UNH uses the Blackboard software for online course material. The problem is, Blackboard sucks and UNH’s admins seem to have no clue how to maintain it. It regularly goes down for long periods, hours even, at a time. The software itself is slow and the user interface is horrible. Right now it is completely down and not responding, which means no access to the University webmail portal, the registration management system, or Blackboard itself. And this is exactly during peak times.

The problem is when this stuff happens all the time people begin to accept it instead of saying “why is this software unavailable when I need it the most?”

So, I am now a Computer Science major! And, my schedule for fall is finalized:

• MATH 531: Mathematical Proof. With Rita Hibschweiler, whom I had for Calculus I some time ago. I’m looking forward to this, I think it will be fun.
• CS 520: Assembly Language and Machine Architecture. This will be similar to ECE612/562 and ECE543. But CS majors are required to take all three courses so now I will be learning it from a different perspective.
• CS 671: Programming Languages. This will cover the ML Programming Language and some advanced Java topics. ML is a functional programming language, which will be neat because I don’t have much experience with that paradigm. I wish we were covering another language besides Java in the second half, however.
• PHIL 447: Computer Power and Human Reasoning. I like the professor for this class and I think it will be a lot of fun. It’ll be nice to be taking a non-technology class again.

One of the two Western Digital Raptor drives in colobus failed tonight. I was sitting at my desk when my phone indicated an incoming SMS. It turned out to be from the mdadm monitoring utility telling me that one of the drives had failed and the RAID was running in degraded mode. The main filesystem is on a RAID 1 array, which means two identical drives in a mirrored configuration. Since one has now failed, it is running in a non-redundant configuration until the drive can be replaced.

Fortunately I was able to find a replacement drive at the local Best Buy for an entirely reasonable price and I’ll be heading down to Boston to replace the drive tomorrow. Amazingly, the failed drive was less than a year old. The drive is under warranty (5 year warranty terms) so it’ll be replaced free, but in order to rush in an immediate replacement I need to get a new drive. The failed drive will be RMA’d later and then I’ll have a spare on hand.

We’ll need to reboot to perform the drive replacement. The latest version of the Linux kernel fully supports hotplugging of SATA drives, but unfortunately that was not out 160 days ago when colobus was last rebooted. It’ll received a shiny new kernel tomorrow as well.

UPDATE: The drive replacement was completed in about 20 minutes with the array reconstruction taking an additional hour (while the system was up). I am very pleased with how things worked and how easily the my Tyan Rackmount’s hotswap bays worked. I wasn’t able to actually hotswap the drives this time because the old Linux kernel version didn’t support it, but when the machine was rebooted the kernel was upgraded and any future drive replacements can be done with the machine online.