Micks' Musings

This is a rant about spammers. I just received an email claiming that I have "received a Hallmark E-Card!" Several clues indicate something is wrong. 1. There is no name for the person sending it. 2. It invites you to click on a link to see the card 3. The link is to a site with an IP address (string of numbers) and not a name. It should point to "hallmark.com " as that is what the email address says. 4. Firefox thinks it is an email scam and warns you. 5. I have no friends so no one will be sending me a e-card (actually not true for me or anyone else)! The other links in the email point to Hallmark but I bet the link will bring up a nice picture of some pills. How many people click on the links in their email without checking where they are actually pointing to?

I have been fine tuning the setup on my Fedora 11 File server. I have a PrOffice (yes it is spelt with one oh) Upsonic UPS that does not come with software but had a peice of paper with a link to download the Windows version of the software. Now that I am using Linux I did a search and found the Linux version (they even had an AMD64 Linux version). Google is your friend! This works fine (it looks like a Java application and looks identical under Linux to how it does under Windows). I had lost the serial number but my "friend" provided the answer. Why is software that is tied to a particular type and brand of hardware protected by a serial number? Especially a serial number that was supplied on a small, loose, piece of paper that was probably lost five minutes after the first time the software was installed and is probably thrown away in the box nine times out of ten!

I have now commissioned our new file server. The two disks reporting reallocated sectors have stabilised and there has been no change to the number for ten days. My research (a quote from the Seagate support forums) indicated that there are a lot (maybe even thousands) of spare sectors on the 1.5TB drives so I decided to go ahead and commission the new file server after adding a sixth disk (a Samsung 1.5TB) to take the space to 7TB. Using my own blog post to add and grow the raid worked fine after I fixed the " mdadm --grow" example to include the "-n 6" parameter. Without that the extra disk was kept as a spare disk ! There is one other thing to do - use " tunefs " to remove the reserved space that Linux automatically keeps on each disk. For a storage medium why keep 5% or more unused? See http://www.walkernews.net/2007/02/28/tune2fs-increase-linux-free-disk-space/ for more details on how to do this and why you might want to. I will wait a few week...