... Lots of it! 
I don't mind though, I like snow; it's kind of soothing and gives great scenery that makes me enjoy my little daily hike even more.
The only thing that I hate about snow, is other road-users. It's common sense that with snow you should drive safely by adjust your speed, increase the distance between the cars, etc. Some people, however... ye gods. 
Seriously, if you're either afraid to drive with snow, or you see the snowy roads as a playground; Do us all a favor and stay off the goddamn road, will ya? 
Thursday, time for another pick! Here's my "Pick of the week" for week nr. 5:
Now please... hold me, hold me.. *sniffle*
As most other system administrators, I put a lot of value in having a stable server. Unfortunately it is always possible that, for whatever reason, your server "hangs" and becomes unresponsive. One of the most common reasons is a Denial of Service attack (and sometimes bugged anti-virus software 
) which generates 100% CPU usage and causes your server to become unresponsive.
To prevent stuff like this from happening, something called a watchdog was invented. The basic principle is real simple: the watchdog has to be reset within X seconds, or else the system will reboot. FreeBSD has support for both hard- and software based watchdogs. Since my server has an Intel ICHxx chipset, I logically opted for the hardware based solution.
Before making permanent changes to my kernel, with the possibility of wrecking my server, I had to determine if my server would actually support the interface. Since my server has an elevated kernel security level I first had to reboot it with level 0 security before being able to load kernel modules:
ams01# kldload ichwdNothing happened, the world did not implode on itself, my server did not suddenly reboot itself; This was a good sign. Fetching a list of the loaded kernel modules confirmed that the module was in fact loaded:
ams01# kldstat Id Refs Address Size Name 1 7 0xffffffff80100000 6abc20 kernel 2 1 0xffffffff807ac000 8b8 accf_data.ko 3 1 0xffffffff807ad000 1580 accf_http.ko 4 1 0xffffffff807af000 3818 ichwd.ko
And consequently, a quick peek in dmesg also told me that the interface was recognized and support:
ichwd0: on isa0 ichwd0: Intel ICH9R watchdog timer (ICH9 or equivalent)
Excellent! Of course loading a kernel module manually would mean that it would not be loaded anymore after the first reboot, and I still had to reboot the server to restore the kernel security level). I had two options now: either I compile a new kernel with the "ichwd" device enabled, or I tell the system to load up the kernel module at boot-time. I decided to go for the second option:
echo 'ichwd_load="YES"' >> /boot/loader.conf
Once I update the system to a newer release of FreeBSD, I have to compile a new kernel anyway, but for now this will do just fine. The next step was to enable the watchdog daemon that will be doing the polling:
echo 'watchdogd_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf /etc/rc.d/watchdogd start
I let the server run for a few minutes and nothing happened; which is good... it should only do something if something is wrong, after all. Since I had to reboot the server anyway to restore the kernel security level, and I wanted to see what would happen if something did go wrong, I killed the watchdogd process and waited. A few seconds later, suddenly my SSH connection was terminated. About 30 seconds later I received a text message on my phone that the server had rebooted itself.
Well well... It seems to work just fine! I sincerely hope that I never actually have to use this failsafe though 
Another week, time for another pick! I came across a video with some dub-stepping pigeons, and i just loved it! So here's my "Pick of the week" for week nr. 4:
Let's just hope they don't crap on your car.
Back in 2008, I bought a Western Digital MyBook "World" 500GB NAS. It was a decent NAS, but mine had some cooling issues which were probably related to where I kept it. It was on top of a closet, where it was pretty dusty and warm, which isn't very beneficial for hard disks. So after a while it started developing issues: it would randomly give time-outs and become unresponsive. After a reboot it would work for a while, but after a week or so it would give timeouts again.
I quickly moved all essential data to my computer's hard disk, and powered down the NAS until I had found a replacement and would copy the rest of the data as well. But I made a cardinal sin when I powered down the NAS: I made an assumption. As we all know, assumption is the mother of all fuckups and Finagle's law will apply. I assumed that by turning off the NAS via the big button on the front, it would completely shut down the NAS. Unfortunately, I found out that this was not the case when I had a new storage device a while back and was ready to migrate all my data. The NAS felt quite warm, which surprised me to say the least. Apparently when you push the big "on/off" button at the front, it only powers down the little main board; but it keeps the hard disks spinning. To power down the hard disks, you have to unplug the power supply or flip a small switch on the back of the device. When I tried to boot up the NAS, it didn't do anything at all.
Crap! now what ? Did I just lose a large portion of my data ? I wasn't ready to give up just yet. My geek-credibility would be at stake. Since the NAS was essentially dead, I carefully dismantled it and took the Hard drive out. Because i didn't know what the state of the hard drive would be, I didn't want to plug it directly onto my computer's main board; after all, Finagle's law was in effect and I didn't want to blow up my main board just yet. I went online and bought a SATA/IDE to USB 2.0 Adapter. Since it was a Linux based NAS, I installed Ubuntu Linux on a USB stick and booted up my laptop.
First order of business was to determine if the Hard drive would be salvage-able. As soon as I plugged in the power to the hard drive I could hear a soft whirl indicating that it was still spinning up. Since it would be the third SATA device (the first being my laptop's internal hard drive, and the DVD-ROM the second) connected to my laptop, it would have to be /dev/sdc that I was looking for. A quick peek in the boot log confirmed that the system had indeed detected the hard drive. Next up was to see if the hard drive would still operate, and which part I had to restore:
root@ubuntu:/# sfdisk -l /dev/sdc Disk /dev/sdc: 60801 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0 Device Boot Start End #cyls #blocks Id System /dev/sdc1 3 368 366 2939895 fd Linux raid autodetect /dev/sdc2 369 381 13 104422+ fd Linux raid autodetect /dev/sdc3 382 504 123 987997+ fd Linux raid autodetect /dev/sdc4 505 60800 60296 484327620 fd Linux raid autodetect
Well, well... this is interesting. Even though the NAS only had one hard drive, Western Digital still made all the partitions part of a raid set. My best guess is that Western Digital did that because the MyBook line also featured larger models with two hard drives in it; and they would be able to use the same configuration for those. In my opinion a sloppy solution, but more about that in a moment. In any case, the device showed four partitions, of which one was roughly 480GB. This was clearly my target. Since you can't just mount a raid partition, I first had to find a way to recover the raid set:
root@ubuntu:/# mdadm --examine --scan /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdc2 /dev/sdc3 /dev/sdc4 ARRAY /dev/md4 UUID=dee2de1f:eec30950:726acf0d:54e86bff ARRAY /dev/md3 UUID=e1e3ad6e:0753b0ae:86339bf0:ca6e9d49 ARRAY /dev/md2 UUID=51a4640a:c27e3a2e:4b454248:eeac819a ARRAY /dev/md1 UUID=6afd8edb:48c319d6:c6d492e3:868da876
Good news so far, Linux recognized the arrays. Now we could attempt to reassemble the raid sets:
root@ubuntu:~# mdadm --assemble --scan mdadm: /dev/md1 has been started with 1 drive (out of 2). mdadm: /dev/md3 has been started with 1 drive (out of 2). mdadm: /dev/md4 has been started with 1 drive (out of 2).
Of course, with a raid1 array the system would expect two drives. But since the NAS only had one hard drive, it would mean that the array would always be in a "degraded" state. This won't stop the array from working, but to me it seems rather sloppy. It also seemed strange to me that it wouldn't reassemble /dev/md2, but since /dev/md4 was my main concern and the hard drive would be scrapped anyway, I couldn't be bothered to investigate it further. Fortunately, /dev/md4 was reassembled properly and I was able to mount it and access my files:
root@ubuntu:~# mount /dev/md4 /media/nas_backup root@ubuntu:~# cd /media/nas_backup root@ubuntu:/media/nas_backup# ls -l total 24 drwxr-xr-x 2 root www-data 4096 2009-04-25 18:10 backup drwx------ 2 root root 16384 2002-02-28 12:30 lost+found drwxr-xr-x 3 www-data www-data 4096 2010-05-07 05:31 PUBLIC
Copying the data took quite a bit longer than I thought. It was only 93GB, but it took well over 3 hours to copy it from the hard drive to my new storage system. A possible cause for the lack of speed was the fact that it was an USB adapter, and I'm not sure if I actually hooked it up to a USB 2.0 port on my laptop. On the other hand, the hard drive wasn't in the best state either, so that could also have been a bottleneck. It was totally worth the wait though; my data was secured.
*phew*
One of my resolutions for 2012 is to generate more content for this site. This plan also includes sharing a bit more of my musical taste in the form of a "Pick of the week" section. Every Thursday I will post a new found music video with what I consider good/cool music. This will feature music videos of all kinds of genres and flavors.
So without further delay, let me present to you my "Pick of the week" for week nr. 3:
Enjoy
Let me put one thing straight, I love my Victorinox Workchamp. It's an absolutely fantastic knife. It's loaded with features, superb locking blade and very solid built... but it also weighs a ton (205 gram), which makes it somewhat less suitable for "every day carry" on a belt. I decided to move my Victorinox Workchamp to the front pocket of my Maxpedition Jumbo Versipack, where it will serve me just as fine. But that leaves an empty spot on my belt, so I searched for a decent sized, knife that is lighter, has a sturdy locking blade and a price-tag of no more than € 50,-
So, as I was browsing through my favorite knife-store, I saw it... and I just fell in love immediately. This was the perfect knife... it was under € 50,- with a sturdy locking blade: the "tactical pink" KA-BAR "Dozier" Folding Hunter knife.
This knife is very light: with 45 grams you hardly notice it when you're carrying it. I'm keeping the knife on my belt in the nylon sheath of my old Buck 450T, which seems to fit quite decently. The knife has a 7,5 cm (or 3 inch) locking blade of AUS-8 steel with a hollow grind. By default it came with a reasonably sharp flat bevel, but I don't want reasonably sharp knives... I want ridiculously sharp knives, so I re-sharpened it with my own polished convex cutting edge. The handles are made of Zytel (the same material that the sheath for my Fällkniven F1 fixed-blade knife is made of), which is lightweight yet extremely sturdy. My first impressions of the knife are very good.
So why did I go for a pink knife, when it's also available in black, od-green and other more "manly" colors ? In part because it's just easier to locate your knife in the dark or out in the woods; but also because I just like to provoke... and a pink knife is certainly a conversation piece
Friday the 13th; A perfect day to go see ReVamp and Epica, two of the best Dutch gothic metal bands, live in concert!
The video has got a fair bit of noise and some focus issues, but still... I'm very impressed with how well my little Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-W350 pocket camera performed in these low light conditions.
While driving home from a little hike out in the woods, I came across this road sign.
I guess someone didn't agree with the traffic rules 
While randomly browsing videos on YouTube, you occasionally come across a video that initially makes you go "Euh.. wtf? ".
Then, after watching it a few times, you come to realize that the whole video is actually pretty awesome!
In my opinion, this is definitely one of those videos