SWAT's blog

Even before NetworkManager came to be, connecting to different wireless networks was a annoying work. Very often networks don’t require the same configuration, so you create some nifty alias for it. My aliases have served me well in the past years, but they have their drawbacks. I was still required to type them in everytime I wanted to connect to a network, since I had no auto-connection feature. It also looked very geeky, which made me the “Linux geek” instead of the “Linux user”. Since I know that Ubuntu is a great distribution, there had to be a solution for these wireless troubles.

A while after that NetworkManager came into the picture and I thought my life was about to get a lot easier. Au contraire, my life didn’t get easier. Why? NetworkManager is a good ‘try’, but has severe drawbacks and was always ‘funky’ about my WPA2 setup. This shouldn’t be ‘funky’ since it’s simply a matter of calling wpa_supplicant with a working configuration and it works.

While I was reading my daily batch of IT news, I came across this article on Linux.com. I read through it with a lot of scepticism, since I’m a bit picky about the software I want to run. It looked very promising and minimal (like it should be) and I went to the project page. I added their repository to my sources.list, updated my list and installed wicd. I set up my WPA2 AP, set it to autoconnect and it worked. Then I rebooted and my interface went up magically! Wireless woes are over! Use wicd!

Before I had this blog, I used drupal as blogging software. After I was using it for a while, I found it bloated and it used PHP so it became less appealing to me. Apparently I ‘lost’ one precious, use full blog entry, which I had to retrieve using an old database backup. Here it is:
My HD crashed (due to power-failure) and I fixed it

Maybe this story has a strange title but it’s true. Yesterday the entire region here had no power for about 2 hours. I was just working and suddenly my PC’s and monitors turned off. I thought I did something (like consuming too much power), because I just connected another computer to the power-outlet. As I went downstairs to check the fuse-box, I saw that everything was OK. Then I went outside, talked to the neighbours and they had the same problem. Damn, total power-outage.

TV, radio, PC, internet (router), fridge, phone (digital) were out-of-order. Even my cellphone had bad reception, because the cell-stations had no power. When the power went on again, I saw the damage that was done to one of my HD’s. The horror, the corruption, the evil…

swat@voyager:~$ mount /mnt/hd200/
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdb1,
missing codepage or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail  or so

swat@voyager:~$ dmesg | grep -i hdb
[4294730.583000] hdb: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
[4294730.583000] hdb: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=183, high=0, low=183, sector=168
[4294730.583000] end_request: I/O error, dev hdb, sector 168
[4294731.923000] hdb: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
[4294731.923000] hdb: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=183, high=0, low=183, sector=176
[4294731.923000] end_request: I/O error, dev hdb, sector 176
[4294731.923000] Buffer I/O error on device hdb, logical block 22
[4294733.338000] hdb: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
[4294733.338000] hdb: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=184, high=0, low=184, sector=184
[4294733.338000] end_request: I/O error, dev hdb, sector 184
[4294734.686000] hdb: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
[4294734.686000] hdb: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=183, high=0, low=183, sector=183
[4294734.686000] end_request: I/O error, dev hdb, sector 183
[4294734.686000] EXT3-fs error (device hdb1): ext3_get_inode_loc: unable to read inode block - inode=8, block=15
[4294827.909000] hdb: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
[4294827.909000] hdb: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=183, high=0, low=183, sector=183
[4294827.909000] end_request: I/O error, dev hdb, sector 183
[4294827.910000] EXT3-fs error (device hdb1): ext3_get_inode_loc: unable to read inode block - inode=8, block=15

swat@voyager:~$ fsck /dev/hdb1
fsck.ext3: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to open /dev/hdb1
Could this be a zero-length partition?

It looks bad, doesn’t it? Luckily it could be fixed by something this simple:

mke2fs -n /dev/hdb1
e2fsck -b 32768 /dev/hdb1

Time to party, like it’s 1999