Cygon’s Blog

Great.

Just when I wanted to go to sleep, this sucker killed my RAID array again. Browsing into a network share got my Vista workstation’s explorer window to hang (of course — what else should windows do but rely 100% on some network peer to provide data in a timely and reliable manner). I couldn’t close the damn fucking thing and had to kill explorer.exe. My compliments for not learning to write a usable file browser in over 20 years, Microsoft.

On the server it looked no better. Tried to browse to the shared folder, but of course, the window just hung. I couldn’t restart the server either (the hung window stalked me into the reboot screen), so I had to hard-reset it. Windows Server 2008 isn’t even worth the $0.50 media it’s pressed on.

After rebooting, the RAID array was gone. I couldn’t reactivate it.

Shutdown, reboot, one RAID disk functioning, two missing, two foreign disks. WTF?

Tried to reactivate missing disks - device not ready.

Tried to import foreign disks - warning, you will loose data if you proceed, bla bla bla. Shocked, but remembering that I had that before and clicking yes actually doesn’t destroy my data. RAID array resynching. All shared folders unshared.

As I’m writing this, my Vista desktop is completely unresponsive, because I tried to browse into one of the server’s administrative shares. This sucks major ***.

Nowhere in the Event Logs can I find anything that gives me a clue as to what is happening on this freaking server. I’m going to buy a 1 TB drive, copy my RAID array onto that, then install Gentoo Linux on the server, create a new (soft) RAID-5 with the old drives, copy the data back and be done with this. Suck my ***** Windows Server 2008.

[Warning: rant follows!]

Now that the behemoth is released, I have a Windows Server 2008 trial version going again on my home NAT + File server. I had quite the trouble with Beta3 of Windows Server 2008, but expected the final product to be free of any such problems as I was encountering. Boy was I wrong.

The server is an AMD Athlon 3500+ with 2 GB of RAM (Corsair TwinX), four SATA drives (all WD - 1x 200 GB boot plus 3x 500 GB in a soft RAID 5) and a low-power passively cooled Asus GeForce 8300 card on an Asus NForce 4 mainboard.

I have to let off this rant because I’m so incredibly frustrated with this toy operating system. I’m not a linux guy and wouldn’t even remotely consider using it on my workstation for everyday work, but I’m seriously considering to go through the effort of configuring a complete linux environment just to get my home server running for good.

What the hell am I doing wrong? If what I’m experiencing is the state of things with Windows Server 2008, I can’t imaging anyone seriously using such a system professionally.

Here’s a list of the first 20 days of my Windows Server 2008 trial:

Suicide by Disk Cache

If someone downloads larger amounts of data from this server (> 2 GB), the server seems to start paging out vital parts of the operating system. It gets so bad that I cannot connect via Remote Desktop anymore.

Maybe it’s supposed to be okay paging out everything that’s not actively in use to make space for the disk cache. After all, Windows just has to store useless copies of huge, sequentially read files that aren’t going to be accessed again. That’s worth any sacrifice.

Suicide by Memory Fragmentation

Most BitTorrent clients experience strange freezes and are unresponsive about 90% of their time (literally!). Azureus works and so does Halite (the only x64 BitTorrent client I know of). Having some quite large downloads going (I’m currently downloading all of the MythBusters episodes :p), I leave my BitTorrent client running for days at a time.

Last Monday, I noticed the server wasn’t issuing my workstation a DHCP IP anymore. Attempting to log in to the server was impossible, it took several minutes to go from the password prompt to the welcome screen. I finally hard-resetted the thing (which I don’t like to do since it means a full RAID array resync)

Tuesday, the server was unresponsive again. I had to hard-reset.

Wednesday, the server had the same problem yet again. I had to hard-reset.

Thursday, unsurprisingly, was no change. Another hard-reset.

Friday and over the weekend, I resorted to rebooting the server every morning, noon and evening. That kept it working, but it’s not enough time for the RAID array to fully resync (which means after rebooting, it starts the resync all over again).

What happens is that windows’ memory usage slowly climbs all the time while my BitTorrent client is running. The process itself doesn’t eat up any more memory (assuming the windows task manager would at least show if Halite and Azureus leaked memory).

RAID Array Mess-Up

Today while I was tagging some FLACs I had just encoded (I’m in the process of re-ripping my entire audio collection using EAC), suddenly, the server’s X: partition disappeared (that’s the RAID-5 parition I store my music collection, DVD backups, virtual machines and stuff on).

The whole RAID array was just gone. Windows showed “missing” on 2 out of the 3 drives. I checked their cables tried to reactivate, but only got errors that the device was unavailable.

After rebooting, the BIOS screen showed all drives. Back in windows, a “foreign” RAID array was shown (that’s Windows slang for “inactive RAID array”). I imported it. Whenever I tried to assign a drive letter to the RAID parition, Windows reported that the “function is not supported”.

Another reboot later, my RAID array was running and had its old drive letter assigned again. But it’s resyncing. I don’t know if it’s still resyncing from last week’s happenings or resyncing due to the import. After leaving the disk management console open for 6 hours, there was still no progress indication (normally, after a few minutes, I remember a percentage being shown behind the ‘resyncing’ status).

DNS Failures

I don’t know if my NAT, routing table and DNS server have some configuration error or what else it might be, but sometimes, specific domains don’t resolve anymore through DNS.

The funny part is that, sometimes, they can be resolved on the server, but not on NAT clients. And sometimes, even stranger, they cannot be resolved on the server, but by NAT clients using the very same server.

Flushing the DNS cache on both client and server doesn’t change a thing in this situation.

Virtual Server Outage

On Beta3, I had installed Microsoft Virtual Server to run some build agents for my continuous integration server (TeamCity, now free, I can wholeheartedly recommend!).

After several hours of work getting Virtual Server installed and setting up the build agents, the whole thing was finally running.

For about 3 days. Then the network adapter of Virtual Server broke out of the blue and even reinstalling didn’t change a thing. I discovered several others with this problem and the only solution was to reinstall the whole server.

I’m not going to even try Hyper-V or Virtual Server on Windows Server 2008. I’m so sick of putting hours into this nonsense just to know that all my work will be destroyed again sooner or later.

It all started when my old Plextor PX-712 SA burned DVDs that a friend of mine was unable to read. Several months later, it would not even read plain DVDs anymore (normal pressed DVDs). It was still good for CD ripping, so whenever I wanted to watch a movie, I just ripped it on my other computer, moved the ripped files to a network share and watched it via ethernet.

Wednesday, I decided to restore my drive image because my Vista installation is acting strange. I burned my imaging boot CD to an old CD-R and tried to boot from it. It failed, again and again.

The Plextor drive was really good, but with only 2 years in service, its life expectancy seems quite low. Today, I replaced it with a Pioneer DVR-215D in the hope that Pioneer’s drives might be better (I chose the exact model referencing the AccurateRip Drive Database to find one that would be able to do perfect CD audio rips just like my Plextor drive.

- I cannot set the ripping speed to anything else than 40.0x. Although I know that it’s supposed to be a myth that drives work more accurate at lower speeds, at least for the Plextor drive, that myth held true.

- The drive’s C2 error detection seems to work well. All my CDs are as good as new (since I never use them, I rip them once and put them away), so this may be a moot point.

- Enabling EAC’s “overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out” seems to be a very bad idea for this drive. Whenever I enable that option, I get sync errors and suspicious sectors for the final track of a CD. Changing virtually any setting leads to a different checksum.

- The EAC offset test CD calculates a read offset of +8 (tested 5 times, always the same), but the AccurateRip Drive Database indicates that the read offset is +48. I’m baffled as to what’s going on here.

All in all, the drive seems to be capable of doing accurate CD audio rips and, although I’m wishing that I had bought a Plextor drive again, I think I’ll keep it.

Took another go at the same 10 km route I ran on saturday.

Time: 1:35 with an average heart rate of 161 bpm reaching up to 180 bpm. Killed 2005 kcal on the run alone!

Apparently, my body takes more than 4 days to fully recover from such a trip since I was still feeling the weariness from Saturday’s round. Another thing I can credit to the weight I put on during the past years, I guess.

It took quite a bit of pushing to reach the milestones in the same time, but it was a lot of fun. When I was at the lower end of the valley (directly before a 3 km uphill stretch) my legs were already heavy. I’m somehow growing a taste for this, the harder I have to fight myself, the more I enjoy it. I willed myself up the 3 kms without slowing down and felt proud

Shortly after, at 1:05 my right foot’s levator muscle started hurting and didn’t quite fulfill its task anymore, so my jogging form got a bit awkward. When at 1:35 I finished the route and stopped jogging, I immediately noticed the front muscle on my left thigh was done for, too. Luckily, it regenerated after a few wood-legged steps, so I didn’t have to hobble through town.

I think I’ll do a shorter regenerative run on Sunday. My legs definitely got stronger, since the last attempt, the muscles just weren’t fully restored again!

On Saturday, after a good break of about 10 days, I finally took the 10 km route I had been planning all the time.

It took me 1:36 at an average heart rate of 154 (maxing out to 184 bpm). Seems my heart rate is still getting lower all the time. I was hoping my muscles would catch up and I could enjoy pushing myself through the track at 170 - 190 bpm (call it masochistic, but I like the feeling :p).

Well, judging by my watch I got rid in excess of 1887 kcals, with the EPOC effect surely kicking that way below 2 mcal, if not 3 (yay!)

There’s still some way to go to get back to 10 km / 1 hour. Actually, I have to run 50% faster. Don’t think that’ll be doable with reasonable effort unless I get rid of some excess weight :/

Yet another one! FreeImage is a popular library among game programmers that can load a wealth of image file formats (.bmp, .dds, .exr, .gif, .ico, .jpg, .mng, .pcx, .png, .tga, .tif). It’s also free and Open Source, so there’s nothing stopping me from attempting an x64 build of it

FreeImage internally uses OpenEXR, the IJG reference JPEG implementation, libmng, libpng, OpenJPEG (supported JPEG 2000) and LibTIFF. All of these libraries are available as source packages as well. I’ve updated all these libraries to their latest available version.

Source Patches

Here are some patches containing the changes I had to apply to FreeImage in order to make it compile to x64 cleanly:

Download: Patch fixing all x64 issues for OpenJPEG 1.3
Download: FreeImage 3.1.0 patch fixing all x64 issues

Visual C++ 2008 Binaries

You can find precompiled, optimized binaries for Visual C++ 2008 in my Subversion repository:

https://devel.nuclex.org/external/svn/freeimage/tags/3.1.0-r1

The binaries have been compiled with Visual C++ 2008, all contained libraries targeting the Multithreaded DLL runtime, so you’ll need the Visual C++ 2008 Runtime (x86, x64) to use them. If you have Visual C++ 2008 installed, you already have the runtime.

Demo Application

If you just want to see whether this truly works, here’s a quick command-line image loader (loads .bmp, .dds, .exr, .gif, .ico, .jpg, .mng, .pcx, .png, .tga, .tif) in both x86 and x64 incarnations. The x64 version only works if you’re running Windows XP x64 or Windows Vista x64, of course:

Download: FreeImage x64 demo application
Requires the Visual C++ 2008 Runtime [x86, x64] to work!

If you haven’t heard of it before, Audiere is a well designed multi-platform audio library. It incorporates Dumb (for mod playback), FLAC (lossless audio playback), libogg/libvorbis (ogg vorbis playback), Speex (special speech compression) and supports some formats on its own (including .mp3 and .wav of course). And the best part yet: it’s free and open source.

Recently, I’ve been playing around with native x64 applications. My experiences have been very positive so far: Basically any library that provides its source code could be compiled to x64 binaries with very few changes.

Source Patches

Audiere was no different. There was some assembly in FLAC 1.2.1 and libvorbis 1.2.0 that I had to patch, a small WinAPI pointer issue in Audiere and some more minor things. Here are the patches containing my changes:

Download: Patch for libvorbis 1.2.0 fixing all x64 issues
Download: Patch for FLAC 1.2.1 fixing all x64 issues
Download: Audiere 1.9.4 fixes and x64 patch

Visual C++ 2008 Binaries

You can find precompiled, optimized binaries for Visual C++ 2008 in my Subversion repository:

https://devel.nuclex.org/external/svn/audiere/tags/1.9.4-r1

The binaries have been compiled with Visual C++ 2008, all contained libraries targeting the Multithreaded DLL runtime, so you’ll need the Visual C++ 2008 Runtime (x86, x64) to use them. If you have Visual C++ 2008 installed, you already have the runtime.

Demo Application

If you just want to see whether this truly works, here’s a quick command-line audio player (plays .wav, .mp3, .ogg, .flac and .mod) in both x86 and x64 incarnations. The x64 version only works if you’re running Windows XP x64 or Windows Vista x64, of course:

Download: Audiere x64 demo application
Requires the Visual C++ 2008 Runtime [x86, x64] to work!

Enjoy!

I felt like I was having a cold on Saturday and Sunday morning, but after feeling quite good in the evening, I spontaneously decided to try a longer route this time. The old routes are getting boring, so I planned out a new 10 km route.

I figured my way through the forest hill in the north just fine, but then, well, sort of chose the wrong path upon entering the second forest stage. There was not an inch of even surface plus logs littered all over the path. I slightly twisted my left ankle two times but it didn’t swell, so I assumed it was alright.

After noticing the path didn’t even take me remotely to where I wanted, I cut short downhill through the forest. I ended up near a stone pit. When I had paved my way down to the road, I had to backtrack quite a bit to return to where my planned route would have led me.

The rest of the track went pretty well, except maybe that at the final bend, which would orient me back towards home, I still felt pretty fresh and thus went off in the opposite direction, leaving my planned route again. I ended up running a good part of another route before finally heading home.

I can’t plot the exact path I took at the places where I left the route, but from what I can piece together, I jogged for about 13 km. That took me xx:xx:xx at an average heart rate of xxx bpm (maximum at xxx bpm).

Looking forward to repeating this run without choosing the wrong path and without twisting my ankle

I’ve got a Thrustmaster Dual Analog 3, that’s a plain and simple USB gamepad without any fancy vibration, orientation sensor or anything. I’m mainly using it to control my WinAmp when I’m listening to music.

Whenever I start an Unreal Engine 3 game, for example Gears of War, Blacksite: Area 51, Medal of Honor: Airborne, Turning Point: Fall of Liberty or, just right now, Turok, I can enjoy the intro, and, as soon as the action starts, my character is spinning to the left. Permanently.

This goes on until I disconnect my gamepad, which is quite inconvenient since I have it attached to the back of my PC so that the cable is long enough to use it when listening to music while lying on my bed.

So, as always, I have to end the game, download the latest Thrustmaster driver, fiddle with the settings, start the game again, watch the introduction a second time, and am still spinning to the left.

I fiddle some more with the settings, restart the game yet again, watch the introduction sequence yet another time and finally, I can play.

This sure is an evil gamepad I have.

Still felt a bit drained today (gardening work…) and decided to jog the shorter 8.6 km version of my running track once more.

Took me 1:16 with an average pulse of 159 bpm and maxing to 186 bpm.

Had some issues with my watch (a Polar AXN-700), it kept jumping to 50-70 bpm during the run. The batteries are quite fresh, so maybe there’s a contact problem in the sender unit.