ST31500341AS can be jumpered for 1.5Gb/s SATA

I’ve been struggling getting a 1.5TB Seagate ST31500341AS (CC1H firmware) to work on my ageing Mythtbuntu MythTV box (Gigabyte GA-8PE667 Ultra 2) to store TV programs on, it would just stop after the SATA BIOS for the onboard Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3112 card had ID’d it correctly, before returning its size. So I went to Jaycar and bought a two port Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3512 SATA card instead which seemed to work fine – the kernel booted and ID’d the card OK and I could partition it but then found that when I tried to make a filesystem I got lots of these:

ata3.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x2400000 action 0x0
ata3.00: BMDMA2 stat 0x86c1009
ata3: SError: { Handshk UnrecFIS }
ata3.00: cmd 25/00:08:28:7b:a8/00:00:ae:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 4096 in
res 51/04:00:2f:7b:a8/00:00:ae:00:00/e0 Emask 0x1 (device error)
ata3.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
ata3.00: error: { ABRT }
ata3.00: configured for UDMA/100
ata3: EH complete

which caused I/O errors and the mkfs aborted. 🙁 Some nice people on the LUV list suggested jumpering the card for 1.5Gb/s operation, but I found a post on the Seagate forums saying:

The manual for Seagate SATA drives pretty clearly states (on page 22): “1.5Gbits jumper block only applies to ST3320613AS, ST3320813AS and ST3160813AS models” So it would seem that you can’t run your ST31500341AS in forced-1.5Gb mode (though the drive does support auto-negotiation – but I guess your controller does not).

I thought I was out of luck, and then I stumbled a post elsewhere that said:

I just called to Seagate. They insist that even though the product manual (At their website) says that using the jumpers to force SATA1(150mb/s) speed not supported for my HDD(ST31500341AS) and also on top of the HDD never print the label anymore, you still set the jumper and it’ll force SATA1 speed. According to the tech support dude.

So, having a jumper to hand I decided to give it a go, and it does appear to work! Not only can I finally successfully make a filesystem, but I can also run bonnie++ on it continuously without issues and then rsync all 200GB of TV shows onto it.

Iranian Internet Controls – Targeting Flash and Email ?

Some very interesting investigations done by the Arbor Networks security folks looking into Iranian traffic engineering and filtering from the time of the Iranian presidential election onwards. They have both a preliminary investigation showing a dramatic fall in traffic at the time of the election and a follow up deeper look demonstrating that they appear to be specifically targeting streaming media (flash, et. al) and email, as graphically demonstrated by this graph:

Graph of video streaming bandwidth used by Iran around the time of the election.

Web and other traffic have been left relatively unscathed, prompting this comment:

Perhaps games provide a possible source of covert channels (e.g. “Bring your elves to the castle on the island of Azeroth and we’ll plan the next Ahmadinejad protest rally?”)

WordPress 2.8 upgrade – beware SVN!

Just had a rather nasty experience trying to upgrade to WP 2.8 using svn switch to move to the 2.8 tag – it resulted in the whole thing going pear shaped during the upgrade process and complaining about:

Fatal error: Class ‘WP_Widget’ not found in $wordpress/wp-includes/default-widgets.php on line 15

Turns out that the files in SVN don’t match what’s in the 2.8 tarball, and the 2.8 tag in SVN doesn’t work. The fix was to rsync the files from the tarball over SVN. Very very weird (and the first time I’ve had such problems!).

Anti-immigrant Facebook group

The ABC is reporting the depressing, but not entirely unsurprising, fact that 65,000 people have joined an anti-immigration Facebook group.

I’d like to make a suggestion to all that groups members – given that you want immigrants to leave Australia perhaps you would do the rest of us the honour of going first given that your ancestors arrived here with the last 1% of the inhabited time of this continent ?

Thank you for your understanding..

T-Mobile compromised – data for sale ?

Apparently someone claims to have pinched all of T-Mobile’s data..

The U.S. T-Mobile network predominately uses the GSM/GPRS/EDGE 1900 MHz frequency-band, making it the largest 1900 MHz network in the United States. Service is available in 98 of the 100 largest markets and 268 million potential customers. Like Checkpoint Tmobile has been owned for some time. We have everything, their databases, confidental documents, scripts and programs from their servers, financial documents up to 2009.

They claim to have hawked it around their competitors (who seem to know better than to buy it) and now are offering it on the open market.. 🙁

(Via ISC)