Trackerd makes Mutt a sad MUA…

By marty | Published: March 14, 2008

I recently upgrade my home machine to Ubuntu Hardy. Lots of teething issues including the rt2500 based wireless card not working with 2.6.24 kernels.

However the one thing that caught me by surprise was Mutt stopped seeing new mail in folders other than $MBOX.

After checking that I was receiving email fine, my attention turned to the method Mutt uses to detect “new mail in mbox format folders”. By default it relys on the atime. Which works fine until something else accesses your ~/Mail/ e.g. backups running.

I’m not sure when Ubuntu introduced Trackerd, but the upgrade to Hardy appears to have either introduced it or started it by default for the first time. It’s basically a search engine for your hard drive. Unfortunately when it reads files this resets the atime. This makes Mutt sad.

At first I was tempted to turn it off seeing as I’ve never used it. However, realising that it’s possible to mount partitions ‘noatime’ I figured the Mutt guys would have provided another way to do this.

set check_mbox_size = yes

Woot.

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As sexy as they are, Macbook Airs are nothin’ but trouble!

By marty | Published: March 11, 2008

Steve Jobs Made Me Miss My Flight – “I’m standing, watching my laptop on the table, listening to security clucking just behind me. “There’s no drive,” one says. “And no ports on the back. It has a couple of lines where the drive should be,” she continues.”

Gone, Without a Trace – “As humiliating as it sounds, let me repeat: the MacBook Air is so thin that it got tossed out with the newspapers.”

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It must be a bad day to be in the hosting business…

By marty | Published: March 10, 2008

Dreamhost – “Due to a typing error on our primary router while trying to block a denial of service attack, DreamHost is currently offline.” Out of band access anyone?

Nearly Free Speech – It will probably have changed shortly but right now it reads “Our master MySQL server has blown more drives, and this is causing most aspects of our service to stall. We are replacing the entire server as quickly as possible”. Ouch. Edit: Have to say I’m impressed with the information flow provided. Almost hourly updates until the situation was brought under control.

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Links of the Day: Mar 09, 2008

By marty | Published: March 9, 2008

More reading on the Youtube hijacking, this analysis from the RIPE project.

Photo gallery of a high density Internet Exchange in LA.

Commentary on the credit crunch. I’ve always been surprised that it’s the executives who get the million dollar bonuses when times are good and the million dollar kiss off when times are bad. What do their employees get? Token bonuses when times are good, perhaps shares or options (which are now in the red) and a redundancy slip when things get really bad. Somehow executive remuneration needs to be more closely tied to the long term stability and prosperity of the company, instead of short-term-ism which leads to the debt laden behemoths that are all falling out of the sky now that risk spreads are now rational.

Storms in Germany and a Lufthansa flight has a wing touch before a go around.

An Elementary Exposition on the Theory of Ponydynamics.

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Links of the Day: Feb 29, 2008

By marty | Published: February 29, 2008

It was posted a few days ago, but this article on incron was interesting. Rather than run a script every so often to check for new files to be processed, this hooks into the kernel and triggers a script when a file handle event occurs.

Even my Mum mentioned the “Me-Tube” [sic] incident. Renesys blog is again the best analysis to read on it.

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Links of the Day: Feb 21, 2008

By marty | Published: February 21, 2008

Not sure why but I searched for my name in Google. Fairly common name so it wasn’t till about page 7 that this showed up. So I poked around a bit on the SFS site and found some more photos of us.

Kuro5hin article barracking for more modularisation and sharing between software projects.

Apple stops shipping Xserve RAID hardware just after $work[0] buys one. Sigh.

“Australian Workplace Agreements will be extinct by Easter after the Coalition dropped its plans to delay their abolition until midyear.” – SMH. I think the thought process was suddenly “I don’t think we’re in government anymore Toto!”.

I’ve always wondered about the equation of computer use with computer literacy / savvy. It seems that a lot of commentators thought that just because those children and teenagers growing up now use computers a lot also implies that they understand them better and use them more powerfully. What total bunk! And now there is a study on just this topic, covered by CMS watch, which agrees with my unscientific conclusions.

Skewed priorities.

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Corner cases make me a sad panda

By marty | Published: February 20, 2008

At $work[0] we’ve had issues with a server that has a Nvidia SATA controller. The errors look a little something like:

ata2.00: cmd 60/08:78:3f:8f:3b/00:00:00:00:00/40 tag 15 cdb 0x0 data 4096 in
res 40/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
ata2.00: cmd 61/00:80:66:32:77/01:00:00:00:00/40 tag 16 cdb 0x0 data 131072 out
res 40/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
ata2: soft resetting port
ata2: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
ata2.00: configured for UDMA/133
ata2: EH complete
ata2: timeout waiting for ADMA LEGACY clear and IDLE, stat=0x400
sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] 488390625 512-byte hardware sectors (250056 MB)
sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
ata2: EH in ADMA mode, notifier 0x0 notifier_error 0x0 gen_ctl 0x1501000 status 0x0 next cpb count 0x10 next cpb idx 0x0

It appears some sata_nv “features” (NCQ) were added to Linux 2.6.22 but some Hitachi hard drives don’t support it. Redhat has errata on this.

Of course we’re running that combination. Sigh.

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Links of the Day: Feb 19, 2008

By marty | Published: February 19, 2008

I’m a Sony Ericcsson fanboi. Despite wanting a “smart phone” the P1 was totally underwhelming, so I upgraded to a k850i. Just in time for them to release the g900. Sigh.

“It’s a doggone chart buster – a song audible only to dogs has topped New Zealand record charts, and is looking to go global.” – SMH.

Portfolio.com has an interesting article on how P2P users bit back at MediaDefender, a company who try to make life difficult for leechers.

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Internet “news” and those cable cuts.

By marty | Published: February 18, 2008

I’ve followed with interest the cable cuts in the Med and Middle East that have seen rumour layered upon rumour and every armchair commentator lathered in to a frenzy with conspiracy theories.

There has been excellent coverage at the Renesys blog (Parts 1, 2, 3, quash Iran rumours, 4, summary) and Data Centre Knowledge has been linking to lots of sane coverage.

It’s always struck me as rather odd that just because the Internet enables everyone to have a say that everyone feels they should exercise that capability at every opportunity on topics that they know very little.

People do strange things on the Internet. Film at 11.

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Links of the Day: Feb 18, 2008

By marty | Published: February 18, 2008

Data Centre Knowledge reports on Speed Cabling and links to another story and the official site. Crimping tools at 20 paces. What will they think of next?!?

Stilgherrian links to a story at El Reg on the cable cut rumours.

Speaking of the cable cuts, the Beebs has a nice article covering all the basics and Steve Bellovin stirred the rumour pot earlier this month.

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