New disk in workstation
One of the larger disks in the workstation – 300Gb on SATA3 – is knows to have some problems in some areas, that are not noted until accessed for read – no problem writing there, but read fails. Due to it’s size, I used this disk mainly for storing disk images for VirtualBox VMs. Pretty nasty it one of these files gets into such an area….
So I purchased a 1Gb disk to replace it = could /should have taken an even larger one but that was not available nearby, and 1Gb is large enough to hold the few VMs that I keep at hand.
Installing it wasn’t as easy as I thought: since I couldn’t remove both side panels of the machine, it happened quite some times that either power or data connection flipped off the disk. Second, I found that UEFI seems to locate the first disk it can encounter to be the system disk, if there is a change in configuration, so this needed to be done as well: take all disks off the machine, even the ones connected via USB, except the real system disk, and start it up. Once that is found, it will fix that disk as the boot disk…
Second thing I noted, though the 6GB SATA connectors are most left, these are not slots 0 and 1, but 2 and 3. And I moved the SSD holding the operating system from the 3GB slots to one of the 6Gb slots – the new disk is set on that one too. But now the partition table is written to another disk….
Anyway, all was working again after a few hours. System boots faster since the SSD is now on a 6GB slot – which also has SSD cache. And after I moved one of the VM disk containers to that disk the VMS started significantly faster – for that reason, and because the file is now likely to be contiguous.
New porting project ahead
I found another site that may be a pox to Internet abusers. It offers free registration, and that allows you to register the IP address (and domain info, but it might be forged) of systems that are sending spam, try to connect to the system via FTP, SSH, YELNET ….Whatever. For this, you can use an API that is embedded in application Fail2ban, that intercepts login failures, messages signalled as spam etcetera. OpenSource – and running (of course) on Linux. But since it seems to be Python based, it should be able to get it running on VMS. Not to intercept the way as on Linux but afterwards. Otherwise, you can simply use curl (also available on VMS) to pass the data to this site.