Joe's Random Ramblings

I've had a NAS (Network Attached Storage) box for years. I've been using a 1-TB RAID 1 setup for it. That 1 TB got used up. 99% full.
Since the manufacturer, D-Link, doesn't sell this particular model anymore, they haven't updated the firmware in years. Their firmware limits the disk size to 2 TB.
I thought I'd have to buy a new NAS device to be future-safe for bigger storage media.
But, I recently became aware of an Open Source firmware for these D-Link NAS boxes, called Alt-F. Alt-F supports disks up to 4 TB.
I installed ALt-F on my D-Link NAS last weekend. It worked without problems right out of the box.
So, on Monday, I ordered 2 4-TB SATA drives to put in the NAS. They arrived today. Put them into the box, selecting RAID1, and off we go.
I am right now transferring data from my 1 TB drive to the new 4 TB disk array, having connected one of the 1 TB disks to my Linux box.
I initially had some minor issues with mounting the old drive, because it's one disk out of a Linux Software RAID.
As it turns out, Linux detects the drive as a RAID drive, and creates a /dev/mdx entry, but doesn't really tell you about it. And it doesn't let you mount it, either, because it's only one disk from the RAID.
The technical desciption:
After googling a bit, I found that a 'cat /proc/mdstat' shows you if Linux detected the drive. If I close the /dev/md127 device that Linux gave me on bootup, with mdadm -S /dev/md127, I can then use mdadm --assemble --force on the device, and then I can mount it normally as an ext3 partition. That was all I needed to be able to copy files from the old drive to the new drives in the NAS. Even with a GBit network connection, it takes a while to transfer 1 TB...
This is what df reports right now:

Filesystem                    Type            1M-blocks    Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/md0                      ext3              936374M 918270M    18104M  99% /mnt/hd
192.168.2.110:/mnt/md0/       nfs              3754944M  57527M  3697401M   2% /mnt/nas

It's a tragedy, of course.
As a pilot, there is not much more to say about it.
Except This:
I have cringed at the utter misrepresentation of aviation facts.
Shame on all the news organizations out there. Not one of them got it right!
What a bunch of idiots!

The recent hubbub about banning all flags from a small portion of the UCI campus, not surprisingly, brought out all the xenophobic, racist, and ignorant trolls in the country.
These idiots obviously have never attended a university.

And not surprisingly, a state Senator (Janet Nguyen, a Republican, predictably) couldn't resist exploiting this issue for political grandstanding. She said she would sponsor an amendment to the CA Constitution to prevent such banning of the US flag.
As a politician, she really should know that the US Constitution prohibits such an amendment. I am sure she has heard of the 1st. Amendment. If not, she would obviously be unqualified for any public office.
She obviously just hopes that her constituents are sheep who don't know nor care about the US Constitution. In other words, Mrs. Nguyen is anti-American! Shame on her!

The students exercised their Constitutional rights to free speech. They should be applauded, not condemned.
But in Republican-controlled Orange County (where the racist "Minutemen" originated), even the UCI Chancellor caves in to racists and xenophobes. Shame on Chancellor Gillman!
Of course, current UCI Chancellor Gillman isn't the first UCI Chancellor to cave in to the Republican donors of Orange County. Former Chancellor Drake did the same when he rescinded the appointment of the first Dean of the UCI Law School (he reverted course later.) That was the beginning of the end of Chancellor Drake. I hope that the current display of a lack of a spine is the beginning of the end for Chancellor Gillman!
UCI needs a real Chancellor, one who stands up for the students, one who supports the students, not these spineless appointees!

There is a resolution out to support the students. I signed it and I urge everybody to sign it as a voice against racism, xenophobia and bigotry!

I've written a couple of times about AT&T's incompetence regarding support of IPv6, the last time here.
It seems they finally have gotten their act together.
For unrelated reasons, I had to reboot my U-Verse modem, and lo and behold, they updated the firmware upon reboot and it now actually does give me a honest-to-goodness IPv6 address.
Took them only about a year (they crippled IPv6 tunneling with a botched firmware update in Oct. 2013), but better late than never

For a few years, I have been registering my domains with Namecheap, a reseller of eNom.
I came to them from GoDaddy, back when GoDaddy supported the SOPA/PIPA legislation in the US Congress, which would have crippled the Internet. Namecheap was an outspoken opponent of that legislation.
Until a few months ago, I was pretty happy with Namecheap.

But then...
Starting about 2 months back, a significant amount of spam made it through my spam filters. There were a few common threads to that spam, mainly non-sensical headers that the spam filter had a hard time associating with spam.
The other common thread was that pretty much all this spam referenced websites hosted and administered by Namecheap, in particular their namecheaphosting.com domain.
I reported the spam that made it through my filters to Namecheap, through Spamcop. However, nothing happened. The spam kept coming.
I complained on Namecheap's Twitter and Facebook accounts.

And then something actually DID happen: Namecheap blocked me from their Facebook account.
That made clear that Namecheap is now a supporter of spam. They have turned to the dark side.
Time to find another registrar.

Update, 11/17: Posting a link to this blog post on Twitter certainly got somebody's attention at Namecheap.
Lets hope they improve their actions on spam reports. I've reported 15 or so spam mails to them just this morning. And these were only the spam mails that made it through my filters...

Update, 11/18: So far, nothing has changed. Except that Namecheap's Twitter person has gone silent. So, a reaction similar to their Facebook account.
In other words, an acknowledgement that they indeed support spammers, are in bed with spammers, profit from spammers and don't want to lose that unethical income.

Update 12/4: I have now initiated the transfer of my domain registrations to French registrar Gandi.net.

Update 12/10: All my domains are now transferred out of Namecheap. This spam-supporter doesn't get any money from me anymore.
It isn't surprising that Namecheap did not allow expediting some of the transfers out, but just waited out the default time. Bad customer service to the end.

Last Update, 1/2/2015: The spam with the spamvertised domains registered through Namecheap continues, but the spam filters have caught up with it, so it at least doesn't litter my inbox with this filth.
My last remaining tie to this spam-supporting organization is now cut: The SSL wildcard certificate for this domain that I bought through Namecheap expired today, and I got a new one somewhere else.
Good riddance. May Namecheap rot in hell!

Another update, 4/7/2015: It seems that these spammers have now asked Spamcop to no longer send spam reports to them. They obviously got inundated with reports, and want to just spam people without the constant reminder of them being the scum of the earth. Disgusting spammers! They are the lowest lifeform on Earth.