Oi! You're NIC'd, mate!

So, I use an open-source backup system called Bacula.  Last night, I labelled the four brand-new 170m tapes that arrived yesterday afternoon and started full backups for the first time in nine months.  All the clients went smoothly except for vorlon, my Athlon46/PCI-Express übergamebox, which would run for five seconds to a minute before the connection dropped.

Fifteen hours later, I've found the culprit.  vorlon's motherboard has two onboard gigabit NICs, one an nForce NIC built into its nForce4 chipset, the other a Marvell Yukon 88E8053 PCI-E NIC.  Just as an experiment, after perusing megabytes of debugging logs from the storage daemon, I tried switching vorlon's Ethernet connection from the nVidia NIC to the Marvell NIC and .... poof!  Problem vanished, just like that.

vorlon is now happily streaming data across the network to babylon5 as fast as babylon5's VXA-1 tape drive can write it to tape.  Clearly, there's something subtly wrong with the nForce NIC, but I don't know yet whether it's at the hardware, firmware or driver level.  So, I guess I'm just not going to use it any more.

It'll be interesting if this change turns out to fix vorlon's intermittent random-lockup problem too.

Now it just remains to build and install bacula clients on yama and nijo.

Callahans gallery is live

About that Callahans photo gallery I mentioned a while back?  Well, it's not feature-complete yet, and won't be until there's more real data there to work with, but it's enough "there" to go live for now.  The URL will change later on, after rbos identifies and fixes the Apache configuration problem on novylen.net that's preventing CGIs from executing on my co.ordinate.org virtual domain, but for now you can find the Callahans gallery here.  (I'd host it right here at babcom.com, but Verizon blocks incoming traffic to us on ports 80 and 443, and many people's proxies won't let them access us via ports 81 and 444.)

If you frequent #Callahans on Freenode, we're holding a submission contest for portraits for Grimes and Gridley.  If you have a good mental image of what one or the other looks like and a good photo that matches your mental image, go on ahead and send it in.  The best submission (in my and cymrullewes' judgement) for each cat will get posted as their official portraits.

"The Gearbox!"

My family has a traditional toast, that is ours and ours alone.  The toast is this:

"The gearbox!"

How, you wonder, did this come about?

Well, you see, years ago, my elder sister Peri went on a field trip to Wales with the Polytechnic of Central London, where she was studying for her degree in ecology.  While they were there, the college's van broke down, and a mechanic was summoned from the nearby village to diagnose and repair the problem.

Now, there's a traditional Welsh toast that sounds like "Yakky da" or "Yakki da", but no-one in my family had the least idea of what it actually meant (or, fr that matter, how it was actually properly spelled in Welsh.)  It occurred to Peri that with a Welsh mechanic outside working on the van, she had an excellent opportunity to find out what "Yakky da" actually meant.  So she went outside, walked over to the mechanic, who was lying mostly under the van working on it, and asked him,

"Excuse me, what does Yakky-da mean?"

However, the mechanic, being mostly under the van and concentrating on his work, didn't really hear her clearly.  But as it happened, he had just at that moment found the problem, and reasonably enough assumed that she was asking what was wrong with the van.  So he yelled back,

"Oh, it's the gearbox!"

Thus are family traditions born.

Now, through the magic of the Internet and Google, it can be revealed that "Yakky da" is properly spelled lechyd da (and armed with that, I now know how to properly pronounce it), and that it means the simple and prosaic "Good health!"  But "The gearbox!" is much more fun, and we'll be keeping it.