Irene restored
I did run some checks (using Ubuntu LiveCD) on the memory of Irene – the family PC that broke down – and found quite a lot of errors, but I wasn’t sure of the truth of the outcome. It’s new (just a few weeks old) and had run perfectly for some time. So I returned the system to the shop to test it.
Indeed – the added 1Gb memory turned out to be bad. Had it removed and retry to boot – but it seems Windows is capable of making a mess of the disk due to memory errors: the same problem persisted: spontanuous reboot each time the system was booted.
The Ubuntu startup didn’t work either.
SO I had to do some repair: ChkDsk on both Windows disks (system and pagedisk), so at least Windows was bootable again.
The faulty memory was returned to the shop where I bought it, they ran some checks as well but found it defective indeed. So I got a new module, installed it and behold: as if nothing has happened. It seems nothing is lost.
Just Ubuntu needed to be re-installed, but that had nothing to do with failing disks. I think I made an error with assigning the disk priority (which is the “C:” disk can be set in BIOS) and finally I got it re-installed. Only to find that mouse and keyboard didn’t work. I installed an old keyboard and at that moment, it worked. Now to find a new keyboard 😉
WASD weirdness
I have 7 services defined – and I should have a list of 7 checking the services. But for some reason, in time it will be a multiple of 7: some way all 7 are duplicated and I didn’t find out why, yet. I seem to be the only one with the problem…
But to be true, that’s the only problem (apart from the known PHP engine stuff) I run into on Diana….
ATI card problems
For some time, the ATI-based card in Aphrodite – the workstation – fails, returning into a colorfull, stripy type of screen in the normal Windows mode, blacking out and sometimes restarting in the alternate setup, or blackout and power it off under Ubuntu. The only solution is to reset: Attempting to restart under Windows doesn’t work – and I cannot see why, and Ubuntu really hangs – the system is completely ‘dead’ – doesn’t react in any way. It might be set to SLEEP, eventually, but I doubt it – hitting the power butten does not resume but restarts – from BIOS, over GRUB into the selected system. It happens when I have watched movies – .AVI, .WMV, .MPEG, or, more particular, .MP4 – that’s where I first encountered the problem.
16-Nov-2008
Hardware problems
Due to electricity work this morning, Diana has been switched off nicely – to prevent possible problems on startup. Just a few minutes, not to bother about too much.
Well, so I thought, but it turned out that the whole excersise in getting everyting back online was a very, very different matter: to put it simple: Diana refused to come alive. power on was no problem but in the line of starting, everything froze. I’ve had the problem before and cycling power several times usually helped, but not today.
So I had to boot another Alpha off the system disk. The easiest – and probably fastest – way was to take the AlphaServer 400 – it has 160 Mb internal memory, and carries an EV4 processor running at only 233 Mz – slow, compared to the Personal Workstation but it should do for DHCP, DNS, basic mail (including PMAS – the spam filter) and the basic, static webpages. After having replaced some cards – including the one that connects to the Shared SCSI bus, I booted this machine minimal, changed some startup files to prevent starting unneeded stuff, and restarted. It hung – but interrupting on the console and boot worked. The system started nicely, though slow. Once running I could disable the links to the blogs and the wiki in the page header – I had to extract the data from the library, change it and put it back in – and could create a text file to show.
The system ran nicely for a couple of hours, I could finish the job I was working on,, examione what was wrong with the Personal Workstation (now I had DNS, I could access the Internet 🙂 ) , and after that, I tried to retrieve my mail.
I shouldn’t have done that.
For some reason, the AlphaServer froze. Login to the AlphaServer failed – only CTRL-P worked. I initiated a system crash but that didn’t finish – and the SRM dumped it’s contents. Something I’ve seen happening when booting the box on shared SCSI when the PWS already booted from it.
At that time, I had been working finding out what went wrong in the PWS. The documentation I could find showed the problem was related to memory. At some point, the PWS beeped: once, three times, three times. The doc stated: there is no memory, or if there is, something made it unavailable. Re-seating the DIMMs seemed to help, but it took several attempts to have the system come up without a problem.
Once the AS400 got stuck, I added a KZPSA card – seemed to be required to get the Shared SCSI to life. But the console has some trouble with it, the startup sequence mentioned an error at test E6: Command error 4; and error happened after test E4 as well: SIMPORT failed.
So back to KZPBA – one left so put that is. Hooking it up the shared SCSI however didn’t work. For one reason or the other, this card didn’t notice the disks. Perhaps the wrong SCSI-Id? Changed that, to no avail. Finally, I re=installed the original cards in the PWS and the AS400 – hooked them up to the system and rebooted the PWS: And all seems well, at the moment.
The lesson: It’s time to get a newer box. Power off the PWS may become a nasty problem – once down, it may not come back again. But for now , it works.
Database trouble
I found this error in the database log:
$ VERIFY = F$VERIFY(F$TRNLNM("SYLOGIN_VERIFY"))
InnoDB: The log sequence number in ibdata files does not match
InnoDB: the log sequence number in the ib_logfiles!
081108 22:25:14 InnoDB: Database was not shut down normally!
InnoDB: Starting crash recovery.
InnoDB: Reading tablespace information from the .ibd files...
InnoDB: Restoring possible half-written data pages from the doublewrite
InnoDB: buffer...
InnoDB: Last MySQL binlog file position 0 3274, file name ./mysql-bin.000013
081108 22:25:23 InnoDB: Started; log sequence number 0 502105172
081108 22:25:23 [Note] Recovering after a crash using mysql-bin
081108 22:25:23 [Note] Starting crash recovery...
081108 22:25:23 [Note] Crash recovery finished.
081108 22:25:25 [ERROR] Column count of mysql.db is wrong. Expected 22, found 15. The table is probably corrupted
081108 22:25:25 [ERROR] mysql.user has no `Event_priv` column at position 29
081108 22:25:25 [ERROR] Event Scheduler: An error occurred when initializing system tables. Disabling the Event Scheduler.
081108 22:25:25 [Note] /$116$DKA100/000000/WEB/MYSQL/MYSQL051/VMS/bin/mysqld.exe: ready for connections.
Version: '5.1.23-rc-log' socket: '' port: 3306 Source distribution
and yet, everyting seems fine. I asked JEan-François about this, he suggested to do a check – it might be the result of the known problem with MyISAM – used by the MySQL engine itself. By mysqlcheck didn’t reveal anything worng. All tablwe were fine. But I might have missed something in upgrading the database, so that’s what I’ll do next – after making a backup 🙂
Update
It looks like it all worked, the conversion is done and all seems to be present. Here, at least. And a number of columns have been added to table mysql.db. Now time to restart MySQL and seen what the logfiles says:
$ type mysql051_root:[mysql_server]MYSQLD.LOG
$ Set NoOn
$ VERIFY = F$VERIFY(F$TRNLNM("SYLOGIN_VERIFY"))
081116 22:32:07 InnoDB: Started; log sequence number 0 579383835
081116 22:32:08 [Note] Event Scheduler: Loaded 0 events
081116 22:32:08 [Note] /$116$DKA100/000000/WEB/MYSQL/MYSQL051/VMS/bin/mysqld.exe: ready for connections.
Version: '5.1.23-rc-log' socket: '' port: 3306 Source distribution
081116 22:32:08 [Note] Event Scheduler: scheduler thread started with id 1
$
I guess that’s more like it should be.