Stormsail

Yes, after a week of time and effort, Rick has finished rebuilding the top part of the back wall. Unfortunately, as Ricks getting on a bit and is no longer a spring chicken it came down to me to make lots of tea, mix up cement and run around collecting bricks so he could complete within a week. This meant collecting 320 total odd bricks from various reclamation yards during my lunch hours and then moving them out the back so Rick could use them on the wall. Unfortunately we couldn’t save that many when the wall was demolished. I’m glad it’s finished because I’m knackered but it was worth it in the end from looking at the finished job. Next on the hit list is to re-point the bottom half of the wall (both sides) and to rebuild the shed with a slate roof….

Well, not crashing down but with some brute force machine assistance. Now the back wall as been in a sorry state for a while ever since I moved in and I’ve finally got round to doing something about it with my neighbors cooperation. So using a demolition hammer we’ve removed the cracked top section and saved as many bricks as we can so Rick (our friendly builder) can rebuild it. Matt and I had a go of repairing the section of wall over the soon to be rebuilt shed and made quite a good job of it (according to Rick) but due to time constraints Rick’s going to complete it. Once the wall has been re-done, Pheeb’s and I can dig up the concrete and finish our back yard garden plan…..hopefully before the winter sets in! Stay tuned for the finished photo……

In changing anything you run the risk of running into unseen problems and that’s just what happened when I attempted to upgrade the power supply in my main system. I was upgrading to a higher capacity PSU in order to cope with the 7 disk drives, a tape device, a DVD writer, a quad core AMD processor and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 graphics card. This was because every time I tried to kick off a backup the old PSU would reset the system due to the unrated power supply and obviously I wanted to back up as much of the system as I could in case of issues. So, the initial PSU replacement to an unbranded 800 Watt PSU from Ebuyer only took 15 minutes to replace once I’d sorted out all the cables,plugs etc but the noted strangeness when OpenSolaris booted. It complained about OHCI usb errors (and stopped the keyboard/mouse from working) and ATA disk errors (which happened to be my mirrored ZFS boot device). Just in case it was a configuration error I tried booting the live OpenSolaris cdrom and got the same thing….strange. So thinking something was really wrong, I replaced the original power supply and after which I didn’t see the errors any more booting from live cdrom but had managed to corrupt my ZFS rpool….bugger. So searching on the net I noticed that lots of other folks have run into similar corruption issues and they’ve managed (by some assistance from some ZFS gurus) to get the pool back to read only mode and recover the data. There is also some mention of CR 6667683 – “need a way to rollback to an uberblock from a previous txg” which when implemented will allow the admin to rollback to a previous transaction….but not implemented until build 125 and I’m on build 111b…..bummer. After some shared shell access and some jiggery pokery by Victor and Jason they managed to get my rpool back to read only (Thanks Chaps!)….whew. Once I’d copied the data to my working pools, I re-installed OpenSolaris and then copied my root rpool data back, created a new beadm boot environment and managed to get back to where I was prior to the corruption….yay. Having spoken to another colleague at work, I’m going to try a well known PSU and see what happens…but not first without detaching a mirror or first boot from cdrom to confirm that all is well…..