These days, something happened to one of my external USB drives that I so far only knew from ReiserFS (which I since called ReisswolFS, German word play on "shredder" ...). But, it's not ext3 which I blame.

Short story what happened:

• Resumed the system from 'suspend'.
• I copied some files onto the first file system.
• I copied the same files to a second external disk (dual backup...)
• I copied some files from the first disk, which caused an access-beyond-end-of-disk, mounting the filesystem read only
• Unmounted the filesystem, started e2fsck
• Started copying the files from the secondary filesystem
• Got the same error on the second disk.
• Cancelled e2fsck doing more damage to the first disk.
• Shutdown and reboot
• Memcheck, three iterations. Nothing.
• Checked second disk, no errors in filesystem (!), copied the files I had issues accessing just fine.
• Filesystem on disk #1 seriously trashed.
• Had ext2fsck try to recover filesystem on disk #1
• Pretty much all data on disk #1 is now in lost+found, it seems as if all major folders were corrupted. Lots of corrupted file entries (character devices with random permissions and numbers) there, too.

What I will do now:

• Reformat disk #1, and restore it from the other backup (Extra backup for teh win! I also have a 3rd copy of about 2 months ago off-site)

As you can see, something was wrong with the system, not with the file system.

I have a strong suspect to have caused this. In case you wondered why I included "resumed from suspend" above: I've been having system stability issues with resume ever since upgrading to the Intel driver 2.9.0 and KMS (Debian unstable+testing) with kernels up to 2.6.31. In about 1 out of 5 resumes, I get a Xorg or system lockup after anything from 1 to 60 minutes. Sometimes I also experience video corruption after a few minutes, trashing some terminal emulation until the next redraw. Just before writing this email I had a typical lockup: when scrolling the terminal emulator. This has been a typical trigger for lockups. On contrast I havn't seen any such crashes (or screen corruption) on a fresh boot.

Freedesktop bug reporting the same issue closed as "not our bug, blame it on the kernel".

Note that 2.6.32 release candidate Changelog contain many changes for the intel DRI kernel driver. So the bug might already be fixed in the RC kernels.

Same report in Kernel Bugzilla is still 'NEW' though.

Related bug report in Debian, blaming it on KMS.

[Update: I've disabled KMS and upgraded to 2.6.32-rc8 and not had such a crash since. But I can't pinpoint it to one or the other yet.]

[Update: just tried another external harddisk ...

[305032.148616] EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
[305066.061708] usb 1-8.3.3: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 27
[305081.132471] usb 1-8.3.3: device descriptor read/64, error -110
...
[305147.468857] sd 4:0:0:0: Device offlined - not ready after error recovery
[305147.468880] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Unhandled error code
[305147.468886] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_ABORT driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
...
[305147.473500] WARNING: at /build/buildd-linux-2.6_2.6.32~rc8-1~experimental.1-i386-g1b8iG/linux-2.6-2.6.32~rc8/debian/build/source_i386_none/fs/buffer.c:1159 mark_buffer_dirty+0x20/0x7a()

It seems as if the USB disk stack still doesn't really survive suspends? Let me try on a fresh boot later on.

[category: /en/linux | Permalink]

When I got my Google Wave account, it took the invitation about a week to arrive. A few days ago, I got my first own invites, and invited some colleagues (in an attempt to actually find a use for Google Wave beyond "rich media live messaging"). Within a few minutes they were "in". Now I just got my second set of invites. So is Google Wave now getting ready for mass opening, rocketing user numbers?

As you might have already guessed, I'm not convinced by Google Wave. It's technically interesting and well-done. The demos are all nice. It's just that the UI in the browser is a bit fragile and cumbersome, and the big question so far is:

What does Google Wave allow you to do that you couldn't do before?

To me, there has been little actual use so far. Wave can do everything, but isn't optimal in any of them:

• You can use it for mail, but it only works with other users of Wave and lacks good offline operation.
• It beats pretty much any instant messaging in functionality, but the UI isn't well for running in background. Most IM clients have a great UI for "background" operation.
• Collaborative editing - I prefer having a real editor and real files for that. Check out Gobby for that. I've heard Wave is good for remote brainstorming, though.
• Social networking, read "facebook". Wave doesn't have all the filtering stuff that Facebook is still trying hard to get useful. Just wait until someone releases "Mafia Wars" for Wave ...
• Blogs. Sure, I could do a 'Blog Wave' and invite my friends there. Makes sense for small-audience private blogs; not for blogs like mine where I mostly write to people that I do not know.
• Games. This probably is the current killer app on Wave: Sudoku. Although the (widespread) implementation sucks somewhat. Magnetic Poetry is a nice idea, but doesn't even work in Chrome for me properly ...
• All the web 2.0 stuff just gets on my nerves. I'm not going to use it for my blog; I by design do not have comments on my blog, either. Being able to web 2.0 everything doesn't make up for a lack in benefits.

Yes, I'm aware that you should differentiate between the protocol and the ui. Still pretty much everything is currently designed for the web browser with full JavaScript and Flash capabilities.

Of course this isn't the end yet, Google Wave will evolve. Maybe into something cool, maybe it will remain just a niche thing. Maybe some cool apps will just use Wave as protocol. But I figure, I'll mostly wait for these things to happen first before I become a frequent user of Wave.

The biggest thing I see is the "spam" (this especially includes 'Quiz', Mafia Wars and similar Scamville type of 'apps' that surely will show up in no time, once Wave is open to the public). What will Wave provide to me to handle this flood of worthless information that I'm getting more and more?

P.S. Please don't bother to ask for invitations to Wave.

P.P.S. here's how to replace the odd scrollbars with the regular OS scrollbars with a really simple user style (CSS).

[category: /en/web | Permalink]