I never had problem with GPartEd before, even it's not 1.0 yet. So this surprised me. It happened when I was resizing a cloned partition to fill a bigger drive. Two partitions: 1 NTFS, 1 FAT (IBM diagnostic partition). So I moved the FAT to the end of the drive and expanded the NTFS. Once I clicked "Apply", the GPartEd window went away. I kinda scratched my head and opened a terminal window. top showed gpartedbin is hogging about 97% of CPU. I waited for a while. Nothing. Guess it's stuck. I tried opening another instance of gpartedbin, and it showed partitions unchanged but NTFS having unreadable content. Crap! I had no choice but to kill the thing. Luckily things seem to be OK after restart.
Eventually I got the job done with Acronis. Not sure if this is a bug.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Thursday, February 26, 2009
The dirty little secret of Dell EMC AX150i
I got it really cheap - around $4000 with 3 250GB SATA drives installed. It seemed to be a very good deal considering its functionalities. But when I tried to extend its life and upgrade it a little bit, I was rudely surprised. Dell quoted a 500 GB module at more than $600. SATA drive at that price these days? All they provide more than a generic drive is just a tray so it fits the array. Are you kidding me? The 750 GB module is even more obscene at more than $900. Even when their site is selling the 250 GB module at $69.99, they couldn't explain why it's so much more expensive with the bigger drives. The array model isn't that old!
Dell also quoted a Next Business Day support contract at more than $2,200 a year. They seem to entirely rely on EMC guys to quote that, even the EMC support guys in the past told me to talk to Dell for any support issue. At that price you can buy a new, better array for the cost of a two-year support contract. Yep, that's how they promote their new wares.
It's probably true for all the so-called low cost iSCSI arrays. The "hidden" cost of upgrade and support makes them not so good as the first look. But hey, isn't that often true for many IT investments?
Dell also quoted a Next Business Day support contract at more than $2,200 a year. They seem to entirely rely on EMC guys to quote that, even the EMC support guys in the past told me to talk to Dell for any support issue. At that price you can buy a new, better array for the cost of a two-year support contract. Yep, that's how they promote their new wares.
It's probably true for all the so-called low cost iSCSI arrays. The "hidden" cost of upgrade and support makes them not so good as the first look. But hey, isn't that often true for many IT investments?
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Editing auto-start setting for VMWare Server 2 guests
It's not that tied to individual but rather a host wide setting list. That's not very intuitive but kinda makes sense. You go to "Edit Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown Settings" command. Also you use "Move up" "Move down" to shift guest among 3 lists (auto with order, auto with no order, manual) to set their config, which isn't very intuitive either.
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