The cats have been on something of a killing spree lately. Bailey has been caught bird in mouth on more than one occasion, so he is the prime culprit for leaving the little “presents” that are sometimes waiting after work. Yesterday was unusual though. No sign of any cats, just lots of things knocked over and a lot of bird crap on the window sill. Oh, and this chap waiting upstairs:
One slightly flustered looking, but very alive, magpie. Getting quite a large bird with a nasty looking beak out of a window involved lots of slapstick moments with a blanket and ducking out of fear of getting pooped on. Initially on the first floor, it got right up to top of the second at one point before coming back down, knocking over a pile of DVDs and diving through the window. Definitely one to add to the Cat Tails page.
I decided a few weeks back to switch to using LVM ontop of Linux software RAID on my desktop machine, mainly to provide redundancy. I have lots of DVB recordings and digital video from our LUG talks that is impractical to back up but it worth protecting against a dead hard disk. I was using two 300GB SATA disks in an LVM volume group, so I purchased two more SATA disks with a view to running all four disks in a RAID5 array. and came up with the following migration strategy:
1. Backup important stuff.
2. Copy sufficient data off vg “data” to allow data to fit onto /dev/sda (279GB).
3. Remove /dev/sdb from volume group. (Resize FS, shrink lv. Then pvremove.)
4. Create 1 primary partition on /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc, /dev/sdd (which is 5GB short of the maximum disk size)
5. Create RAID5 array (with missing disk) across /dev/sdb1, /dev/sdc1, /dev/sdd1. (Partitions 35768 cylinders = 273.99679184 gigabytes)
6. Set partition type to “fd”
7. Set up /dev/md0 as a LVM PV: sudo mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=4 /dev/sd[bcd]1 missing
8. Add /dev/md0 into “data” LVM.
9. Move data from /dev/sda to /dev/md0 (pvmove, or by removing /dev/sda “manually”).
10. Remove /dev/sda from VG (pvremove).
11. Create primary partition on /dev/sda as before.
12. Add /dev/sda into RAID array: sudo mdadm /dev/md0 -a /dev/sda1
13. Wait for array to rebuild.
This seemed like a good idea at the time. What actually happened is detailed here. And I owe Hugo Mills thanks for his sage advice during the process.
I seem to have made the poster for LUG Radio Live. Apparently by running a BOF session is sufficient to warrant inclusion. 
Admittedly I’m only just above the metaphorical juggler, but at least I’m right next to the Community Hero, Ben Thorp. I’m really looking forward to LRL, there’s loads I want to go to; iFolder, the lug.org.uk BOF, the #lugradio BOF, MythTV, ELER, the GPG keysigning and of course the main speakers. I’ve also volunteered to help out with the live audio on the day, which may mean I won’t get to everything I want to see.
Apologies to the Planet LUGRadio subscribers, who will probably see this poster a dozen times over.
I’ve been on the ‘net for a long time and have seen many bizarre things. Howevever this series of videos on Google Video has left me staring at my monitor in silent dumbfoundedness.
