QNAP freezes during RAID rebuild - buying some time

I have a QNAP TS-439 Pro II 4-bay NAS that I've owned for a few years now, and it's finally reached the point where the HDDs have started to fail. Primarily this is because the HDDs I'd installed in it were not certified for use in a NAS (WD 2TB Green) and so are prone to fail after a certain amount of use.

One problem I noticed was after I'd replaced a failed drive (I chose a 3TB WD Red HDDs for replacements) I found that another drive had failed. Upon replacing this, again another drive failed. This left me with 3 x 3TB working drives and 1 x 2TB failed drive.

Now for the weird part...

If I remove and replace the 2TB drive with a new 3TB drive, the RAID set dies, the NAS won't boot successfully and all my data is missing. If I keep the 2TB in, the system seems to work fine once booted (I think). However, if I reboot it, all my custom app configurations disappear, for example Sick Beard, CouchPotato, NZBGet, Optware, etc, and it begins a RAID rebuild process that seems to get to 80% and then freeze the NAS. Weird, I know.

So anyway, the purpose of this post was to describe a hack I found which allowed me to 'buy more time' with my current '1 x failed drive' configuration so that the rebuild process doesn't get to 80% for a very long time, while I save some extra money to buy some spare 3TB drives to copy my data off onto.

The hack involved tricking the NAS to ignore the rebuild by changing the CPU timing of the RAID device to a very low number. This is done by following these steps:

1. Open /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_max
2. Change the default value (200000) to 5000
3. Save the file
4. Open /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_min
5. Change the default value (200000) to 5000
6. Save the file
7. Reboot the NAS

I found this allowed me to use the NAS for several days without interruption. I've since upgraded the firmware on the NAS and had to repeat the process again, however it appears to have still worked.

Now I just need to buy the replacement drives!

The article where I found out about this technique was here:
http://www.corelgott.de/?p=18

I hope this is useful as a temporary measure for some of you out there.

Cheers!

Playrust

I've been playing a game with some mates called Rust (www.playrust.com). It's one of the more addictive FPS games I've played to date and I just can't seem to stop playing it. It's taken my focus away from the DayZ Standalone alpha (dayzgame.com), which is possibly a good thing.

The concept of Rust is simple: Gather resources (wood, metal, food, etc), build shelter, craft weapons for protection and survive. You start with only a rock, and must craft more tools to use to gather stone, metal and sulfur in order to make the big stuff.

It has a great base-building engine that allows you to quickly convert harvested wood (which you can gather from trees, or random placements of wood piles) into wooden planks, which can then be used to build foundations, pillars for supporting walls and ceilings, as well as walls, windows and doorways.

It's the sort of game where you need to 'grind' to get more resources so you can make your base bigger and more well-protected. Using these simple resources you can also craft survival items like hatchets, bow+arrows and even guns (once you find the blueprint plans for how to make them). Once you get further into the game, and you've learnt how to make more complex items, you can build bases out of metal in the equivalent sense as you can with wood.

It's a complex game that's hard to sum up in a blog post, however I recommend checking it out if you're into first person shooters with a construction / base-building element. Just try and stay clear of people who decide not to wear pants.

Other than that, I recommend checking it out :)

For those people that have played before, and want more help, try these sites:

Map of Rust Island: https://rustmap.net/
Wiki with everything you need to know about the game: playrustwiki.com

Cheers!

What does it cost to buy a house in Australia?

I'm in the process of finding a new house to purchase for the family and I to move into.

While I've been working with my finance broker to sort out various mortgage structures and potential purchase prices, I stumbled across a useful Australian site for calculating ballpark fees associated with the purchase of a property. This isn't by any means an exhaustive look at all upfront costs, as there are other non-bank related things to sort out like utilities / services re-connection, moving costs, etc, which all need to be factored in. This was more to help me model a few purchase scenarios so I know what capital I needed in order to purchase at varying prices and what money I'd have leftover for renovations / improvements, furniture, etc.

The site is MyBank, and the page was their Borrowing Costs Calculator:
http://mybank.com.au/cost.asp

The site was one of the more well-rounded websites that allowed me to enter my deposit values and purchase price in order to see what things like Stamp Duty and LMI would look like (Lender's Mortgage Insurance is for anyone borrowing more than 80% of the property purchase price in Australia).

Again, this isn't a perfect site, but as I mentioned it's helped me model various finance situations. Here's an example of a dummy calculation:

I hope others find this site useful.

Cheers!

What's in store for this blog

Welcome random visitor!

I know what you may be thinking: 'blogging is so late 90s.' And you'd be right. However, in my defense, I need a place to capture my thoughts when randomly browsing the net looking for useful information, and needing somewhere to store them. There are many times I'll discover a fix for a problem, or find a new site / app / piece of code that is interesting or useful that I'll forget about, or do something outside the online world that I want to post about and have just not had a meaningful, centralised place to store it. Not to suggest my blog is meaningful - far from it.

You're probably saying to yourself "why not just post stuff to Facebook." Well, I don't have a Facebook account and I don't think Facebook will serve the purpose I'm looking for anyway. Perhaps this is more of an online generic journal.

While this blog may be more public than a Facebook profile, it will most likely be visited by less people than my Facebook profile if I had one.

So anyway please sit back, relax and enjoy the very bland, uninteresting musings that will be posted here. I know I will ;)

Cheers!