Category: Modern problems

As I reported a week or so ago. We’ve gone to satellite for our Internet.

This is cool, and generally works really well.

Of course it meant that I started looking at our aging infrastructure and began removing older devices that perhaps weren’t being used anymore, but were still attached to the network.

Ever heard the term “Let Sleeping Dogs Lie,” next time I’m going to heed that cautionary tail.

It started out simply enough.

I thought, “I’ll swap in the faster more modern router.”

I did and everything seemed to be going along just swimmingly. Then I sat down and started evaluating the network disk storage.

There are some drives that are used for backup pretty muck exclusively, and there are other drives that are used for data of all kinds. I think perhaps I could consolidate the data on the newer drives and then simplify the network by removing the older drives before they become problems. 

I’ve been hearing noises from a couple of the older units that are worrisome.

In all, these changes should cost me nothing but a little time.

This also takes me toward the final goal of permanently mounting the shiny new gigabit switch under the shelf in the wiring cabinet with appropriate length cables and generally neat and pretty connections, instead of looking, as it currently does, like a flying spaghetti monster is living in my network cabinet.

So I move some data, I’m making progress, then suddenly I notice my usual computer is making backups really slowly. After a fair bit of investigation, I’m not sure why. As time goes on the backups are slower… and slower… and it makes no sense.

CRAP!

I’m seeing 52MB backups taking an hour. I can transfer 52MB with file copy in seconds, so what gives? Dying drive, screwed up connection, nothing makes sense.

Shoulda let sleeping dogs lie

I’ve narrowed it down to something going on with specifically my computer, and specifically my backup utility. 

Great!

WTF has gone awry in my baby?

Hit the internet

Gee! That satellite thingy is pretty cool. 

Problems with Time Machine backups appear off & on for years, across all flavors of Mac OS X.

Great, there actually is such a thing as too much data.

Narrowing, narrowing, narrowing, and …

Time machine may take a long time in the preparing phase, or in the backing up phase if a backup was interrupted. This can also happen if the machine hasn’t been connected to the time capsule device for a long time.  Finally, this can be caused due to corrupted spotlight indexes.

Hummm so I wonder what would happen if I delete the local drive index and force a rebuild?

Seems straight forward enough… Lets see what happens.

sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD

/:

Indexing enabled.

Well, no crash & burn… that’s a good sign and the nice snappy response is reassuring. I suppose that the first backup after the index rebuild will be slow. The system will probably act like it’s been disconnected from the storage device for a lone time.

That backup will have to wait.  Right at the moment, the shiny switch is getting a workout using rsync to move a bunch of files.

I brought a venerable 7 year old computer out of retirement to handle that chore. I really should get that machine a new hard drive. That’s the only problem it has. It’s down to 8GB and is slowing down because there isn’t enough scratch storage space, the machine itself is still fast.

Maybe a nice 500 GB or 1 TB solid state drive. Faster, quieter, lower power consumption and cooler running.

I’ll check into that on Monday.

Ahh, the CPU in this machine just pegged. Yep, the Indexing routine is a very busy camper.

I’m going to let this machine finish it’s assigned tasks, then I’ll test the backup on a USB drive. That will at least tell me if I’m on the right track figuring out what the problem is.

I want to get this taken care of. I want to make sure that it’s not something in the connections or devices I’ve moved around.

That’s important because I don’t want to mount all this crap, only to have to take it all apart again because I missed something.

I’m hoping that tomorrow I can say, “To Fry’s Electronics, boy wonder. We’ve got some cabling and mounting stuff to buy.”

---

Interesting.

Looks like flushing the index solved the problem. At least it solved the problem on the external drive.

I was seeing this long pause “Preparing Backup”, then an inordinately long time actually backing up the data. After flushing the index the “Preparing phase” was a lot shorter and the actual backup was as fast as normal.

I’ve got the TimeCapsule backup drive / router busy as heck right now so further testing will have to wait. On the plus side, I’ve seen an improvement which leads me to believe that I’m on the right track.

“To Fry’s, boy blunder!”

I do really like the iPhone / Yosemite personal hotspot tethering.

This stuff works remarkably well and most of the time, if I’ve got an LTE signal on the iPhone it’s faster than the Starbucks free internet.

It’s also private and less susceptible to “man in the middle” attacks and the like.

I’ve told my phone to only allow ONE connection at a time. So it’s either my iPad or my computer but not both.  Thus far I haven’t stumbled over that restriction making my life difficult.

Since the phone “knows” the iPad and the computer I don’t have to worry about my phone hotspot being hijacked by someone else either.

I expect that as this kind of thing becomes more prevalent we’ll see fewer and fewer public WiFi hotspots. 

As I write this, I’m sitting in a Starbucks whose WiFi is down.

I’m not missing it at all, my phone is doing the job happily.

If I wanted something more private, I could hardwire my phone to the computer. At that point, someone would have to  be monitoring the cell signal to grab my private data. That’s not to say it’s impossible, it’s just a little harder and requires equipment that’s not readily available at BestBuy.

I know I sound like a tinfoil hat wearing kind of guy with my privacy concerns; its always been of concern to me. We let so much data get out about us. 

Remember how back in the day Radio Shack wanted your Name, & Address when you bought something? Some of you may be way too young.

Back in the day, Radio Shack didn’t have cash registers. They had cash drawers and the employees had to be able to count back change. I know, I was one of those nerds working in a store asking for your name and address.

Oh we’d sell you stuff without you giving us that information. But we were required to ask, in fact we could be fired for not asking.

We would write all your items out by hand, then we’d add ‘em all up, look up the sales tax and total it. You’d hand us cash and we’d make change.

People used to get upset that we were asking for information that would put them on mailing lists, and it did!

Looking back on it I laugh.

Now days, we’re leaking private information all the time. Every web site where we create an account. Every news source that asks us to register so we can see the latest photo of a Kardashian, every phone call we make where we have to provide our social, phone number, security question answers, date of birth. etc is slowly bleeding information about almost every aspect of our lives from us.

What was your first pets name?

Mothers maiden name? 

Where did you live in 1988?

All the information is essentially handing the keys to our life to people we don’t know and whom we have no reason to trust. Each additional data point we give out “for our safety” serves to make us less safe.

I haven’t come up with any solutions in my life about it. I have become more mindful and resistant to creation of pointless online accounts. By default, any location information is denied pending my specifically telling a device to share that information. 

I think almost all websites ask your device for your location, again this is under the guise of trying to be helpful but does a newspaper really need to know where you’re reading it? 

This may well be a situation where the horse is out of the barn, the Djinn is out of the bottle, pandoras box is already open, I’m tilting at windmills,  or what have you.

In fact I’m sure it is, but I can’t help at least trying to maintain some marginal control over my data.