blog . sebastian martens

QNAP “Drive plugged out” Seagate ST32000542AS

I bought me a new NAS server QNAP TS-412. It has room for four hot swap ready HDDs. I inserted 3 Seagate ST32000542AS 2TB drives from the QNAP compatibility list, combined to one RAID5 volume. This was ran very smooth the first days. Great and easy setup, network performance is ok and including various features by default.

After three days i got waken up by a very loud beeping of the NAS. The front was blinking in red and the smart phone was vibrating by getting the error mails send by the NAS server.

The system log said Drive 2 plugged out. ( which i didn’t do ). The Volumemanager marked the drive with “Read/Write Error”. The RAID was “in degraded” mode. After pulling the drive from slot 2 and insert into slot 4 the Volumemanger said “Ready”. After reinserting the drive into slot 2 it was marked as “Read/Write Error” again.

Submit Outlook Calendar Invitations with PHP

I need to submit an Outlook Calendar event with attached .ics-file from my PHP application. After i searched for several hours i found a very hugh number of ways which are not working at the same time for the iPhone (using .ics), Thunderbird (using Lightning plugin) and for (Exchange-) Outlook. Also this are so few lines of code.

For everybody with the same problem ( and for myself for the next application ), here is the outcoming method (not too well documented but by playing with the parameters you’ll get it very fast):

How to create a mirror software RAID with two partitions with OSX

With the OS X Disk Utility it is very easy to manage your different hard disks. It also allows you to create a software RAID in the modes 0 ( striping ) and 1 ( mirroring ).

In most cases you don’t want the complete hard drive to be part of the RAID but want to seperate the disk into multiple partitions. To create those multiple partitions each in a RAID you could use the following steps.

User Mouse Tracking / Website Research

If you use website statistic tools – and thats something i guess everybody is interested in – you got well numbers about how many users visit your website and exactly which page of your website. You will also know from which other website the came and which key words they used within Google to get to your page. Each of this are very important facts for exmaple for SEO aspects, etc. For example Google Analytics is of course a great free tool for this ( include the old discussion how many more should Google know about you and your website ).

Connect OpenOffice with MAMP/XAMPP MySQL on OS X

Just to have a note for myself, here are some steps you need to know to connect your MySQL Database with OpenOffice e.g. for creating form letters.

You need to create a ODBC connection. First step is to install the latest ODBC drivers. For MySQL you will get them diretly from MySQL: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/odbc/. Just download and click through the installer. If you used the XAMPP or MAMP packages the MySQL socket will not be installed in the /tmp directory. But this is required for most ODBC drivers.