Grrrr, broken fileserver (by alaric)

Eargh!

I fitted a nice Maxtor OneTouch 250GB USB/Firewire disk onto my fileserver - to back its contents up onto, as well as a few other machines, the USB-ness giving it the "cheap, random access" goodness of a disk with the "removeable and lockable up, moveable between machines and sites" goodness of tape.

Plugged it into the machine - which runs NetBSD - and it said it detected a USB mass storage device (umass0) and reported that the device was SCSI tunnelled over USB - but then didn't seem to detect the resulting SCSI bus, unlike as shown here.

I eventually found somebody else with the problem here, and a solution here.

So I rebooted the server... and it didn't come back up. The boot loader ran, but the kernel didn't run - I don't even get the copyright message, just DDB's message stating how many bytes big the symbol table is, then it freezes.

MUCH experimentation later has revealed:

• It can boot off a floppy, but the floppy boot loader that loads the kernel from floppy fine still can't load the kernel off of the disk, so it's not the boot loader
• Compiling a new kernel or downloading and using a GENERIC kernel don't fix it either
• Blanking the disk (don't worry, I put all the data onto a second disk first!) and reinstalling onto a totally fresh filesystem still doesn't fix it
• Unplugging the USB disk doesn't help (that's the only hardware change I've made that could have brought this on, within memory)

What I'm going to do next is to try a fresh new hard disk and install onto that, just in case there's a subtle problem with my hard disk somewhere. But if that doesn't work, then it's going to be time to boot from the install floppy and get a shell up, mount the USB disk and the local hard disks, and transfer everything across and then set up a new server from scratch, which will cost me money, but I need my NFS server back!

Snell Systems (by alaric)

As one small step along the road towards my dream of becoming a Victorian gentleman scientist, I've gone part time with my employer Frontwire Ltd and am now freelancing for the other half of it under the auspices of Snell Systems.

As well as selling my services as a software engineer and technical author, I'm also doing network installations.

Wish me luck - and if you need a network installed in the London area, drop us a line!

Hello, World! (by alaric)

In order to avoid having to spend the first half hour of every conversation I have explaining that we're married, and how the wedding went, and so on, I've decided to put up a Snell-Pym blog that I can just point friends at for the latest news.

Back from Suttons Mill (by alaric)

The visit to Suttons Mill went well; we helped with the party, then stayed around for a few days afterwards.

Suttons Mill is where Alaric's Snell grandparents raised their children - Alaric's father, aunt, and uncle. So there's lots of interesting Snell family history around; old photographs, Alaric's grandfather's old technical notes on the designs of avionics systems, and so on.

It's a lovely old house; converted from a disused mill in the 1940s, it's all beams and Cotswold stone, nestling in a valley with the stream tinkling past it... we both enjoy visiting there, so we were pretty taken aback when Barbara asked if we'd like to take it over in a few years!

Now, we'd been rather glum up until then about the sorry state of the housing market. A place with outbuildings for Alaric to do casting and metalwork, where we could have cats, and a nice garden, and lots of space, was going to be out of our reach for decades. Or so we thought.

Wow. Wowowowow.

Sarah ought to have finished her PhD by then, and Alaric works from home, and the Mill is within a short drive of a train station that can take you to and from London in an hour or so, so the only potential difficulty with relocating is going to be whether the village has decent broadband by then! Apparently there's some kind of satellite broadband in operation, but that sounds a bit high-latency for an SSH connection...

We shall see.

Wow!

Honeymoon 2 – Sutton’s Mill (by alaric)

For the second leg of our honeymoon, we're off to visit Alaric's aunt Barbara at Sutton's Mill in Gloucestershire.

We'll start off by helping with Barbara's birthday party over the weekend, then for the rest of the week, we will unwind in the countryside.