There was a good interview with Stephen Colbert today on NPR’s Fresh Air. Here’s a link.
Archive for January, 2005
Hard Drive Issues, Again…
Boy, the last couple of months I’ve had more hardware issues, than I’ve probably had the prior four years. Tonight, while listening to Rhythmbox, the music suddenly cuts out in the middle of a song. My first thought is that my router has screwed up due to a power outtage, since it’s not on a UPS, and all my music is located on a seperate server. After a quick check, though, that turns out not to be the problem. So, I then decide to look at my server, and quickly browse the file directory on the hard drive which contains my music files. At this point, my server decides to freeze, which forces me to do a hard boot. Once my server starts up again, I check my log files, and come across this:
Jan 23 18:32:44 xxxxxx kernel: hdd: irq timeout: status=0xd0 { Busy }
Jan 23 18:33:12 xxxxxx kernel: hdd: status error: status=0×00 { }
Jan 23 18:33:12 xxxxxx kernel: hdd: drive not ready for command
Jan 23 18:33:12 xxxxxx kernel: hdd: status error: status=0×00 { }
Jan 23 18:33:12 xxxxxx kernel: hdd: drive not ready for command
Jan 23 18:33:12 xxxxxx kernel: hdd: status error: status=0×00 { }
Jan 23 18:33:12 xxxxxx kernel: hdd: drive not ready for command
Jan 23 18:33:12 xxxxxx kernel: hdd: status error: status=0×00 { }
Jan 23 18:33:12 xxxxxx kernel: hdd: drive not ready for command
Jan 23 18:33:40 xxxxxx kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev 16:41 (hdd), sector 62495
(And more of the same…..)
Crap. Doesn’t look good for my secondary hard drive, which contains all my music files, but at least my OS is on a different hard drive. So, I run an fsck.reiser on the drive (/dev/hdd) to see if the filesystem has been corrupted. After a couple of minutes, it reports that it doesn’t find anything wrong. At this point, I try to connect my desktop machine to the server, and play music. I’m able to mount the drive fine, but once I begin to play music, the hard drive once again freaks out. I reboot my server again, and decide to take a break and grab something to eat.
After grabbing something to eat, and talking to Ken (who mentioned that he just picked up one of those new Mac Mini’s), I get back to facing my server problem. In a futile attempt, I try again to connect from my desktop, and lo and behold, it now works. I can only guess that I’m having a problem with the hard drive’s controller. Hopefully, it’s just the cable coming loose, which I’ll look at tomorrow, but for now at least I’ve got music again.
Update: After working for about 30 minutes, it decided once again to give up the ghost. D’Oh!
Something For My West Coast Homies
This is what your missing by living on the West Coast. How you could deprive yourself of the pleasure of shovelling, I’ll never know.
Luckily for me, the neighbor across the street pulled out his snow-blower, and did our sidewalks and driveway. I only ended up having to do the stairs leading down the hill in front, which is good, since it’s only around 18 degrees today. Brrrrrr.
New Theme
Ken pointed me to a new theme to try out, so I’ve figured I give it a try. I was getting a little bored with the default theme, anyhow.
More Of A Nerd Than I Thought….
Really, didn’t think I would get that high of a score.
Winter Snaps Back
Well, after a week of 60 degree weather, Mother Nature has decided to bring back winter with a vengeance. In addition to the 19 degree temperature, we’ve gotten around an inch of snow. Now, I need to motivate myself, to go out and clear the sidewalks.
Not 0wn3d, So Far….
Boy, after reading about Ken’s system being cracked, figured I give my system a good look, and make sure it hadn’t also been compromised. Looks like it hadn’t been cracked, but certainly not for lack of trying. Doing a quick cat auth.log.0 | grep ssh | grep [Ff]ail | less, I get the following:
Jan 6 23:21:59 xxx PAM_unix[20651]: authentication failure; (uid=0) -> root for ssh service
Jan 6 23:22:01 xxx sshd[20651]: Failed password for root from 4.46.206.20 port 4161 ssh2
Jan 6 23:22:02 xxx PAM_unix[20654]: authentication failure; (uid=0) -> root for ssh service
Jan 6 23:22:04 xxx sshd[20654]: Failed password for root from 4.46.206.20 port 4260 ssh2
Jan 6 23:22:05 xxx PAM_unix[20656]: authentication failure; (uid=0) -> root for ssh service
Jan 6 23:22:08 xxx sshd[20656]: Failed password for root from 4.46.206.20 port 4353 ssh2
Jan 6 23:22:22 xxx PAM_unix[20680]: authentication failure; (uid=0) -> www-data for ssh service
Jan 6 23:22:24 xxx sshd[20680]: Failed password for www-data from 4.46.206.20 port 4815 ssh2
Jan 6 23:22:25 xxx PAM_unix[20682]: authentication failure; (uid=0) -> mysql for ssh service
Jan 6 23:22:27 xxx sshd[20682]: Failed password for mysql from 4.46.206.20 port 4917 ssh2
Jan 6 23:22:29 xxx PAM_unix[20684]: authentication failure; (uid=0) -> operator for ssh service
Jan 6 23:22:31 xxx sshd[20684]: Failed password for operator from 4.46.206.20 port 1032 ssh2
Jan 6 23:22:34 xxx PAM_unix[20690]: authentication failure; (uid=0) -> irc for ssh service
Jan 6 23:22:37 xxx sshd[20690]: Failed password for irc from 4.46.206.20 port 1184 ssh2
(clipped)
Really proves the need for strong passwords, which Ken unfortunately got nailed with. I probably should be keeping a better eye on my system reports each morning.
Ken, you should give Debian a try on your server. You should be able to install it with no problem with 64MB of RAM, since it doesn’t use graphical install like a lot of the other distributions. Also, I hear their new installer is much improved compared to when I installed mine.
Gnome-Blog 0.8
The latest version of Gnome-Blog came out today, so I spent the morning preparing new source rpm’s for Fedora Extras. It looks like Gnome-Blog is still having issues correctly handling the drop-n-drag images for WP posting, so another version will probably be showing up pretty soon.
Free WordPress Hosting
For those wishing to set-up a WP blog without having to deal with hosting it, try looking at Blogsome or Speedy Blog.
