Rich Rauenzahn

A few years ago we remodeled our kitchen and went with an undermount Moenstone sink. This Thanksgiving I noticed a hairline crack in the bottom. We called Moen and they were willing to give us money or a new sink as part of the warranty (which is great!), but the sink is undermounted. We'd probably need to remove the entire countertop to put a new one in, and Moen no longer makes them. Our choices were either to repair it, install a drop in sink, or maybe find another undermount sink with a similar profile. A new undermount probaby requires taking off the countertop and recutting.  A drop-in requires recutting the counter.  Ugh! So... I researched how to repair composite granite sinks.  I didn't find a whole lot of information. Some people suggested epoxy. We are one day (2015-12-19)  into our repair, still waiting for the glue to set, but I wanted to document my process. The foundation for our repair is a Simpson Strong-Tie product I found for repairing c...

Often I find myself wanting to cd back to a directory -- but never the exact previous one I was already in (i.e., cd -)!  It is usually the directory I was in just a few of cd's ago. I was considering writing a bash shell function that more or less aliased cd to pushd with some cleanup to keep the stack only about 10 levels deep. But I found someone else (Petar Marinov) beat me to this back in 2004: http://linuxgazette.net/109/marinov.html Add this code to your login shell and the last 10 directories you were in will be saved in a stack. Listing the previous directories is as easy as 'cd --' and going to a previous one is simple: 'cd -#' where # is the number in the history: [centos6:/tmp/ssh-ZhqNv10269]$ cd /tmp [centos6:/tmp]$ cd cow [centos6:/tmp/cow]$ cd fox [centos6:/tmp/cow/fox]$ cd fish [centos6:/tmp/cow/fox/fish]$ cd elephant/ [centos6:/tmp/cow/fox/fish/elephant]$ cd rhino/ [centos6:/tmp/cow/fox/fish/elephant/rhino]$ cd zebra/ [centos6:/tmp/cow...

We've been trying to purchase the Pikmin 3 DLC for the last week or so. Everytime we get through about half way through the eShop purchase, the eShop app gets an error code (useless!) and exits.  Sometimes we get further than other times, and once it fails, it seems to fail faster. Using the Nintendo Wii-U eShop seems to be a common problem found on the Nintendo forums. Originally it was an issue with the Wifi reception. But there still seems to be a few cases here and there, and we use a wired connection. I was stumped. It didn't seem to matter what time of day either. So today I was looking at my firewall logs and noticed: [4582372.494624] iptables drop ratelimit:  IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=... SRC=23.7.194.90 DST=... LEN=93 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x20  TTL=59 ID=27348 DF PROTO=TCP SPT=443 DPT=4040 WINDOW=18666 RES=0x00 ACK PSH URGP=0 A lot of those.  That's weird.  That IP is an akamai address.  And I seem to get a lot from them from akamai's port 443 to a r...

The last time I swapped the drives out in my home built NAS, I bought Western Digital Green drives.  They sounded great!  Low power, low heat, low noise... Unfortunately, they appear to not have been built for this particular application.  They auto park and the timer is set too low for Linux filesystems.  (I believe the default may be 8 seconds! http://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=78891) My drives began to give me trouble (thankfully) even before the warranty ran out.  I found the load cycle count on my drive to be extremely high - 10's or 100's of thousands.  This is way beyond the expected count. Here's how to query for it: # smartctl -A /dev/sdX | grep ^193 193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       XXXXXXX Luckily there is a solution -...

This problem had been driving me crazy for weeks.  I run a home linux server (currently Fedora Core 18) as a NAS and various other services.   Ever since I upgraded the OS disks to SSD I began getting SATA errors in my kernel logs: Jul 31 00:02:26 kernel: [20859.208310] ata3:EH in SWNCQ mode,QC:qc_active 0x7E sactive 0x7E Jul 31 00:02:26 kernel: [20859.208371] ata3: SWNCQ:qc_active 0x3E defer_bits 0x40 last_issue_tag 0x5 Jul 31 00:02:26 kernel: [20859.208482] ata3: ATA_REG 0x41 ERR_REG 0x84 Jul 31 00:02:26 kernel: [20859.208533] ata3: tag : dhfis dmafis sdbfis sactive Jul 31 00:02:26 kernel: [20859.208585] ata3: tag 0x1: 1 0 0 1 Jul 31 00:02:26 kernel: [20859.208636] ata3: tag 0x2: 1 0 0 1 Jul 31 00:02:26 kernel: [20859.208697] ata3: tag 0x3: 1 0 0 1 Jul 31 00:02:26 kernel: [20859.208748] ata3: tag 0x4: 1 0 0 1 Jul 31 00:02:26 kernel: [20859.208800] ata3: tag 0x5: 0 0 0 1 Jul 31 00:02:26 kernel: [20859.208860] ata3.00: exception Emask 0x1 SAct 0x7e SErr 0x0 action 0x6 ...

I thought this blog post by  +Matthew Ringel was a concise and useful summary of how (and when) to ask for help when stuck on a technical problem: https://blogs.akamai.com/2013/10/you-must-try-and-then-you-must-ask.html I often find coworkers skipping step #1: working at the problem a little longer and documenting/recording/reviewing what you've already tried. When I do step #1 I often solve the problem myself.  I might be in the middle of an email explaining what the problem is.  I owe it to them to explain what I've tried, what results I got, etc.  Most of the time the solution then presents itself!  I then just delete the email draft and keep plugging away. But then sometimes I wait too long for step #3 - going and asking for help. And then sometimes, I just need a rubber duck: http://www.rubberduckdebugging.com/