Its_All.Lost

Because hope just breeds everlasting misery…

Hard drive failure

hard drives

Yes, it happened…again. I suffered from a “violent” power surge a couple weeks ago. It was not a normal surge or outage. The power went off and on very rapidly for a few seconds. The lights were flickering all crazy and I swear I heard some electrical crackling. We had two power outages that day. After the first two I ran over and shutoff my Mac and external hard drive.

Later that day when I turned the Mac on I noticed my external drive icons did not appear on my desktop. They were gone. WTF. After a few moments they eventually appeared. I have my external drive partitioned into two parts. The second partition loaded up fine, the first popped up with an error stating I could not write to the drive and that I needed to backup the data and reformat as soon as possible. Oh shit. I immediately opened both drives. They opened in Finder, OK all the data is still there. So I figured something happened obviously. I unmounted the drives and killed power to the external drive. I turned it back on hoping the drives would load, and they did not. Now I had the error on both drives. Fuck.

It’s a 1TB drive and all I have is a 256GB SSD on the Mac. Not even enough space to save all the data. Fuck fuck fuck. After a few days of constantly trying to get the drives to mount I gave up. I copied all the data I could. But after the second try of mounting the drives started coming up with files and folders missing. Oh shit did I lose my shit? I don’t think so. The drives were still reporting the correct usage and free space, so the data has to still be there. Right? After a week of scouring the net I came to the conclusion that the partitioning table got fucked up. I tried repairing it with the Mac but no luck. Soon as I tried the disks unmounted and never came back. Fuck again.

The drive was not working at all on the Mac or Windows. Lets try Ubuntu. Hey they don’t load but I can see the drives in /dev. I still couldn’t mount them, format them or play with the partitions. I tried loading GParted but it would just hang until the drive was unplugged. I let that bitch sit for hours. Believe me I gave everything I did a lot of time to do what it could. Nothing worked. I believe the drive is fucked. I had to go out and purchase another drive. I couldn’t go on any longer without an external drive. And I was getting disk full errors on my Mac. A trip to Fry’s Electronics fixed the no drive issue. Had to drop $100 though. I ended up getting a 3TB (upgrade!) external drive with enclosure. It was $10 more to get the drive+enclosure vs just a bare drive. So I went with caution in case the external drive enclosure was jacked (I don’t think so because I tried the drive with my Apricorn DriveWire) and got the enclosure too.

So I still have the drive, just like the last one that died on me. I am so fucking tired of losing data. Shit is gone that I will never be able to replace… Time to invest in cloud backup storage. 1TB of cloud storage at DropBox doesn’t sound too bad right now.

 

(More) Network Woes

The week I got home from my liver transplant we started having network issues. Like that is just what I needed. The issues are much like the last time (with our Comcast modem, I’d link the post but I can’t find it) except instead of dropping the ISP modem connection my Wifi is deciding to crap out, consistently. When trying to log back on you get the error “cannot obtain an IP address”. Great. I know it’s not the server this time at least, it’s just sitting there and it is working just fine. I had already switched back from ClearOS to a standard router WTF is wrong?

So I thought it was the AP in the garage so I unplugged it, worked for a few hours then the IP issue came back. Plugged it back in and tried unplugging another AP. Same results, worked for a few hours then the issue came back. This time I unplugged all the APs. Same results. Looks like its the router this time.

The router in question is a Buffalo WHR-300HP, which was a good router for the most part. It shipped with DD-WRT installed which was partly why I bought it at the time. Maybe it needs an update. Well apparently they didn’t issue any official updates for it. In my search of the DD-WRT forums I found I could use another routers firmware update instead… no doing that. Not without a back up. I do have other routers lying around but they are old subpar WRTs or other just as old units. It looks like I needed a new router. If I had to get a new router it was gonna have an AC band. So I did a little research and bought one. I nabbed an ASUS RT-ACRH13 (AC1300) Dual Band Gigabit Wireless Router. There were better choices but I was not comfortable dropping $150+ into a wireless router. But I made sure to get something gigabit this time. Now the entire network is gigabit, even the wireless! Ha.

All of the AP’s are powered down and only the ASUS is running. Covers the whole house. It has 2.4gHz and 5gHz bands which is nice. It does do AC but only the tablets and phones have AC modems in them at the moment. Honestly everything else is wired. It would be nice if the TVs and gaming consoles were AC. I would at least settle for N speeds. The router has a USB 3.0 port but I am not using it. I have a full blown server running don’t really need a NAS too. So far the new router is working out nicely, but I don’t care for the interface very much. A little too “Web 2.0”. It’s a wireless router, a piece of network hardware. I don’t need (or want) some fancy ass menus. Other than that its great so far.

But now I am saddened. I had a home built machine running as my router with distributed wireless Access Points throughout the house. Had issues and had to remove the server router. Now I have wireless issues and had to remove the APs. Well I didn’t have to but the new router really makes them obsolete. I no longer have a “cool kickass” home network :(. At least I still have a rack in the garage filled with blinky lights! Which could be reduced down to just one switch probably :(. Now I am sad again.

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Update

So I have been gone a while, I had my liver transplant. I was suppose to have a live donor liver transplant on the 10th of November. It was all setup, donor was ready and then I got a call on the 3rd, “come to UCSF NOW!”. That was one of the freakiest phone calls I have ever received. Someone up in Washington had passed and was a match for me. I was still waiting on the list, had at least another year to go before my spot was up. But they decided to bypass everyone else and give me the liver. Apparently the gentleman was “rather large” they said and I was one of the only ones the liver would fit in. I’ll gladly take it. A full liver is better than half, less recoup time and better overall for me. So for the past few weeks I have been home resting. Things are starting to get better, I am starting to feel more like myself as time goes by. They gutted me, my stomach looks like Frankensteins Monster. Somewhere around 60-70 staples. They basically traced my rib line. Staples finally come out next week. So hopefully I will be back in action no too much further down the road. Then I can get back to tinkering and shit. So that’s where I have been.

Battlefield 4 Disconnected Session

I have a Playstation 4, thing is awesome. Fuck your XBox. Battlefield (any of them really) is my favorite franchise. I used to play Call of Duty but honestly BF is just so much better. Any the game chat isn’t filled with 12 year olds whining about how your skills are better than theirs. TLDR? Go to the bottom of the post.

Recently there was an update for BF4, they changed some things to get ready for Battlefield 1. BF1 is OK, I played the beta a bit. Didn’t care for it too much. I found the gameplay slower than other BF games and the in game animations where so fucking slow. A rifle reload took forever. While it may have been realistic it’s too fucking slow for my liking. I don’t want a run and gun like CoD but I felt like they were killing what I liked about BF. Anyways this new update broke my fucking game. Now in multiplayer when joined in a group for online play the host of the group can only select a game once. Let’s say you pick a server to play on but the queue is has too many people so you cancel, well your fucked now. You won’t be able to select another server. The game simply wont let you. Either one of your friends has to create a new group and pick a server (only one chance remember) or you have to quit the game and restart it. I know a few people that are affected by this. Well on top of this awesome new feature I started getting “Disconnected from Session” messages. I was not able to play BF4 for a week until I found the solution. Now remember, nothing on my end has changed other than the BF4 update. The fix to the session disconnect error is to forward ports. Wait what the actual fuck. So EA patched a game, now I cant play it unless I forward ports. That is some fucking bullshit right there.

On to the fix. I watched this video and found the answer. You can Google the issue and find a solution (maybe why you are here?) but there are a few different ports floating around out there. I did not (and fucking will not) forward all the ports they specify. It is simply not needed. There is ZERO fucking reason why a PS4 game needs port 80 and 443 forwarded. Fucking ZERO, and if there is such a game that exists take it back and return that piece of shit. All I had to forward was some UDP ports. Port 3659 and 14000-14016. That’s it. Don’t forward anything else.

The fix for “Disconnected from Session” is to port forward UDP ports 3659 and UDP ports 14000-14016. If you don’t know how to do port forwarding go here https://portforward.com/.

PCDuino and Filespace

I hate PCDuinos. But it was on sale, and I didn’t know any better at the time. Fast-forwarding… after using dd or the Apple Pi Baker to transfer the (old ass) image to the SD Card you can boot right up, that much actually works. But soon you will run out of disk space. The image is 1.9gb and I am using a 4gb card. Plenty of space. If this was a Raspberry Pi you could us the config menu and resize the partitions with no problems. That shit works. This shit doesn’t work. Stay away from PCDuinos, please. Their support sucks balls. Using the default PCDuino resizer from their menu causes the unit to not boot once you reboot it, the shit just hangs. I have also tried a few other methods of resizing the card with zero luck. It always just hangs, or has a kernel panic. But, the PCDuino config is still important. It has a few things you may need. Such as changing the boot to desktop option.

The best way to get all of you file space with no headaches is GParted. Just download GParted to a USB drive and use that. I used it on a laptop I have laying around, tossed in the SD Card and resized the partitions in seconds. Why didn’t I try this earlier?

Just do it really, it fucking works. Make the USB it doesn’t take long. You will actually save time. Trust me, I have tried all the other methods and they don’t work. At least not with my image for the PCDuino Nano Lite.