Illusory Follies

I’ve been somewhat annoyed by PHP recently. For an example, see the script running the sidebar that shows the sunrise/sunset. Now granted, it’s an odd script to include in the main PHP libraries. However, if it IS included, I really wish it would work correctly. It’s really odd because it fluctuates between the correct time and 1 hour offset from the correct time. I have no idea what it is doing. I’ve also found quite a few ways to break it and make it return bogus output. It’s kind of annoying.

On the home front, I finally got my RAID solution in place. I went cheap and got two 500GB hard drives ($145 each) and a HighPoint RocketRAID 1740 RAID 0/1/5 4 channel SATA 3.0 GBps card ($110). I set the hard drives up (went smoothly) and then after only a little bit of a struggle, reconfigured my Gentoo kernel with the rr174x driver. I’ve had so many bad experiences with poorly written linux kernel device drivers but this one was fun.  I did a make patchkernel on the device driver and then a make menuconfig on my kernel. I had wanted to clean up some junk that was currently being compiled into my kernel so this was an opportunity to do this. Recompiled the kernel and rebooted and voila, I see /dev/sda1 ready to go. I went ahead and formatted it with XFS and shared it out to my local network as a Samba share.

I also wanted to configure the RAID Management daemon in order to monitor the health of the RAID array. I thought this was going to be hard but it seemed to work just fine. I downloaded the RPMs provided by HighPoint on their website and just did a rpm -Uvh –nodeps on them (it was listing some bogus dependencies so I had to ignore them — I’m not sure why this is). Both the daemon and the CLI installed like a charm. I had to remember my ISP’s SMTP settings (always a pain) and although their mail server is SLOOOOW, it appears to be working.

I also went ahead and installed smartmontools in order to check my non-RAID hard drives on the system. Might as well make sure everything’s working nicely!

Down the road, I may go ahead and upgrade this array to a 1.5TB RAID 5 array. For now, it’s a lowly 500GB RAID 1. I think for now, 500GB is plenty for my needs. I have a lot of other hard drive space, so the 500GB is only for the stuff that I can’t afford to lose. My bet is that when 500GB becomes too small, they will have dirt cheap 1 or 2TB drives that I can use in place. Then again, who knows how long SATA II will be a standard…?

It goes on… Thinking of refinancing the house and that’s about all that’s new. I’ve been spending very little time with computers recently. I got two new 500 GB hard drives and a nice RAID card that I was going to set up in a mirrored array but I’ve been slow on that. Other than that, it’s just been work and boring stuff. Spring is here and things are starting to become more green and colorful. Hopefully it stops frosting soon…

I think I need to stop doing projects for a little bit and just relax. Maybe catch up on some reading that’s been piling up. I have about 20 books that I’ve started but not finished. That’s not good.

Anyway — more interesting stuff when my life becomes more interesting…