Carl Hutzler’s Blog

Yup :-)

Like last year, I did not bring a camera. I just relied on other people to take my picture. Then I would hand them a business card and have them email me the result. I lost hope on this one but then, somehow, the person came through! They finally downloaded the image from their memory card and STILL had my biz card. Lucky!

 Jake and I after we ran the last mile of the MCM together.

As the father of a nearly seven (teen) year old, I know I am :-)

We had a heavy, wet snow today in DC. Perfect for a guy with a button nose.

So even as I published my last post on FreeNAS and how to backup your data to an off-site location I started seeing some errors in my FreeNAS logs. Eventually the errors got worse and worse and then the whole operating system started dying and the FreeNAS box was rebooting itself and failing during backups.

The errors were disk related. Failures to write. Failures to read. Everytime the system crashed and rebooted, it would run FSCK and eventually things would check out. But these errors were at a minimum causing the RSYNC backups to fail regularly.

I initially thought it was the software RAID provided with FreeNAS so I switched from JBOD to RAID0 (stripe). The RAID0 seemed better for a bit, but then it too had issues.

So I bought a RAID SATA PCI card online. It arrives next week. I thought that might be a possible solution as maybe the FreeNAS software RAID solution was not as reliable as it should be.

To hedge my bet on the HW RAID, I also decided to buy two new 1TB drives. This time I would buy Seagate drives. I had been using Western Digital 1TB drives and something in the back of my mind reminded me that the Infrant.com site mostly recommended Seagate drives for their NAS units. So I bought the Seagate ST31000340NS Barracuda ES.2 SATA 1000GB (32MB Cache) that they listed.

Turns out the drives arrived first. So I installed them and set-up my software RAID in a JBOD configuration. I started the RSYNC backups again and they have run flawlessly for a day and a half now (its a lot of data). And the speed of the backups is going even faster now….not the throughput over the network, but the overall wall clock time is noticeably shorter. I am guessing that the errors I was seeing were actually when a read or write had been retried multiple times and eventually failed permanently. But that there were many more errors which were slowing down the transfers using the Western Digital drives. Now that I was using Seagate and things were happier, backups are completing much faster (maybe 2-3 times). It’s not the WD drives were defective….I just think there is something in their firmware which causes issues in RAID configurations…and if you read the Infrant site page, it seems that several manufacturers have problems in this area.

So the moral of the story? Not all hard drives are created equal when it comes to RAID storage (even just JBOD if you call that RAID). I don’t know why the WD drives had issues and why the ST drives work well. But even the Infrant guys seem to say that ST works well and very few other manufacturers work properly. I bet most of the compatibility issues are the firmware on the drives. Wonder why these manufacturers don’t figure out their issues? I guess until then, Seagate can go on charging a 10-15% premium for their drives….I am happy to pay it :-)

One of those Aeron Chairs by Herman Miller. I never sat in one before yesterday when I helped someone with their computer for 2 hours. I got up and knew I had to have one. $1000 is a heck of a lot of money, but it will likely be the last chair I ever buy. Its made like a tank and if it ever has an issue, I bet they will fix it for free. For $1000 they better! :-)

I should probably also preempt my friend Phil who got one of these at an office that was going out of business. He paid $25 for his! Damn you, Phil ! :-)

My son got some temporary hair color for the holidays. So he let me paint him as a Christmas tree the other day. He loved it!

  

So I know you are good about your data and backups and all (right?). But I wonder if you have any of your data off-site? Do you worry about fire, theft, flood/water (burst pipe) or similar disasters? Do you have all your data backed up but still within 10 feet of the original? Maybe you do what I used to do and take the back-up off site periodically and store it in the bank safe deposit box. But that is a pain and the frequency of that process is poor at best.

Well, I believe I have proven out a great and very inexpensive system to not only do backups, but get the backups off-site. And it works completely automagically….no need to even remember to hook up a USB hard drive and run Carbon Copy Cloner (great Mac OS software for cloning your hard disk).

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The other day I was using my Sprint cell phone as a modem connected to my laptop over bluetooth. I was surprised to receive a normal voice call during the data connection. I took the call as normal and when I was finished I hung up and the data connection went right back to working without having to do anything on the laptop. It was just like my old Cingular service used to work. Why was I surprised? Well because I have always been told that this capability (to put a data session on hold and allow a voice call through) was an amazing feature of the GSM cellular technology and the antiquated CDMA technology just “could not do this”. Those darn sales people.

So I looked online and found out that Sprint does allow incoming calls to your phone during a data session BUT only if the data TX and RX happen to be idle at the moment the call comes in. I guess I was just lucky the other day when the call came in as my data session must have been fairly idle. So I poked around a little more online and found this site which explained how to switch the feature to ALWAYS allow a voice call to place your data session on hold. And I just tried it and it works exactly as you would expect….you are in a data session using your phone as a modem and a call comes in. The data session is “put on hold” while you take the call. Then when you hang up the voice call, the data session resumes automagically. Laptop has no idea the data session even paused! (of course if you are on the phone for a long time, I imagine some data session stuff might time out on the laptop, but that’s another issue)

Anyway, the way you do this is right on the web page above. It involves going into the service menu on your Motorola V3m phone (by entering ##3282# as the phone number). Then you select EVDO from the menu and edit the DDTM setting to be OFF. Very simple, but you need to get your phone’s MSL code to do it!! This code, called the Master Subsidy Lock, is of course some silly secret of the cell phone company. And they usually will not give it to you. But I found a simple way to make them give it to you. Just call up and say you put a security lock code on your phone and have forgotten the password lock code. They will tell you to try the last 4 of your SS# and the last four of your phone number, and a bunch of other stuff. Just say “its not working”. Then you will get transfered to technical support. They will tell you to enter the magical service menu by hitting ##3282# on your phone. Once in, they will walk you through the menus and eventually tell you to hit EDIT on one of them to reset your lock/security code. The phone will then ask for your MSL code before letting you do this. Just write down what the tech support guy tells you. Now you have your MSL !! (fyi, the MSL is different for every phone and its based on the IMEI code which is unique to every device…so don’t use an MSL code for one phone on another phone even it’s the same make/model or you can lock your phone forever as this code is also related to unlocking your phone so you can use it on other cell networks).

Dial *2 for Sprint customer service :-)