had my ultra fast and acceptably redundant system online.

I’m very glad that I took the time to do this, though I still have not got round to formatting sdf and setting it up as hot spares… it still has most of the old data on as a duplicate copy!

Image from Wikipedia

My Icy Dock 5-in-3 SATAII cage arrived today from Aria. I was quite excited, and wanted to fit it straight away. I shut my computer down, took the case apart and set about fitting it. The first issue I came across was that the drive rails for my Antec P180 case would not fit properly - I had to fit only the bottom to, as fitting all three meant that they were all too close together to squeeze on the P180’s rails. Once I had this sorted, I set about trying to fit the power and data cables. ARGH! :@ There just wasn’t enough space! And to make things worse, the connectors on the back of the cage were the wrong way round for the L-shaped SATA cables (see image) to fit! After over an hours struggling, swearing, plugging, unplugging and general annoyance, I finally got the damned thing into my case. Breathing a sigh of relief, I set about the long task of attaching my drives to the mounting rails of the cage. I then slotted them in, and rebooted.

WOW!

WHAT THE HELL?!

THATS SO NOISY!

They rattled like anything. I quickly turned the machine off, tightened (really really overtightened, if you ask me!) the screws as much as I could, and then slipped the drives back in and powered up. This time the rattle was gone, but it was still very noisy from all the vibrations. The Icy Dock does not have any anti-vibration built in, making it much noisier than I was used to (I normally mount the drives using the rubber gromits that come with the P180 case). The fan was also very noisy, so much so that I had to change the setting on the back to 55oC instead of 45oC for the warning temperature.

Credit where credits due, the cage does keep my drives nice and cool, and it is very helpful to be able to see the individual hard drive status LEDs. It also have the obvious advantage of being able to quickly and easily swap a drive in and out in the event of a disk failure, without all the effort of having to go inside your case (and possibly knock a cable out of another disk drive without realising!).

Generally, though, I would sum up my feelings thus:

I recommend NOT buying an Icy Dock 5-in-3 SATA cage.Was hard to install&my computer is *miles* louder now+resonates.Pretty lights though…

By the way, this is the first post that I have written with Zemanta (my first “zemified” post). I’m quite impressed at its ease of use, and I will continue to use it for that reason. Towards the beginning of writing a post the articles it brings up tend to be quite random though… what does this post have to do with celebrity babies, for example? I really like the gallery feature though, and the links are especially helpful (though I am surprised that “Zemanta” isn’t among the link detection)! Great work, guys!

See my moblog: http://moblog.co.uk/view.php?id=303976