Well, it’s been another long gap since the last update… What a surprise eh?

We’ve just come back from 10 days in the sunny (ha ha) South of France. I say ‘ha ha’ since all but the last few days seemed to disappear in the torrential rain and thunderstorms — heck, even the motorway between Monaco and Italy has been shut for over a week! We did however have a really lovely time including nice meal for my birthday (21, for real!), various days out, etc…

Yesterday something went wrong with Baldrick, very much like it did back on the 1st of July, where PostgreSQL locked up in IO and no number of kills solved the problem. One reboot and a kernel update (while I was at it…) later everything seemed to be working fine again. Strange. This morning I woke up to find MySQL had gone crazy and was eating CPU trying to access a corrupted table, which I can’t figure out either. All fine again now. Very strange.

I’ve also been experimenting with IPMI, originally to get sensor values from my server for things like temperatures and fan speeds. That’s when I got more interested and found out all sorts of very interesting swanky features like being able to remotely retrieve this information and, probably the most useful, being able to remotely cycle power in case the box crashes (even though I can ask 49pence to do that for me, albeit with a delay).

Just while double-checking Baldrick was working OK at the airport, I noticed Gromit‘s battery was running low very quickly, and although it lasted a good while after getting down to 1%, I’ve now discovered my battery is on its way out. Apparently, a battery that only at the start of the summer was rated C+ and very good for its age is now “very poor” and has less than a quarter of its original capacity. That’s £82 that is!

Another thing on the shopping list…