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.

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.

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.

Today I’ve been automating Juniper router configuration assessment. Basically issuing a “show configuration” from the CLI and then using a Nessus .nasl script to parse the results. The main problem is that JunOS uses multiline config statements, so to check if HTTP is enabled, you end up having to go through this lot: system { services { web-management { http { interface em0.0; } } } } So you have to use a combination of functions – ereg() which can look for a multiline regex and return true/false, egrep() which can return a single matching line from a multiline string and eregmatch() which returns just the matching portion of that single line!