2011 Jun 30 - Thu

Minicom on Debian

This note is a quickie on getting minicom to talk to a standard Cisco device.

After installing Minicom on Debian through

apt-get install minicom

Configure Minicom with

minicom -s

In serial port setup, more than likely the device needs to be changed from /dev/ttyS1 to /dev/ttyS0. Bps should be 9600 8N1, and hardware flow control should be turned off.

Save the settings as dfl (default), and 'Exit from Minicom', else the modem initialization stuff will take over.

Startup Minicom with

minicom -ow

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2011 Jun 18 - Sat

Severance Pay - Video of a BMDS 24 Hours To Curtain Production

In 2009, Bermuda Musical and Dramatic Society presented 24 Hours to Curtain: six writers start at 8pm Friday night, are given an opening line, a closing line, and a prop. Their job is to write a 10 minute play, and have it finished by 8am Saturday morning, when the directors and actors come in to learn their lines, block the stage, rehearse, and are ready to put the production on at 8pm Saturday night. This is Severance Pay, one of the plays written over night and presented the next day. And I had just received a Panasonic HVX200A. This is one of my first attempts at video. The first couple of minutes scroll some dialog as I missed the opening.

[/Personal/Video] permanent link

2011 Jun 16 - Thu

Hi-Vibes - Million Lights

Singer / Song Writer Steven Kerr was in Bermuda during January 2011 to perform and record some songs with local musicians. I grabbed a camera and we spent a day shooting video for his song Million Lights. Basically, it is a travelogue of a few interesting spots in Bermuda.

[/Personal/Video] permanent link

2011 Jun 15 - Wed

Hard Drive Data Recovery

During an upgrade cycle of my desktop computer, when I was prompted to reboot, the computer would not reboot. It seems something corrupted the booting portion of the drive.

Yes, I know I'm supposed to back stuff up before performing changes, but in this case I didn't. So... I needed to find a way to recover information off of a raid 10 drive array. I had two sets of two mirrored drives in a striped configuration: Raid 10.

As they were controlled by an Adaptec controllor card, I thought Adaptec might help. They were unable to offer direct assistance, but they did suggest that the sofware offered by Runtime Software would be of use.

I used Runtime Software's tools to examine my drives, and used their paid service to determine the drive configuration. The response back from their paid service indicated that my drives were beyond recovery. Perhaps the settings I used were incorrect for the data capture their software provided to their 'human examiners'. But I would have thought they'd have an idea of what would be correct.

After receiving that bit of bad news, I decided to try data recovery myself. I licensed their tools and gave it a try. Long story short, I was able to recover everything I needed.

The following video shows the steps I used to recover data from a drive array controlled with an Adaptec AH2910SA Drive controller controlling four drives in a Raid 10 configuration.

[/Networks] permanent link