I’ve just spent several days (on and off) trying to get an old PIII box up and running as a file server. Now that 250G drives are down to about $80, there’s no reason anyone should be concerned about disk space anymore. Anyway, the computer kept locking (hard) whenever I tried to mkfs the disk, regardless of the filesystem. <\/p>\n
I tried several different drives; different controllers; moving the drives around to different positions (master\/slave); different kernels; different BIOS settings; and some other things—but every time the machine just locked on “Writing inode table…” <\/p>\n
So, as a final straw, I decided to drop down to 128M RAM from 384M. Then it worked fine. Up to 256M—still fine. 384M—hard crash. <\/p>\n
Problem solved. <\/p>\n
I hate this kind of thing, though. It’s painful manipulating the insides of these old boxes, and there’s precious little feedback about what’s going wrong. Maybe a more wizened hacker than I would have thought to check the memory first, but everything else appeared to be working fine which isn’t usually the case when you’ve got bad memory. <\/p>\n
An old friend of mine called this kind of experience “tuition.” It costs a lot, but in the end you learn your lesson. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve just spent several days (on and off) trying to get an old PIII box up and running as a file server. Now that 250G drives are down to about $80, there’s no reason anyone should be concerned about disk space anymore. Anyway, the computer kept locking (hard) whenever I tried to mkfs the disk, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}