Category Archives: Technology

ReadyNAS and SMART Errors

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As some of you may be aware, I don’t put a whole lot of stock in the “SMART” feature of hard drives.

Rarely have I had the SMART capabilities of a hard drive actually tell me that the drive was going to fail.

Recently I had an encounter with SMART errors in a totally different way.

Basically, my ReadyNAS NV+ storage server was telling me that “Disk 1” was having problems and might fail soon … but all my tests indicated that the drives were fine.

After a lot of hassle, and going back and forth with Netgear support, I finally figured out the problem.

It started a few weeks ago with an email the ReadyNAS sent

Reallocated sector count has increased in the last day.

Disk  1: Previous count: 671 Current count: 677

Growing SMART errors indicate a disk that may fail soon.  If the
errors continue to increase, you should be prepared to replace the
disk.

The odd thing was, the SMART information on the drives, that was available via the ReadyNAS web interface, did not indicate any of the 4 drives currently installed had any reallocated sectors.

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Spontaneous Security

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Over the holiday weekend, I experienced the ultimate computer security mechanism:

“Spontaneous Security”

I was using my new Dell Latitude E6420 to do some network reconfiguration when the machine started acting weird with regard to the network.

Since this machine runs Windows 7, I decided to just reboot it to clear the network configuration.

After I restarted the machine I was asked for a password by the BIOS.

The odd thing was … I never set a BIOS password.

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I’m Shocked! It Fits!

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A while ago I wrote about my iPhone Complaint … where all the accessories I was looking at were designed to fit the iPhone itself and not when it was in a case.

I was expecting to the have the same complaint about my new Motorola ATRIX … but, so far, it looks like I won’t.

I purchased a the Car Dock accessory for the ATRIX and was expecting to have to remove the phone from it’s case whenever I wanted to put it into the dock.

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Refreshing Tech Support

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It’s happened again … I had some really GOOD tech support.

The phone adapter for our VOIPo service died … no dial tone, no connection, nothing.

Oddly enough, I could log in to the devices web interface … so I contacted VOIPo customer support.  After a few email exchanges, it was determined that they would need to do some interactive diagnostics to determine what was going wrong.

I called them and talked to James … he had me test a few things … and then said something truly amazing … “Could you put the VOIP adapter in to your routers DMZ so I could take a look at it directly?”.

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Modifying the Environment

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Here’s a problem I just encountered … and, unfortunately, haven’t figured out a solution.

A customer is trying to run my Eclipse RCP application … but it’s crashing because it can’t find ‘com.mercury.javashared.agentloader.AgentBootstrap’ class (which is apparently part of the HP QuickTest Professional product).

Turns out they had the ‘JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS’ environment variable set to ‘-agentlib:jvmhook’ at the system level (set in the Windows control panel).

This was causing the boot loader to try and load the class that couldn’t be found.

A temporary work around is to set the JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS environment variable to blank every time they launch the application … but that’s a major pain in the long term.

I’d like to fix this by finding a way to override the JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS environment variable in the eclipse.ini file, or possibly providing a different ‘-agentlib’ parameter option that will supersede the existing value.

I guess I could provide a batch file that clears the environment variable before invoking the application … but that’s kind of kludgy (IMO).

Of course, any product that sets a global environment variable such as this is (at least in my opinion) seriously broken.  The only global environment variable that any application should set (or even be allowed to set) is maybe the path.

Android and sendmail

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And you probably read in my last post … I had a problem getting mail setup my new Android phone.

I could receive mail fine … but it failed (with a totally useless message) whenever I tried to send mail.  I was sure I had the settings right (userid, password, ssl, etc).

I have my mail server configured to do authenticated sending (as all good mail server admin’s should) … but for some reason the authentication wasn’t working correctly.

I tried various setting combinations to see what might be the problem … I verified the settings with my iPhone and Thunderbird.  Everything matched up.

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And Now I’m a Droid

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Android … to be specific.

I decided it was time to upgrade my phone … and switched to an Android based phone.  I got a Motorola ATRIX.

I was split between the ATRIX and the HTC Inspire … the Inspire has better battery life and a bigger screen, but the ATRIX has expandable memory and a front facing camera.

The primary reason for switching was so I could do mobile app development … I’ve got a few ideas for apps in my head and didn’t want to invest in a Mac just so I could develop them.  Android apps are developed in Java and the SDK is free (and Eclipse based).

It’s going to take a bit of time to get used to the new user interface … but so far I’m liking it a lot.

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DNS: Sends No Mail

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I really wish there was a way to indicate, in DNS, that a domain never sends mail.

That way, if a mail server recieves mail claiming to be from that domain, it can be discarded out of hand.

I’ve got a bunch of domains that JUST do web serving … they never send mail.  If the web server that they are hosted on does send mail, it’s sent from via the midrange.com mail server (and is identified as such).

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DKIM Rule – SpamAssassin

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I put together a new SpamAssassin rule that will help identify spam from spoofed email addresses.

Some email providers always sign email with DKIM or DomainKeys … based on this assumption, if you get a message from one of those domains and it isn’t signed, you can assume its more likely to be spam.

This particular rule operates on the assumption that all mail from Yahoo & Gmail will be signed.  It does not, however, raise the score a huge amount … because it’s just more LIKELY to be spam if it’s not signed … it’s not guaranteed to be spam. Some people may use the Yahoo or Gmail account’s in the from address, but not actually send from that service.
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