David Trebacz Blog

A few months ago in another blog post I had a 1TB drive fail in my Ubuntu 12.10 linux mirror array ( http://blog.trebacz.com/2012/04/replacing-failing-drive-in-linux-raid-1.html ) . I decided to replace it with a 2TB drive to have room for further expansion. Using unequal drive sizes allows me to stagger my drive replacements I just ran out of disk space on the 1 TB partition, so I purchased a new 3TB drive. I really on need 2TB, but the Seagate 3TB drive was just to good of a price to pass up from Amazon. This is the second part of the story about adding a 3TB drive to my existing mirror and the challenges that I ran into. The whole process is just a few (11) steps 1. I checked the array to make sure everything was fine before starting. sudo mdadm --detail /dev/md0 /dev/md0:         Version : 0.90   Creation Time : Fri Mar 11 22:53:54 2011      Raid Level : raid1      Array Size : 976759936 (931.51 GiB 1000.20 GB) ...

This blog is about my experience with Illinois ComEd's (Commonwealth Edison) Residential Real Time Pricing (RRTP) electrical rate program installation process.  According to ComEd's FAQ page, "The majority of RRTP participants who participated in ComEd RRTP for all 12 months in 2010 experienced electricity savings ranging from 5% to 16% on their annual electricity bill, as compared with what they would have paid with ComEd's fixed-price rate." My friend Steve had also had an electric energy audit done and the auditor highly recommended the program. The Signup - day zero: I went to the ComEd website and signed up for the real time pricing program and the air conditioner cycling program on August 26th 2012. There is no charge to participate in either program. The premise is by charging you based on real time fluctuating electric rates and  allowing the utility some control over your air conditioner usage - you can help them to lower the cos...

I decided to try one of those DIY spray foam insulation kits to help insulate the heck out of my basement. One of the recommendations from a friend on Facebook said to "make sure you cover everything - including hair". I decided to choose the spry foam insulation kit from  http://www.sprayfoamdirect.com/ . The seemed to have a similar kit to many others and their warehouse was only a few miles from our house, which meant we could pick it up and save some shipping costs. Foam It Green 202 square feet kit Foam It Green 102 square feet kit I decided to use their spray foam 102 kit , since I only needed to do about 60 square feet of rim joist insulation. They have a good video showing the rim joist spray insulation process on their website. I should have know better and ended up buying the 202 kit  to finish the job, probably because I put it on thicker and also made sure the area was well covered. There were a...

I've been a big fan of Android's app's for many years. Lots of great free applications out there that help you do whatever - better. Couple that app environment with a smartphone, car mount, data plan, and you can have an amazing array of information to make you car trip more fun and less stressful. Here's my setup for family road trips: My Road Trip Hardware: I currently own an Motorola Droid Razr Maxx ( http://www.motorola.com/us/consumers/DROID-MAXX/better-battery/96406,en_US,pd.html ) and use their windshield mount ( http://www.motorola.com/us/consumers/Vehicle-Navigation-Dock-for-DROID-RAZR-MAXX/100141,en_US,pd.html ) with one slight modification. The current windshield mount stalk is a bit too short, so I use the old stalk from my original Droid ( http://www.amazon.com/Motorola-89396N-Window-Mount-Droid/dp/B002WC7RKU ). The extended length makes it possible to use the camera and easily keep the suction cup mount out of the pictures. The new Droid Maxx has fa...

When I upgraded the machine from 11.10 Kubuntu 64-bit to 12.04, my machine essentially became unusable until I turned desktop effects off (ALT-SHIFT-F12). The story was well documented on the internet ( http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA4ODQ - Good story on the failings of the 295.40 Nvidia driver that shipped with 12.04 LTS Kubuntu ). I suffered along not wanting to custom a version of Kubuntu expecting Canonical to relatively quickly update the version in the repositories - after all this is an LTS version. After 3 months of running my video on Kubuntu 12.04 by running desktop effects under the compositing type "xrender" for my Quadro NVS 210S/GeForce 6150LE graphics card instead of "OpenGL", I was fed up. Running under xrender was just as good as turning them off. I wasn't up to downgrading my drivers to the previous version or suffering through the continued development on the Nouveau drivers.  I even contemplated getting...

I've been successfully backing up several machines on my network with BackupPC ( Version 3.2.1). After a recent update to Kubuntu from 11.10 to 12.04 (AMD-64-bit), I'm now getting a the error message from three of my Windows boxes (2000, XP, and 7). Googling the error message did not give me any clues to why the error all of a sudden started showing up. I'm pretty sure there was an update to Samba moving from Ubuntu 11.10 to 12.04 (to version 3.6.3). In checking with other resources on the internet it would seem, that the problem stems from an update to samba that has some incompatibilities with BackupPC: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=753531 or http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=653207 Hopefully there is a better fix than reverting sanmba versions back to 3.5.11-71, since I'm not sure what other issues that may cause on my ubuntu based system. Here are a couple excerpts from the logs that show how it was working, but has ...

I've had a disk drive complaining about have trouble writing to certain blocks (specific error is I/O error, dev sdc, sector 1446901823 -across a bunch of different sectors). This raid mirror isn't supper critical, it holds backups from the other machines on my home network, but I'm starting to think it's time to replace the failing drive and eventually upgrade the size of my backup mirror (md0) partition from 1TB to 2TB. I'm using about 90% of the space right now, but probably have a good 3-4 months before I need the space. Overall, the process was much simpler than I expected and very straightforward. Other than the synchronization of the new drive the whole process took about 20 minutes. It was nice not having to do this with a system down, but I could do it much quicker having been through this test run. 1. Preparation before starting: I just wanted to gather some background on my drive system before I start unplugging and plugging bac...