So why does lagune time out trying to mount my external USB backup disks? Spent some time looking
through man pages and myriad sysctls without finding anything obvious. Then, just for the fun of it, I asked Google Gemini: “How do I set the number of retries for
a USB disk to become ready on FreeBSD?”
Now what's the chance of getting a useful answer to so specific a question? But I did! In
fact, a surprisingly detailed description of the situation, along with what to do about it.
But it's so complicated that I can't help thinking that there must be an easier way. There
is one, of course: just try to copy a sector from the disk before trying to mount it. It
will probably fail, but by that time the disk will be up to speed.
Another thing I forgot: syslogd should log to eureka. Done, but it needs
restarting syslogd. That shouldn't be necessary.
Display hydra:0.3 is dead! Not the monitor, just the display. Switch to server 1
and it's fine. Switch back and it's dead.
The background is understandable: I had used that monitor to look at some weirdness
on distress, the Microsoft box. Clearly it had something to do with that. But why
isn't it coming back again after correct connection? Fired up nvidia-settings and
discovered:
How did that happen? And how do I fix it? Spent some time pointing and clicking. It had a
field Configuration, but I couldn't select anything. With a bit of moving around, it
somehow came good, but this program always confuses me.
On Tuesday I considered the alternatives to Macquarie Bank'srequirement
of authenticating via mobile phone. One possibility would be to use my old mobile phone,
the one that can not longer work as a phone. My guess is that their Macquarie
Authenticator app will require the mobile phone network, even though a direct
Internet connection would be more appropriate.
But that's only a guess. To be sure, let's install it and see what it says.
Where is it? Ah, it's far too secure to say what it is. Just that black padlock
“Authenticator”, also designed to make it difficult to find in the list of apps. OK, fire
it up:
That's clever, isn't it? I never had one. So I sent mail to Peter O'Connell, asking for it
to be sent by normal post to avoid the insecurity of email. His response included:
Note, Macquarie will send you your ID number, however it has to be sent to your email address.
Under no circumstances, will they send in the mail..
Somehow every step scares me and convinces me of my suspicion that they don't know what
they're doing. Others seem to agree. Here the current ratings section on the Toyshop
page:
So what's missing for lagune? Not much, just the issues with the USB disks and the connection
with distress, the Microsoft machine. I really hate setting up Samba and Microsoft networking.
Finally got round to doing it. It wants a password! And I didn't write it down. OK, I can
set one, since it's only for Microsoft to talk to lagune. Once again I dragged out
my decades-old copy of The Complete FreeBSD. Time to add it to the new lagoon page.
Setting up on the Microsoft side worked without problems once I found their “share” page,
which seems to wander from one unexpected place to another. I never will understand
Microsoft.
With the disks, noted a reference to a port smartmontools with a
program smartctl that, with the -a option, produces much output that I must
investigate more closely.
The only other issue was for syncing to the web servers: she didn't have the ~/.ssh
files for fra.lemis.com. That was easy enough to fix. Now all we need is for her to
test it, which should come soon.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days,
but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry
a day or two after I write it.
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