Long story short: if you have issues with a PCI-E card like video cutting out randomly and never returning it’s because the designers were on meth. The solution is to only have RAM in DIMM slots 3 and 4. If you put anything in 1 or 2 you’ll want to commit suicide.

What the hell, Dell. This is why I build my PCs.

Anyway, I had a battery die on a controller again and write cache was disabled. Replacing the battery on that controller did not fix it — it was still saying the write cache was suspended. After a LOT of poking it finally came back, but I don’t know exactly how or why. I currently have a theory though that I hope helps someone out some day.

1) Known issue that MD3000i units ship with writeCacheEnabled=true and mirrorCacheEnabled=true, which puts the write cache into a suspended mode because it can’t mirror with only one controller. (They come with one controller unless you order two)

2) Fixing the above problem requires disabling both, then re-enabling only the write cache.

3) Trying the above did not work. Mirror disabled, but still suspended. Somehow with mirror disabled and forcing it to ignore the battery (cacheWithoutBatteriesEnabled=true) would get write cache working again. That’s not a good or safe solution, though.

4) Disabling all write cache settings, doing an offline/online of each controller, and then enabling all the write caches and fixing paths seemed to work.

I think it refuses to mirror the cache which keeps it suspended because the controllers still have some weird cache setting that doesn’t get cleared until you offline/online both controllers to “reset” them. It’s currently the best theory I have, but doesn’t explain why I could force it to work by setting cacheWithoutBatteriesEnabled=true.

tl;dr this SAN is a big box of shit.

We’ve never had much luck with mysql-proxy as we’ve seen it crash its fair amount of times or not start properly on boot, but this was unending. Core dumps weren’t giving anything useful; logs were no better. Here’s the MySQL-Proxy alternative that we should have implemented ages ago. Note, we’re running FreeBSD, so adapt to your own OS/Linux distro:

What you need:

net/socat
net/haproxy

FreeBSD’s rc.conf:

# mysql_proxy alternative
socat_enable="YES"
socat_flags="UNIX-LISTEN:/tmp/mysql.sock,fork,reuseaddr,unlink-early,mode=777 TCP:127.0.0.1:3306"
haproxy_enable="YES"

HAProxy’s config:

global
log 127.0.0.1 local0
maxconn 4096
daemon
#debug
#quiet
#
defaults
log global
mode tcp
option tcplog
option dontlognull
option tcp-smart-accept
option tcp-smart-connect
retries 3
maxconn 200
#
listen mysql :3306
mode tcp
option mysql-check
balance roundrobin
server mysql1 1.2.3.4:3306 check port 3306

Ultimately, HAProxy manages the connections very well and socat fixes any old clients trying to talk over the /tmp/mysql.sock file.

Enjoy.

The other night I was browsing the web and somehow stumbled upon GameCenter Live. A friend told me he subscribed recently, and the price for the rest of the season was reasonable. I was still hesitant to buy it because I was unsure about watching games on my PC, and I also run Linux or FreeBSD often so it needed to work OK in their terrible flash player. Somehow I spotted a mention of the PS3. That sounded fantastic — not paying for cable but watching games on my TV? SOLD!

The GameCenter Live for PS3 is $10 if you’re not a PS3 Plus sucker subscriber, so I figured that’s not too bad an entry fee if I only have to pay it once. The download of 18MB only took about 15 minutes which is hilariously slow, but I’m not going to complain if it works.

My experience has been partially satisfying so far. I’ll give you a rundown of the current features:

GOOD

These problems are not only on the PS3 — it’s also mentioned on the Boxee and Roku forums. My googling so far has found instances of people complaining on non-Sony / PS3 forums. Someone must be keeping people quiet about it. I’ve read people mentioning that they’ve heard back from Sony and they claim their engineers don’t have this issue. Others say it’s known and being worked on. My only guess is that the streaming done to the PS3, Boxee, and Roku devices are not the same as the one to the web. It’s probably encoded differently and uses different servers to do the streaming. Either way, it needs to be fixed.

At this point I’d rate the app 2/5 because of how unwatchable the Capitals vs Hurricanes game was last night. If you can handle these issues go ahead and buy it. I’m sure watching the game after it airs will be a decent experience. However, if you want to watch it live you’re going to get frustrated quickly.

I have high hopes for this market. NHL is getting my money and there’s no reason why this format should be treated like a second class citizen. As more things move to the web the situation should improve, but it needs to improve soon because I’m getting impatient….

edit: For anyone who wants to blame the issues on internet connection problems:

First of all, my platform is FreeBSD. You can do this on other platforms, but the most important info is here. If you’re on FreeBSD, you can install the requirements like so:

# portmaster -d www/nginx net-mgmt/xymon-server www/fcgiwrap

Throw in xymon-client if you want it to monitor itself and if you’re not running BSD grab the fcgiwrap code from the nginx site here.

The biggest problem about this setup is that fastcgi isn’t implemented into nginx. This means that your aliases cause issues because the fastcgi script tries to go to the path the webserver gave it not knowing you’re using an alias. It won’t be able to find the files unless you make a symlink that matches your alias… in certain situations you could potentially use symlinks and not define aliases. Use whatever works for you.

Here’s the relevant info you need:

/etc/rc.conf — make sure fcgiwrap runs as the www user

fcgiwrap_enable="YES"
fcgiwrap_user="www"

/usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf — or drop this in a vhost

server {
    listen            80;
    server_name  xymon.foo.com;

    root    /usr/local/www/xymon/server/www;
    index   index.html;

    #error_page  404              /404.html;

    # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
    #
    error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
    location = /50x.html {
        root   /usr/local/www/nginx-dist;
    }

    location /hobbit/ {
      alias /usr/local/www/xymon/server/www/;
    }

    location /hobbit-cgi/ {
        alias  /usr/local/www/xymon/cgi-bin/;
}

    location /hobbit-seccgi/ {
        alias  /usr/local/www/xymon/cgi-secure/;
}

    location ~ ^/.*\.sh$ {
    gzip off; #gzip makes scripts feel slower since they have to complete before getting gzipped
    fastcgi_pass  unix:/var/run/fcgiwrap/fcgiwrap.sock;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME  /usr/local/www/xymon/$fastcgi_script_name;
    fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING     $query_string;
    fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD   $request_method;
    fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE     $content_type;
    fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH   $content_length;
    fastcgi_param GATEWAY_INTERFACE  CGI/1.1;
    fastcgi_param SERVER_SOFTWARE    nginx;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME        $fastcgi_script_name;
    fastcgi_param REQUEST_URI        $request_uri;
    fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_URI       $document_uri;
    fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_ROOT      $document_root;
    fastcgi_param SERVER_PROTOCOL    $server_protocol;
    fastcgi_param REMOTE_ADDR        $remote_addr;
    fastcgi_param REMOTE_PORT        $remote_port;
    fastcgi_param SERVER_ADDR        $server_addr;
    fastcgi_param SERVER_PORT        $server_port;
    fastcgi_param SERVER_NAME        $server_name;
         }
}

And now create two symlinks so the fastcgi scripts work.

# ln -sf /usr/local/www/xymon/cgi-bin /usr/local/www/xymon/cgi-bin/hobbit-cgi
# ln -sf /usr/local/www/xymon/cgi-secure /usr/local/www/xymon/cgi-bin/hobbit-seccgi

Securing this page is an exercise left up to the reader.

Enjoy your working Xymon setup on a much more lightweight and responsive webserver.

Well, I followed Mr. AlexS’s instructions to no avail. It’s almost been a week now with no solution in sight. I’ve even had a reply from one support person trying to tell me the glue records were there, and then showing me the output of dig which contained nothing more than a query for the host’s AAAA record. Clearly this person has no idea what the hell a glue record is.

I can understand if the issue is that the TLD (.me) is being a little bitch and won’t do the glue record. Hell, at one point I thought we were making progress when they informed me that I can’t have a glue record sharing both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses. Of course I was getting a bit stabby at that point for their incompetence, but figured I’d just work around it by creating a different subdomain for the “IPv6″ version of the DNS servers.

However, the progress ended around there and now we’re playing the waiting game for something I could do in about 6 seconds flat if I had access to the TLD’s DNS servers. I fail to understand how some people get jobs in the IT industry, anyway.

Overall I’d rate NameCheap’s support for IPv6 glue records 4 out of 5 goatsies*. I might even throw in a tubgirl.

*Lower is better.

TL;DR The exciting therapy obtains the dilemma into the reasoning typewriter.

This was annoying.

I googled for a long time and never found an answer, but fret not my fellow Google warriors — the solution is here. Simply install plasma-desktop and you will be good to go.

aptitude install plasma-desktop

Don’t ask me why this wasn’t pulled in by kde-standard.

My only question is, does this prevent them from obtaining it via Steam? Is it only banned in stores / box versions? The internet as a global media distributer may trump all, especially if the “sale” is taking place “out of the farkin’ outback”.

Good Grief.  Read on.

You are stupid if you don’t like this. I’m not kidding. STUPID!!!

I think the only thing that could make it better is (hell, I don’t know if it has it — I’m too busy to investigate) a decent forum and possibly those stupid plugins that shows you who’s online in your TeamSpeak  / Ventrilo / what-have-you servers.

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