As its a bit of a slow day today and two of my three 1Tb hard disks are dying, I’m currently backing up the stuff that’s not important enough to make it into my daily rsync regimen to a stack of 80-160Gb drives (totalling about 500Gb) I have lying around in USB and eSATA enclosures.

Just noticed that as of version 3.0.8, VirtualBox has a Fedora YUM repository, so no more downloading the RPM’s and checking the website for updates. Nothin much new in this version, although I compiled the OSE version the other day and there were a few more features, mainly GUI modifications to the floppy/hard disk/ethernet areas, but also 2D acceleration; that haven’t made it into 3.0.8

Looks like my other Samsung SpinPoint F1 hard disk is dying too, this one is a year old and just click-clunked before getting a “read failure, 20% remaining” result from smartctl….. Gonna have to get my hands on some F3’s or WD Caviar Blacks soon I think, wonder if they’ll replace the 4 month one before the 1 year one dies for good, or the other 4 month one dies – I’m running out of disks large enough to backup to!

My four month old Samsung SpinPoint F1 1Tb hard disk just died on me. Apparently the ones that make this bad vibrating noise are defective, I just thought it was a symptom of spinning constantly.

Removing the drive seemed to upset the encryption of the other drives, but it turned out that something happened to the JFS journals, so when it said bad superblock/filesystem when I mounted the unlocked LUKS partitions, it actually meant you need to run fsck.jfs on the partition to recreate the journal, nice one with the nonsensical error messages there guys!

I’ve been playing with Skype lately, to further my VoIP/SIP knowledge and provide a portable way to make cheap phonecalls. I ordered Skype’s own Freetalk USB headset as its Skype-certified and forums touted Linux support. I signed up for the SkypeOut Unlimited Country plan which allows you to make unlimited calls to landlines in one country for about 3ukp per month, plus of course free Skype-to-Skype “PC” calls.

Well the first thing to do to fix the naff sound quality is remove the USB connector from the headset and just plug the two 3.5mm jacks into your soundcard – I used the front mic+headphone sockets and moved my speaker cable to the center socket, otherwise I couldn’t turn off the regular PC sounds through my monitor when making a call. That also enabled it me to use Skype4 for Windows under VirtualBox – with USB the overhead was too high I guess. So that effectively meant I could have used any PC headset, instead of one with the shortest “2.9m” cable I’ve ever seen!

I’ve finished migrating my old server to three new ones, well an email server (Germany), web server (Germany) and backup server (USA).

Things are going faster and using less memory as I’ve disabled the unused services – like no websites on the email server, no email or SSL on the web server etc.

It didn’t go without a hitch though as the host nodes were new builds, so were still being setup whilst my VPS’s were being deployed.