Saturday, 1 June 2024	Dereel	Images for 1 June 2024
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Winter without heating

Topic: general

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Today's the first day of winter, an ideal time for the air conditioner to fail, and fail it did.

Well, it ran, sort of, but it barely heated. Once again I had the errors 30 (trip lock) and 6 (High Discharge Temperature). And after power cycling after an error 6, I briefly saw ridiculously high temperatures in the zone controller after the power-on sequence, up to 51°.

And that rings a bell. Isn't that the critical point of the refrigerant? Could it really be that it's getting too hot? And then again there's this strange 138° C value for error 6. Could it be that they confuse Fahrenheit and Celsius? 138° F is 58.9° C, high enough to be an issue and close enough to 51° to be plausible. It doesn't explain why the temperature appeared in the zone controller, which should have been showing the room temperature (round 17°), but I've seen something like that before under normal circumstances. 30.6° rings a bell.

Still, what does it all mean? Under what circumstances would the refrigerant get that hot? Apart from that, all points to lack of refrigerant. Hopefully I can get Tony to come quickly.

Another power issue

Topic: technology, general, opinion

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As a result of the air conditioner issues, I listened carefully to what it was doing. And then round 7:10 it just cut out, stopped dead.

That's unusual. Normally it gradually winds down. Damn, what is it this time? Into the office for some reason, where I saw the display on the ATA: only 2 LEDs on, out of 4. That's a reasonable first indication that we're off the net.

What does the NTD say? All looks normal, for once. But the display on hydra was funny: window manager gone. A look on eureka confirmed my worst suspicions: Boot:. Somehow it had restarted. Power issue? That sounds like eureka, and it would explain the air conditioner (which in the meantime had started limping on again).

The usual fun getting eureka up again, except that this time I couldn't get the web browser to connect. Squid wasn't running. Started it, getting an unexpected error in /var/log/squid/cache.log:

2024/06/01 07:28:31 kid1| cannot change current directory to /usr/local/squid/cache: (2) No such file or directory

Yes, the directory didn't exist. But that wasn't the first time the message appeared:

2024/01/24 08:40:26 kid1| cannot change current directory to /usr/local/squid/cache: (2) No such file or directory

And that's pretty much the last thing that squid had to say before today. It appears that it hasn't been running since January. The browsers on hydra don't use the proxy, and maybe the ones I have been using on eureka don't either; at one point I was using three different proxies depending on the display.

Yet another untidy end that requires more time than I want to invest.

And then, of course, tiwi had also restarted. And this time, once again, no display. Turned the TV on, rebooted, and all was well. My best guess now is that the display card can't identify the TV if it's not turned on. It doesn't explain, though, why this time I didn't see the boot messages.

Five years of phone smart

Topic: history, technology, general, opinion

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Five years ago today I grumbled about the same things that still annoy me with Android. Now I need a new phone just to be able to make calls. At the time I wrote:

I'm thinking of reverting to my old steam-driven mobile phone: at least I can always make calls and terminate them without scratching my head.

Of course, that's no longer a solution either. If my 3 year old phone can't make calls after the end of August, certainly no steam-driven phone will.

More searching. Maybe I should just buy a cheaper phone. About the only thing that irritates me about them is that it could be underpowered, like the Xiaomi Redmi 9A. Juha Kupiainen pointed me at JB HiFi, who have a couple of Xiaomi phones for sale. Maybe they've done their homework, and they're the best choice. It doesn't mean I have to buy them from them, of course.

Two years of core, over?

Topic: history, technology, opinion

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Two years ago today I became a member of the FreeBSD Core Team. It should now be over, but for reasons to which I wasn't privy (midnight teleconferences), it has been delayed. As I said at the time “Video meetings aren't going to work effectively. ”

So now we're hanging on to our power for another few days. The elections are almost over, and after several weeks, only 52% of developers have voted. Why? Apathy, I suspect. I certainly failed in one of my stated goals, to make the Core Team more visible. But it seems that I was the only one who wanted to do that. I certainly haven't nominated myself this time round. I belong to another generation, literally: the youngest member of the current core team is 47 years younger than I.

Porting enblend 4.1.4

Topic: technology, opinion

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House photo day again today, and I still haven't ported the last functional version of enblend to hydra. Tried again today, with limited success. For some reason it tried to refer to strerror_r() as returning a string, when in fact it returns an integer.

OK, not an issue, hack the source. Oh. The whole semantics are different. But it seems that the port had prepared for that, and it had alternative code for what proves to be the POSIX version (the other version is the GNU version; rms has something to answer for). But try as I might, I couldn't persuade it to accept my hacks.

OK, this is silly. The obvious thing is to use the FreeBSD Ports Collection framework, which I still have at /home/src.local-and-old/FreeBSD/svn/ports-rot0/graphics/enblend/. I wonder what horrors it has in store for me.

Sunday, 2 June 2024	Dereel
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More air conditioner pain

Topic: general

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I left the air conditioner off overnight. It was another cool night, and about the only effect of me leaving it running was that it would keep me awake wondering what was happening. Even when I turned it on, it didn't seem to make much difference: it didn't go beyond 20° until 13:00. Nothing for it: call Tony Nesci first thing tomorrow morning.

No mail!

Topic: technology, opinion

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Into the office this morning to discover that mail delivery had stopped during the night. Further investigation showed that the root file system on eureka was full.

Why? Lots of searching with find didn't find anything obvious. No new large files in the last 24 hours. But looking through the backup logs gave me a clue: it happened during backup. And then looking at eureka from tiwi gave me the clue:

=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/9) ~ 1 -> df
Filesystem          1048576-blocks      Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
eureka:/videobackup         39,662    31,535   4,954    86%    /videobackup
eureka:/photobackup         39,662    31,535   4,954    86%    /photobackup
eureka:/                    39,662    31,535   4,954    86%    /eureka
eureka:/home             3,705,520 2,667,836 741,242    78%    /eureka/home
eureka:/Photos           7,629,565 6,905,419 647,849    91%    /Photos
eureka:/dump                39,662    31,535   4,954    86%    /dump

That may look like 6 file systems, but in fact it's only 3. For reasons that I can no longer confirm, /videobackup, /photobackup and /dump all got mounted on the root file system. The insidious thing is that files in these directories aren't visible locally, only via NFS. And of course I've been there before; the last point in cold start reads “Check