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All posts for the month May, 2010

Wednesday Funny

An old Italian lived alone in New Jersey . He wanted to plant his annual tomato garden, but it was very difficult work, as the ground was hard. His only son, Vincent, who used to help him, was in prison. The old man wrote a letter to his son and described his predicament:

Dear Vincent,
I am feeling pretty sad, because it looks like I won’t be able to plant my tomato garden this year. I’m just getting too old to be digging up a garden plot. I know if you were here my troubles would be over. I know you would be happy to dig the plot for me, like in the old days.
Love, Papa

A few days later he received a letter from his son.

Dear Pop,
Don’t dig up that garden. That’s where the bodies are buried..
Love,
Vinnie

At 4 a.m. the next morning, FBI agents and local police arrived and dug up the entire area without finding any bodies. They apologized to the old man and left.
That same day the old man received another letter from his son.

Dear Pop,
Go ahead and plant the tomatoes now. That’s the best I could do under the circumstances.
Love you,
Vinnie

We use a couple of external hard drive enclosures for offline backups at work. The best connectivity is via eSATA (USB being a bit flakier and much slower).

It works great on my Ubuntu 10.04 install on my Dell laptop, but that is my personal box. I was able to provision a Dell desktop and a PCI SATA card with two eSATA ports. It is a Rosewill RC-209-EX with the SIL3114 chipset.

After plugging it all in, my drives were just not recognized. No matter the boot order or what I did- no go. So, I buckled and read the directions. 🙂 As it turns out, this card can only do four total SATA ports and the four internal are on by default and the two external are off. I reset the jumpers to turn on both external and two internal.

Now it detects the drives. Well, actually it detects one drive. There are two in the enclosure.

So far I have had no luck getting the other drive in the enclosure detected. This is quite frustrating.

If anyone happens to read this and know what I can do to solve this, please leave a comment. If I fix it, I will add and update to this post.

UPDATE: I have emailed Rosewill (no response yet). I also set the jumpers on the WD drives to force them to be 150 MB/s. This had no effect either. I am still without a solution and am pretty frustrated.

UPDATE 2: I heard back from Rosewill. No assistance at all, I responded- but no word back yet. I have now also tried a SIL-3512 eSATA card (the only eSATA card Fry’s had) and it does not work either. This is very frustrating.

UPDATE 3: I returned the SIL-3512 to Fry’s (no problems there) and hit up NewEgg for a SNT SNT-PCIX Card Silicon Image 3132 SATA II PCI Express 2 x eSATA Port Multiplier RAID Controller Card. It is PCI-E but I have a slot (it appears anyway) and it works with a drive array with multiple drives. About the same price as the other two as well. Why is this so hard? I should get it next week. I also ordered an additional eSATA cable so I have two. This looks really cool as well if you just need eSATA ports and you have spare SATA ones eSATA bracket.

UPDATE 4: The card I ordered from NewEgg works. Well mostly. Sometimes I do not get both drives showing up. I re-seat the cables, and power the enclosure back on and all is well. This was pretty darn annoying if I say so myself.

I spent a little time recently creating a new blog to act as a business landing page.

To make it simple, I am going to use WordPress. Actually installing WordPress is very simple; just unzip it in the right place and follow the wizard to create a wp-config.php file.

The trick I had was creating the database and user. I ran these commands:
mysql> CREATE DATABASE newdatabase;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON newusername.* TO “newdatabase”@”localhost”
-> IDENTIFIED BY “somepassword”;
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

The FLUSH PRIVILEGES command had an error:
ERROR 1146 (42S02): Table ‘mysql.servers’ doesn’t exist

A bit of google-fu revealed some SQL to run. My supposition is that during a recent upgrade of mysql server, this table became a requirement but was not created as part of the upgrade.

Here is the SQL to create an empty table in the mysql database.
CREATE TABLE `servers` (
`Server_name` char(64) NOT NULL,
`Host` char(64) NOT NULL,
`Db` char(64) NOT NULL,
`Username` char(64) NOT NULL,
`Password` char(64) NOT NULL,
`Port` int(4) DEFAULT NULL,
`Socket` char(64) DEFAULT NULL,
`Wrapper` char(64) NOT NULL,
`Owner` char(64) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`Server_name`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8
COMMENT='MySQL Foreign Servers table';

Once I created that table, the FLUSH PRIVILEGES command worked without error and WordPress did all the DB work needed without complaint.