After my computer's power supply dying earlier this week and barely being at home, I managed to spend half my weekend catching up on my todo list - hooray!

My liqueur attempts seem to be going well. I've pulled the first two rackings off the Apple and pear schnapps, and can probably pull another two(?) off before I'll be faced with coming up with an ideal blend of each racking for a final product.

I've also pulled the leaves out of the mint liqueur, but have done nothing as of yet with the coconut - and I'm not really sure how I'm going to go with that one as it's not really like a soft fruit of leaf like the others are.

On a related note, my partner bought me some chilli plants for Christmas which have been going nuts in the sun... I'm hoping once I get some fruit I can do a chilli beer and chilli liqueur of sorts. Fun times :)

I'm also planning on growing my Naga Jolokia seeds, which I think I mentioned in a recent post - which will pack considerably more punch. Maybe some kind of hot sauce will do nicely for those.

In the meantime though, I'll have to settle for beer. Owing to my beer fridge debt I took the time out to stock up again with some: Miller's Chill; Millers Genuine Draft (at the recommendation of a colleague); Three Kings Cider; Tooheys 5 Seeds Cider; Bintang (I know, I know...); and.... James Squire IPA.

.. the IPA is an interesting one, I've heard a lot about it and I've had a few without really realising it. It's short for India Pale Ale and it's a bit different for me. I'm not generally a fan of the sharp bitterness of it, but wanted to give it a chance and especially try it with some appropriate foods. One thing though, it's definately great in summer - wet and cold... so don't be too suprised to see some foody posts coming up in relation to the IPA.

So that's about it for now, another rambly post that leads nowhere... I'm contemplating kicking off an apple cider once I offload some more wine, as well as trying out a strawberry liqueur.

Oh, and daily bike riding to my new job to offset all that delicious beer :)

As I mentioned in my previous post, I've had my Norco case sitting around gathering dust for quite a few months.

Well, all the bits and pieces finally arrived and I had a chance to build it sometime around mid-September. Boy, she's a beaut! The philosophy behind the build was to only build it once - I'm not going to build another storage chassis for the next 5+ years, just you see!

This baby is packed with:

• 1x Intel Core2 i7 930 2.80Ghz Quad-Core CPU
• 1x GIGABYTE GA-X5A8-UD7
• 1x Corsair HX3X12G1333C9 (12GB DDR3 Kit)
• 1x Zotac NVIDIA GT210
• 1x Corsair TX950 Power Supply
• 6x Western Digital WD2001-FASS Hard Drive
• 1x Seagate Momentus XT 320GB Hard Drive
• 2x AOC-USAS-L8i Controllers

For the most part, the build went quite smoothly - but I've had a few follow-up problems which have caused me a large amount of grief.

The first big problem I had was that drives were not coming up on the controller very reliably. A friend with the same chassis had warned me that there were potential problems with the SFF-8087 jacks, but that it was easily solved.

After about a week of troubleshooting, it appears the cables I have were having two major problems. The first is the problem above - the chassis support is so low that the clip is held down (in the unlock position), so that if you move the case, the cable might rattle loose. This is easily solved by removing the chassis supports, detaching the backplanes and using the trusty dremel to create clearance.

Problem the second, it turns out that the cables I have also have extra moulding - pushes against the chassis supports so the contacts on the cable aren't making contact properly. Instead of dremel'ing the chassis again (I was quite sick of pulling apart the bays at this point), I got a scalpel to the moulding and cut away the bits that weren't needed, as they were cosmetic anyway. Figuring this out took another week (hooray).

Hooray, the box lives! After initialising the six drives in a RAID 5 array and laying down a nicely aligned EXT-4 partition, I decided to crank up a benchmark!

Running Bonnie++ against the virgin filesystem yielded 582 MiB/s sequential reads and 425 MiB/s sequential writes. Boo-fucking-yeah.

That done and dusted, given it's my first time doing a software RAID with all my worldly data on it, it's time for testing RAID failure and recovery - and it's a good thing I did.

It turns out this box has another suprise in store for me. Adding a drive to the chassis causes existing drives to drop out of the Software RAID. Whoops, not good. Actually - given that >2 drives fall out of my RAID5 , that's very bad. As in, showstopper.

It's been about a month since I hit this problem - and with taking on the Treasurer role at WAIA and a hectic month at work - I've had stuff all time to look into this properly.

For a good while I've been troubleshooting on the premise that the Linux mptsas driver for this LSI chipset SAS controller card is buggy (and it is). I've since switched to running a 2.6.32 kernel (an Ubuntu backport with all the Canonical patches is available from the Kernel PPA). The 2.6.32 contains a much newer mptsas driver which resolves a lot of bugs. I'm not sure it's the latest 4.18 version which also addresses a very dramatic smartctl issue (cheers to MetalPhreak on IRC for the heads up), but it seemed like the path to go.

When disconnecting the drives, dmesg would pop up saying all the drives had failed and then show them again under new device nodes. I had primarily been testing with a single row of drives, and was assuming the driver was changing drives (for some reason) because a disk had come up on a lower ID.

It's only this evening, where I've been alert enough to approach the problem sensibly that I've noticed what the problem is. Firstly, the drives on the backplane are HIGHER Port IDs, and secondly (this is important folks) - all the drive activity lights were flicking on when a new drive is inserted.

This is a completely different scenario, in the nice sensible land of hardware. I like it here, there aren't arrogant software maintainers who treat you like a numpty - but that's a story for another time.

So either the controller is resetting all the drives on those ports (unlikely), or the backplane card is causing a power interruption or SATA connection drop when the other drive gets connected. Fortunately, I have a SFF-8087 to 4x SATA breakout cable, and it's easy to test on the bench.

Testing with the backplane removed and hoo-fucking-rah, none of the other drives reset. So, it's an issue with the backplane card. Not this one specifically, all of them.

So for now, I've shot the folks over at Norco an email asking for help, and hope it's something simple like a known problem (replacement cards), or a jumper setting.

For now I'm not using this box, as I can't trust the backplane cards - which is a severe dissapointment, but hopefully Norco look after me and can fix the problem so the chassis is hot-swappable as advertised. I'm going to be very upset if they can't (or won't) fix it.

But for now, after this essay of a post - I'm off to bed where I'm a viking!

So despite my University gripes and whatnot, I've been attempting to get credit for my previous studies towards a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science (BS in CS, how appropriate).

Unfortunately for me, my previous University's online handbook does not accurately describe the subject matter of each unit. Given that this information is used by other institutions to determine course credits, one must rely on their archived copies of Unit Outlines for this purpose.

Which I don't have. Any more, at least. Meaning that the 50% of credits I have towards my degree were translated into two credits at the new institution, unless I can obtain copies of the unit outline from my old university.

After six months of speaking to my old unversity, they've stated that:

* Unit Outlines (prior to Oct 2009) have never been mandatorily kept
* The Dept of Computing does not archive these
* Only the lecturer has copies, if at all

Thankfully I was able to find someone in the University's information management team, who actually spearheaded the effort to even get unit outlines archived - who has chased up the school and made a formal request on my behalf for the information - to no avail.

Sigh, looks like I'll be doing a management degree instead.