Crazy filesystems 1

Posted by Simon Mon, 19 Nov 2007 16:45:00 GMT

Recently I invested in some new hard disks for my file server. The idea being to increase capacity (1.1TB to 1.9TB) and to decrease the power usage (10 disks to 3).

I finally got around to fitting them at the end of last week and set the computer copying all my existing data from old to new over the weekend.

However this simple operation failed, running out of disk space. So how can copying the contents of a (not full) 1.1TB file systems onto a totally empty 1.9TB file system run out of disk space!?

/dev/mapper/vg1-lvol1   1.1T  1.1T   46G  96% /u3
/dev/mapper/vg2-lvol0   1.9T  1.9T     0 100% /u4

Firstly I located where all the space on the target drive had gone:

-rwx------ 1 root  root  795G Nov 17 20:54 dsc02170.jpg

Then I just had to see where all that data had come from on the source disk...

-rwxr--r-- 1 simon 43857374 142P Oct 23  2004 dsc02170.jpg

Which looks like the reiser file system having gone a bit crazy.

Needless to say, this image is no longer readable in any meaningful way. On further checking it seems that most of the image files in the same directory are also damaged. Generally their sizes aren't crazy, but the content is wrong. :-(

Maybe one day Linux will get ZFS in a finished state.

Web browsers to scream at

Posted by Simon Fri, 16 Nov 2007 16:49:00 GMT

Thankfully I don't have to play with the details of web user interfaces all that often. But occasionally, they are forced upon me. Thankfully I know enough HTML and CSS to be dangerous!

Even with such knowledge I am still frequently amazed at the obscure browser (in this case IE6) bugs that have to be worked around.

Today's IE6 bug is that you have to force/trick it into repainting the actual a tag on :hover if you want it to considering repainting any of the children of the a tag!

Aaarrrggghhh!

See this article for all the details.

Mum recovering

Posted by Simon Fri, 16 Nov 2007 16:43:00 GMT

I've had a very busy couple of weeks with work and didn't help myself by turning last weekend into a physical (but fun) workout at Camber!

Hence my delay in finding time to write an update here. Anyway...

My Mum was able to come home from hospital towards the end of the week after her crash. While still rather achy and a little lacking in memory, she does seem to have got much better.

Hopefully in a few more weeks she will have made a full recovery.