[Sheflug] The past week...

["Chris J/#6" <nospam [at] nccnet.co.uk>]

..has, it has to be said, annoying. As I've mentioned, nice new shiny 
machine. All running quite happily. For about an hour or two anyway. The 
machine was built, bits transferred from the old box, and some struggle with 
the hard drives...mostly due to cable length.

The case I have (already described elsewhere) has drive bays above the PSU, 
which is good as it means they're very accessible and it keeps the mobo area 
clear. Unfortuantly, the IDE cable I had was too short to plug into the 
standard IDE, so instead I put it into the UDMA 66 slot. All seemed happy with 
this.

First problem came when I tried to boot the system... 2.2 doesn't support the 
HPT366 UDMA 66 controller on the BP6 mobo. On the plus side, I had a 2.4 
kernel I could boot. So did so. And the techs looked down on the machine and 
saw that it was good. And there was much rejoicing.

Fine think I...need to rebuild kernel to switch on SMP. Rebuild goes through 
.. install new kernel ... reboot ... and *bam*. /dev/hdb, the system disk, 
didn't want to know. "Bugger" is the phrase often used in these situations, 
along with others. After some twiddles, atempted fixes, reboots, etc ... I 
booted the machine of floppy disk to drop me into a maintenance mode.

fsck had fun ... directory "." does not exist ... directory ".." does not 
eist. Cannot read inode at <large number>. And other fun errors.

In the end, I took the drive out, stuck it in the old machine to see if it was 
a controller problem on the BP6, but no luck - same errors...these being:
	{ DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Error }
	{ Uncorrectable Error }
	ide0: busy
	ide0: reset success
but nothing would bring it back to life. So a closer look at the drive was 
made...I've got 4 partitions of any note: hdb1 (/), hdb5 (/home), hdb7 
(dumping ground), and hdb6 (/usr/local). hdb1 is fine up until it gets to 
about 70% of the parition ... the start of hdb5 can't even be read. But 
luckily hdb6 and hdb7 seem clean. For the time being at least.

One new 20GB hard drive later (to replace the 6GB that broke), and the system 
is back up and running, as well as a bit more digging around.

One suspicion I have is that the hard drive didn't like being plugged into a 
UDMA 66 slot when its not a UDMA 66...I also wasn't using a UDMA 66 cable. 
I've also dug around at there are very mixed reports regarding the HPT-366 
controller. Many stay clear of it, citing problems, but since moving to the 
standard IDE sockets, the problem has gone. Others though haven't had any 
problems with it. The BP6 BIOS is another issue - though my mobo has the 
latest stable release, there are many betas. I'm wary of beta BIOS's as if 
they're really wrong, it'll probably shutdown the mobo.

I'm staying clear of the HPT controller for the time being, and I'll stick 
with the standard IDE. I did a 2 hour soak test that invovled continuously 
rebuilding the 2.2.19 kernel, and the system hasn't broken, no corruption on 
the disk has been spotted. Yet.

So for the time being, things are mostly stable, I'm just trying to get the 
system back to a usable state. There are some successes (rebuilding the 
kernel, getting XMMS and licq working) and some failures (screwing up my mail 
config O:-) ...

As its a brand new system re-install, I've decided to try other dists on the 
box. This time Debian 2.2. Installed over the network (cable modems are nice 
for this sort of thing :-) and made a boot floppy. I'm not using lilo for the 
time being as I've had uncomfirmed reports that lilo doesn't sit well with 
Win2K (which I also have installed, together with Win95). Yet to confirm this 
though.

As for Debian? Well, it's ... well ... just another distribution. I have no 
feelings one way orthe other towards it at the moment. Though it has come with 
a nice little utility that I'm making a lot of use of. It's called "stow" and 
its basically for managing source compiled packages installed in /usr/local. 
It works like this...say I have package 'foo 3.4', that has the pretty 
standard configure/make/make install build scenario. foo would be installed 
viz:

	./configure --prefix=/usr/local/stow/foo-3.4
	make
	make install
	cd /usr/local/stow
	sudo stow foo-3.4

stow then creates sym-links from the foo-3.4 install directory to /usr/local. 
One can do "stow -D foo-3.4" to remove the symlinks, making it straightforward 
to delete a package. And this keeps $PATH, $MANPATH and ld.so.conf nice and 
simple. As I build heavily from source (I've never been a huge fan of 
packages...mostly due to bad experiences with rpm many years ago), this is a 
lovely tool.

And the system is lightning quick :) With MAKE=make -j3 in the kernel 
Makefile, a kernel build takes roughly 5 minutes. Woohoo. :) I bit of an 
upgrade from the P200MMX I had... *grin*.

Still have news to get up and running (suck/innd) but that souldn't cause 
problems like mail did :) After that, it's just config tweaks, and fixing the 
firewall (at the moment, a blanket reject for everything).

Oh yeah...

And a backup procedure to get working and tested...

You can't be too careful :)

Chris...


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