Trewq's questions

We have a few X7DBT Supermicro motherboards that is using a Kingston DataTraveler 102 USB Flash Drive as a boot drive. The customer had 10 systems and they say that the site had a power failure. Once the power came back on, the 6 systems did not bootup (i.e hangs at grub stage 1.5, or cannot load fs). Grub 0.97 starts running in all cases. This is a headless system, so they shipped it back to us.

We examined the systems are our lab and found that these USB flash had filesystem corruption. I understand that flash drives like the ones we are using are unreliable, and have this paper summarizes it well.

The above state is a standard case of fs corruption, but the following reasons make this failure strange to me:

• The drive has multiple partitions. However, none of this is ever mounted (either read only or read/write). The fs is ext2, and grub reads and a compressed fs into ram and runs from there. So, how the heck does a corruption happen if it is not mounted?

• When we plug a couple (did not test all usb drives) into a system with X8DTT motherboard it boots fine. Both motherboards have latest bios and downloaded from Supermicro. We are going through the "prove-you-are-not-an-idiot" stage in getting support from Supermicro.

The 2nd point can be chalked up to some screwy hardware issues (or bios), but the first one is troubling. Since we are not able to recreate the problem, we need to understand this problem a little better..

I have a couple of SIP phones and use callcentric. I get a lot of junk calls. I'd like to implement the following feature and would like some suggestions on how to do this:

Once I get a junk call, I typically hang up. I want to dial some number (like *23 or something) and I'd like the last number that was received to be put in a database. Any future call from that number will be directed to VM or a busy tone.

I'd appreciate some pointers on how I'd go about doing this.. I prefer an open source solution.

I have a 3 computer network connected through a Linksys/Cisco E3000 Router in a small office. One is running Windows 2008 R2 Foundation and the other 2 are running windows 7.

When I ping the R2 from the windows 7 machine using the name (eg. ping server), the ping waits for 6 seconds, and then starts printing the round trip times (no problems with the round trip time). The printed time is 1ms, and once ping starts printing, it goes fine.

When I ping using the ip of the server though, the ping starts printing out immediately, and there is no start up delay.

I did not remember to check the arp tables on the 7 machine, but this seems strange. The router is handling the DNS.

I can access shared folder on the server and is pretty snappy. However, we have an application (that is uses machine names to work) and has become incredibly slow. I suspect that if I figure out what is happening with the ping start up times, I can maybe figure out why the application is running slow.

I'd appreciate any thoughts on this strange ping behavior.