it’s unix, not eunuchs

I recently bought a Canon Pixma MX700 Office All-On-One Inkjet Printer (2186B002). It’s a flatbed scanner, fax and printer combo. I mainly purchased it because it gets pretty good reviews for it’s ability to scan in documents straight to PDF, which is something I desire as I continue to annihilate my hardcopy records. I’m mainly getting rid of documents because I take better care of my digital records. I actually back up my digital records and even better I use them as I can search quickly through them and find what I need.

Now I’m pretty picky about the hardware I buy, so I looked over the reviews for a few weeks. I was quite happy with the price and when it came in I promptly installed the software and hooked it up, but scanning was not working at all for me. I would press the scan button and the Scanner would happily tell me that it was “Processing… Please wait momentarily.” After a minute or so the printer would return to it’s original screen, not giving me an error, but also not performing any scanning. I could tell it wasn’t scanning as the lamp wasn’t moving back and forth. So I tried to make some copies and that didn’t work as well. I began to panic, wondering if this printer would only work on Vista or some other new technology.

I tried Canon’s web page but it wasn’t very helpful and neither were google searches for this problem. Eventually I realized that I had plugged the printer into a USB1.1 interface. I had assumed that since this was not a data intensive device a 1.1 interface would be fine or that the printer would warn me about this. Unfortunately, that’s not true. So I moved the cable to a 2.0 port and now I’m scanning like a champ. If you run into this, I hope this helps.

My hard drive woes are fixed. Remember that hard drive I bought for the DVR? Finally got it returned to newegg(it died shortly after I started using it.) Now I tossed it in my main computer that’s been running poorly lately. So I mounted it up on my sata channel. At first it wouldn’t mount. Checked the manual and find that I have to set a DIP switch. Got that knocked out and then the OS blue screened. Crossed my fingers and just tried again. It booted.

And surprise surprise….it turns out I have on-board SATA raid. So install the drivers and get moving. In the meanwhile I pull up the PDF on the hardware. Even better. The system doesn’t have to build a RAID from scratch. I can move data to this drive then add a backup drive later on and it will migrate the data to the new drive. So next paycheck I’ll dump $110 into another Seagate Barracuda at newegg and I’ll be sporting two RAIDs on the same system. Plus I can put a new XP load on this system(it’s 30 months old.) and really enjoy life.

my stupid file server is messing up again. what in the hell? I ran a sanity check on the RAID this morning and it failed, so now it’s rebuilding. I’m beginning to believe this rocketraid 1640 is a not much good.

anyhow, off for juevos rancheros from my favorite waitress.

second time in two weeks. sure it was only a few minutes. but it destroyed my RAID last time. You know, the big 400GB mirror? Yup, it’s toast.

Guess I’ll have to look at an UPS.  this is getting silly.

One of my computers blew a motherboard a few days ago. It’s an old duron 1Ghz system that isn’t worth fixing. Instead I’ll throw in a new mobo and processor. Probably will set me back 100-200 but it’s my raided file server, so I need to get it back up and running. I could also buy a wal-mart $188 linux system. But I despise customer support so much, I think I might prefer to just buy the hardware I prefer and know how to troubleshoot.

This is just a note for myself. Read if you like

On hold for 8 minutes. Stacy answers the phone. Asked for a manager as I have a problem that has been ongoing for months. Her manager is not there. Can I leave a number and my name and have the manager call me back? No, she can not promise me that he will call me back. I explained that I called on March 22nd and was promised a call back by March 29th. Call back did not occur. Stacy put me on hold.

13 minutes into the call.

PBX is still messed up. Hold music cuts out all the time.

17 minutes into the call. She is still waiting to see if she can get me a supervisor. Placed back on hold.

23 minutes into the call.

Stacy comes back on and tries to convince me that she can fix my problem. I explain the problem. She had no ideas and places me back on hold. 27 minutes into the call.

35 minutes into the call. Stacy tells me a manager/supervisor is available. I’m put back on hold.

39 minutes into the call Paula joins the call.

In an attempt to keep the conversation short I told Paula that I am a cheapskate and the house is cold. Yet the system keeps rebooting. Paula harangued me about the overheating issue. I had to assure her repeatedly that no the device was not in an enclosed space(like an entertainment center) and did not have anything(even a “piece of paper”) placed on top of it. Because manufacturing and installing a device in peoples homes that could malfunction if you put a piece of paper on it is such a great fucking idea. Anyhow I also mentioned to her that since they’ve already sent two people onsite to investigate that they would have found an issue with the install if there was a problem.

42 minutes into the call and I’m back on hold.

45 minutes into the call and Paula comes back on. Security device is installed on the box. If it doesn’t respond in a timely manner they will reboot the box. That has been disabled. Low signal issue. I explained that the other two techs haven’t seen this low signal problem. Turns out that there is an issue in the area that may be causing the low signal issue.

Credit offered on the account for the on-demand and dvr service. She will check my signals tomorrow and call me back.

Pointed out that I’ve been on the phone for 50 minutes. At a dime a minute that equals the $5 she wants to credit me. Additionally why didn’t I get called from the last on-site visit? For the money it costs to send a person on-site it certainly deserves a call-back. Credit given is 18.86.

Call finished 56 minutes in.

Another 56 minutes of my life lost to poor customer service. Maybe I should just start reading more.

Nothing says unhappy like moving 10 GB from a non-raided non-linux device to a raided linux device…..

ONLY TO REMEMBER THAT YOU FORMATTED THE RAIDED LINUX DEVICE AS A NTFS DEVICE THAT WON’T WORK ONCE I LOAD LINUX!!!

SO NOW I HAVE TO MOVE ALL THE DATA BACK AND REFORMAT THE RAIDED VOLUME! THEN I CAN FINALLY START LOADING LINUX!

GRRRRRRRR

did a little more analysis on the messed up system. I did install new hardware recently, so I disconnected it and it’s not solved the problem. I also installed some new drivers recently, but I backed them out and the reliability is still not high. I think I’m going to roll my system restore points all the way back to last Sunday and see what that gets me.

I’m also looking at the firmware level on the motherboard and it’s pretty old. They have a new revision available, but I’d like to back out my system restore points and see what I get. Then I guess I could attack the firmware upgrade and then possibly install the new hardware again.

Works kind of annoying at the moment. I’m on a 3 person team now. I don’t really like being on small teams. The on-call is pretty tight and if you’re the technical guy you’re basically on-call all of the time. Then this holiday my boss decides to head to South Dakota and my other co-worker takes off for the whole weekend too. I’m on-call, so I shouldn’t gripe so much, but seriously we’re in the middle of a horrendous migration and we have several outstanding production issues. There’s a time to step up to the plate and no one did.

I mean, basically at this point my days go kind of like this.

1. Wake up. This can happen at any time. It happened at 3AM today.
2. Figure out what broke while I was asleep. This may take a while. I try and eat if I can while I’m figuring it out.
3. Triage. Fix things that are horribly wrong.
4. Work-out. This usually means go for a run. This seems to be upsetting my co-workers but seriously I’m working a ton of hours. If I don’t get in the early morning run it just won’t happen. Only problem is that some nights I’m up to 3AM working on problems and then I sleep in(if I can.) but I still go running after my triage.
5. Official work begins. Most days this is where I make it into the office. If the boss is in then I’ll review with him what I’ve recently found and am concerned about. I get my priorities from him and then go work them.
6. Eating. It occurs at my desk as the day progresses. If I don’t pack a bunch of food it’s guaranteed that I’ll be stuck at work and grumpy. Menu plans are really helping me with this.
7. Second Workout. This doesn’t happen too often, but if things seem in hand and I’m feeling good I’ll jaunt out on the bike or swim or something.
8. Work some more. At this point I’m trying to shut the day down. By now we need to know what work we have to do tonight, who’s going to do it, do we have procedures, and figure out who’s going to be in the next day.
9. Drive home. Before this happens I usually have something to kick off. Some job that’s not done yet. So I start it running and head home.
10. Work more. I get home, login and see how things are going. I may be able to grab food at this point, just sort of depends on how the task is going.
11. Chores. Yeah right. Some nights I get stuff done. Most I don’t. The house stinks of cat, dog, and me and I don’t even notice anymore. Friends don’t come over too often.
12. Work more. I’m running about 70% of the events at this point. So if there’s night work to be done, I’ll be up doing it. I don’t sleep well early in the evening so it’s rare for me to nap before the work gets done.
13. Send out my final emails for the night. They detail what happened and let everyone know that YES I’m still up and working. I don’t even state that I’ll be in late the next day anymore. If they can’t figure that out I’ll rip their heads off.
14. Sleep. Fitfully and usually on the couch.
15. (REPEAT AS NECESSARY)

Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy to be gainfully employed, but I wish my co-workers would pick up a bit of the slack too. I think one thing that really pissed me off last weekend is my co-worker Chris asked if I could cover his on-call on Sunday because they’re celebrating Thanksgiving. And yet I’m stuck being on-call and can’t visit with my parents during the official on-call rotation. I mean my parents piss me off and all, but I’d like to see them occasionally. It helps them to not nag me for a few months. They can verify that I’m alive and not dead in the bottom of a barrel. Somehow the telephone can’t fix that fear with them.

But back to Chris. I figure, hey, if you’re doing Thanksgiving a week early, why don’t we just trade the whole week. You’d not have on-call during your family celebration and likewise for me. Oh no, that’s no good because he really NEEDS his vacation. Also, he wasn’t asking to just swap one day of on-call with me, he was flat out asking that I work one of his days with no retribution.

At that point I pretty much just said, NOPE, sorry I’m going hunting on Sunday I can’t help you. And despite all that I still got called on Sunday to work a problem. And it’s a problem that I had already worked once and wrote a document on how to fix it. I published the document to the group. This is what I mean about small teams and being the technical guy.

And seriously the guys don’t really understand that this isn’t going to work in the long-run. I’m running a good bit now. But wait until it warms up and I’m riding 5 hours each weekend. But hey, that’s a management problem I suppose. Well, I’ve ranted enough. It’s time for me to go check and see if any of my processes need attention. Maybe I’ll have some breakfast. A little protein shake or something.

So we have escalated on Sun enough that they brought in an expert, Fred Munday.  He reviewed the work, our procedures, and they even tried performing the event for us once.  It turns out we have one of the largest iPlanet LDAP systems in the world.

On an impulse, Fred just took the binary file itself from the original master LDAP, moved it over, and started the backup master LDAP process.  Theoretically this shouldn’t work.  But it did!

I’m actually writing this post years after this, so the date of the fix is an estimate.  If I recall correctly, one of engineers also realized that the file transfer between the two boxes was taking too long.  He figured out that the routing was set up wrong and it was going over a Gigabit NIC configured to run at Fast Ethernet(10% of it’s function) speeds.  So he set up the copy to run over another Gigabit NIC and that really increased the speed of the transfer.  Not by 900%, but much faster.

event didn’t succeed. AGAIN! I’ve been doing this same procedure for about 10 days now. It’s never worked. Not once!  We’re trying to get a multi-master replication in place where data is synchronized in both the LDAP masters.  So you export the data to a LDIF file, copy it over to the backup master and import it.

Unfortunately it takes close to 24 hours to perform the export, and 20 some-odd hours to transfer it to the other system and then more than 24 hours to import it.  Then the changes that have occurred in the last 68 hours on the original DB have to be synced up to the backup master.  But we only retain the last 72 hours of changes and it takes more than 4 hours for the final synchronization to catch up.  So some of the changes never make it over and you have an imperfect mirror.

Additionally the migration is now approaching. Which means more sleepless nights! I pretty much need to just understand that I’m going to be in and out of the office for a few hours at a time for the next few months. I need to give up and just forward my desk phone to my mobile and put an out of office sticker on my monitor or something.