I can’t think of any sane reason to reverse proxy Trac when you can serve it up under Apache over SSL, except when you can’t. I backported the latest version of Trac, 0.10.2, to Debian Sarge. The process was quite painful, but the result won’t run under mod_python without some additional backporting, though ultimately that may have been easier.

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For years, I’ve been putting off locating some kind of catalog system for my VHS cassettes. As the years passed, DVD has become pretty ubiquitous. Meanwhile, I still had not adopted a catalog system and the problem of what I have locally available remains. Finally, I decided to search the usual places, Freshmeat and SourceForge, for something to fill the bill. I eventually settled on VCD-db, which is the (only) Web based, platform agnostic cataloging system for media I could find that appears to be in active development. Another option was a Java based system still maintained, but given my dislike of Java and loading JDKs on all my systems, I decided to skip it.

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The Web site Matt’s Computer Trends has followed the price per GB for hard disks dating back to 1995 and generated some interesting graphs and discussion. Though I rarely link elsewhere, I found this article particularly interesting given my recent spat of purchasing several large ATA drives.

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Prelude.

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It seems my Toshiba 20GB 2.5″ (second failure) and my Seagate 300GB 3.5″ failed within the span of two weeks. Toshiba’s RMA policy is far better than Seagates, even if Seagate offers an additional two years of warranty. A five year warranty is somewhat diminished if you have to pay for an expedient replacement. Toshiba is willing to charge your credit card and replace the defective disk immediately, crediting your card back when the defective disk is received. (Of course later I learned just how bad of an idea it is to ever give a company a deposit in exchange for warranty service.)

I’ve had some moments of late, so I thought I’d finally reorganize all music files. Everything’s in MP3 format, since that is all that plays on my Sony S2. However, nearly to the last file the MP3 ID3 tags are incomplete or simply missing. Years of poor ripping seems to have taken its toll.

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For a long while I had an extra partition on my Windows laptop, a second primary partition, that I had formatted as FAT32. I used it for my Knoppix /home image and whatnot.

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I thought I’d swap over to my 3Ware Escalade 6200 and run 40GBG x 2 in RAID 1, but it was not to be. After migrating all my files over from my Quantum Atlas 10K2 9.2 GB SCSI disk and my /home from my single 40GB ATA disk, I started experiencing filesystem errors rather immediately. First it was only on the XFS filesystem, but soon I started seeing input/output errors on files on my ext3 filesystems. After running a memtest86, I came up with no bad RAM. Spending more time swapping back to the original configuration without the 3Ware card, the system is stable again. I’ve had that 3Ware card for six months, but never tested it. I guess it was dead on arrival. At $20 for the card, it was worth the risk. I could run software RAID, but don’t really feel like it. I’d rather send the data once to the hardware RAID controller than twice on the bus to each ATA disk. Plus, I’d need to install an PCI ATA controller to obtain enough free ports to run a disk per port. Ah well. Perhaps I’ll buy a 36GB SCSI disk instead…

I finally upgraded to WordPress 1.5.2.

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Yep, it looks like my replacement Toshiba laptop hard disk from February is failing. It’s doing the same song and dance. It’s making some rather disturbing noises. I suspect within two weeks, like the previous hard disk, this one will simply stop spinning up. No disk I/O errors, yet, but they’ll be soon to come. I have already contacted Toshiba’s RMA department. I hope my replacement is still under warranty.

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Apparently it’s hardware death week. So far, my speakers are acting up, my MS optical mouse is refusing random right clicks, and my 512MB DDR fails consistently under memtest86 on test 5, the last pattern.

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After some more testing, I found Luma fails to use the attributes that Mozilla Thunderbird’s AB feature expects. So, stuff like a person’s address, which is visible to Luma when I browse my LDAP tree, is not visible to me under Thunderbird or SquirrelMail’s ldapquery plugin.

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Recently, I have been toying with using LDAP to handle names, addresses, phone numbers, and thelike. After setting up LDAP, I configured Mozilla Thunderbird to speak with my LDAP based addressbook. It works, sort of. Apparently there are a great many issues that still need to be addressed in Thunderbird. Fortunately, I’m a single user, so I can work around the issues.

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After some fiddling I managed to install a recent experimental build of OpenWrt on my Linksys WRT54G v3. It’s spiffy so far.

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What was originally a small issue with the latest KDE packages in Debian turned out to be a bit more than I thought it would be. I ran into the dreaded “Initializing Devices” KDE startup issue. After removing all my KDE related directories in ~, it was still broken. I decided finally it wasn’t worth the effort, so I decided I’d revert to my snapshot of the media laptop downstairs from the previous day.

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