vimeo.com/1016340697

Slapped an ancient LoL Shield onto an old Arduino, printed a diffuser, smashed into a funky old photo frame, and now it plays Conway’s Game of Life forever. Yay, did something with all the stuff in my parts buckets!

#arduino #leds

Packeted the network with four multicast UDP streams of television content, and got ‘em to show up in netcat and ffmpeg. Pretty fun!

#multicast #udp

Metallica concert outfit; I’m hella metal af.

#metallica #concertfit #lolmetal #oldaf #loud

Upgraded Friendica to the latest stable that was released this weekend, and figured I'd do a round of upgrading everything for fun. Except, my FreeBSD pkg upgrade command bombed out during its PHP upgrade and actually hard-locked its VM guest inside Proxmox, leading to a 36-hour outage of my home server.

Initially, it seemed that my ol' FreeBSD guest VM had a kernel panic, causing the UFS file system to corrupt a directory inode.

panic: ufs_dirbad: bad dir

Which sucked, because repairing the problem meant removing that inode, which wiped out /usr/local/lib.

[root@irev]#0:~# sync
Aug 19 00:56:38 irev kernel: (da0:vtscsi0:0:0:0): WRITE(10). CDB: 2a 00 10 24 fe a8 00 00 c0 00 
Aug 19 00:56:38 irev kernel: (da0:vtscsi0:0:0:0): CAM status: SCSI Status Error
Aug 19 00:56:38 irev kernel: (da0:vtscsi0:0:0:0): SCSI status: Reservation Conflict
Aug 19 00:56:38 irev kernel: (da0:vtscsi0:0:0:0): Error 5, Unretryable error
Aug 19 00:56:38 irev kernel: g_vfs_done():da0p2[WRITE(offset=112292737024, length=8192)]error = 6
Aug 19 00:56:38 irev kernel: g_vfs_done():da0p2[WRITE(offset=112292745216, length=8192)]error = 6
Aug 19 00:56:38 irev kernel: UFS: forcibly unmounting /dev/da0p2 from /
Aug 19 00:56:38 irev kernel: g_vfs_done():da0p2[WRITE(offset=112292753408, length=4096)]error = 6
Aug 19 00:56:38 irev kernel: g_vfs_done():da0p2[WRITE(offset=112376184832, length=8192)]error = 6

I'm still confused how a virtualized/software fake filesystem can have bad diskdrive blocks, and even more so when its in a ZFS RAID. Shouldn't ZFS catch that one of the physical SSDs was crapping out, writing incorrectly? Or during the weekly ZFS scrub?

Realizing that my pair of 5-year-old SATA SSD drives were well over double of their wear-life, I rolled out and picked up a pair of 1TB SSD drives. Thanks to succinct directions in a couple of blog posts out there, I was able to replace both old SSD drives with the new ones, grow my ZFS space, and resilver everything easily, in under a half-hour.

Even with the new physical drives, the guest VM FreeBSD server's virtual "disk" was still corrupted. I wasn't able to run a badblocks or smartctl scan of the poor ol' disk image, and anytime I tried to re-install anything that was toast from /usr/local/lib not having any supporting files, the kernel would panic again.

I had to spin up a fresh new FreeBSD guest VM server in my Proxmox host, and pull together all the services, programs, and stuff that makes my server do the stuff I want. However, I couldn't copy configuration or home files over to the new box, because the old box couldn't run rsync anymore. With patient hand-holding, I recompiled rsync and brought over 300GB of files and configs. Once the new box was behaving nicely, I told Proxmox to swap the virtio "ethernet" MAC addresses around between the two guests, and new FreeBSD guest took over.

I ran into some challenges with Apache and PHP not running my users' websites as their user names & permissions. This took a while for me to hammer out because of snags in the new installation that I didn't remember from several years ago when I assembled the original server. There's a thing in /etc/make.conf that needed to be configured for compiling mod_suexec, how to compile Apache to pre-fork workers for each user, and compiling mod_fcgid all special. This took forever for me to find the right combinations, grrr.

36 hours of downtime, I'm a little disappointed in myself that all this took so long to iron out, but hurray that I was able pull it off, 'specially after so many years of me being out of the computars hackings field.

The pirate shirt is far more the costume than the tail, the mermaid half is so natural and fun.

Photo Credit: @lindseyschifferl
Crown: @kittiestrinketsandtreasures
Jewelry: @blackrunecreations
#mermaid #mermaidtail #mermaidlife #reallifemermaid

The internet is for fish pictures:

Mermaid me relaxing on a summer afternoon.

Photo Credit: Lindsey Schifferl
#mermaid #mermaids #mermaidlife #reallifemermaid

The internet is for cat pictures:

#cats #catpictures

I miss LiveJournal, LittleLogs, and Twitter. So this is my attempt to do dumb web logs, status updates, and achievements.

I like being a mermaid, playing Overwatch, and computars.