Weeknotes #371 — Nasty NAS

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A week off work, dominated by having a streaming cold for a few days and a catastrophic failure of my home network drive, resulting in multiple days of effort to get it up and running again.

All last week I had felt as though I was on the cusp of getting sick, but it never quite took hold of me. On Monday I decided to go out and cycle the club ride route that I had missed on Saturday, as I was fed up of feeling ill and wanted to get out and do something. I’m glad I went, as on Tuesday and Wednesday I mainly sat around on the sofa, getting through hundreds of tissues as my eyes and nose ran all day. I turned a corner on Thursday and was largely back to normal by the weekend. I am a complete cliché in terms of how much my illnesses time themselves to occur during weekends and holidays.

At the start of the week, my QNAP NAS drive, which has been happily spinning away in the house for the past five years, let me know that it had successfully installed the latest firmware update. This happens regularly and was nothing out of the ordinary. Later that day, I was out of the house and tried to use PlexAmp to access my music library on the drive, but found that the service wasn’t responding. When I got home I saw that the ‘STATUS’ light was flashing green and red, so I assumed that it needed a reboot. I turned it off and on again using the button on the front of the unit. This is where the problems really took hold. After it came back up, I found that one of the four disks was reporting errors. This has happened before and is an easy problem to fix — you just buy another disk and then hot-swap the old one for the new one, which is a major point of having a NAS in the first place. So, I ordered a replacement disk. It arrived the next day, and I swapped it out as I had done before. The RAID array started to rebuild itself, a process that was going to take many hours. I was happy that I’d resolved the problem, so I walked away and planned to check on the RAID rebuild later.

But it wasn’t that simple. Coming home later that night, the unit was alerting that another disk had failed. The whole drive was now in a ‘read only’ state as the RAID array hadn’t finished rebuilding before the second disk died. In a RAID 5 array like I had, you can lose one disk, but no more. I was pretty sure I had data loss. It was late, and I didn’t want to start tackling the problem straight away. I went to bed with my brain buzzing about the ‘spec’ I would give Claude or ChatGPT the next day. This prompt would define what I wanted to achieve from the process of rebuilding the drive and restoring all of the data, as well as fixing one or two things that I had never been happy with in my setup but had never got around to resolving.1 The failure was the perfect opportunity to start again. In the morning, I put together a prompt on what I wanted to achieve and fed it into both AI tools. I liked Claude’s approach the best and decided to follow that. It put together a whole step-by-step document on what I needed to do, which wasn’t perfect but it was pretty close. The process of rebuilding and configuring the NAS, restoring all of the data, setting up the shares, configuring the drive for Time Machine backups for our home Macs, and lots of other small tweaks must have taken the best part of three days.2 In some ways it was super frustrating that it took up so much time, but I was grateful that it happened when I did actually have the time available to do it.

Aside from sitting around being ill and providing technical support for myself, this was a week in which I:

Started looking seriously at what second car we will buy. Our short ownership of a 15-year-old Mini was a financial disaster, so we are looking at spending a little bit more to buy something newer, trying to keep the insurance costs for our two boys as low as possible. Current thinking is something like a Hyundai i10, Kia Picanto, or Toyota Aygo X. The Aygo is interesting as Toyota continue to give you a warranty for up to 10 years as long as you get the car serviced with them.

Finally relented to ‘upgrading’ our Virgin Media boxes to ‘TV 360’. This involved clicking an option on the existing TV box and then getting sent new remotes in the post, which you use to complete the upgrade. I don’t really understand the reasons for them pushing this software change.

Bought a new CD player from Deco Audio, replacing a 23-year-old Cambridge Audio unit that had been recently repaired but had failed again. The Pro-Ject CD Box DS3 sounds great, and fits perfectly with the other components in my Hi-Fi system. It was lovely to play some CDs again during the week at home.

Loved getting regular updates on the chat group tracking my youngest son and his friends as they cycled around the Balkans. He has gone from being a non-cyclist before Christmas to cycling over 1,000km in about a week.

Had a lovely family lunch at my mum and dad’s house, along with my brothers and their families, as well as an aunt and uncle, and some friends I haven’t seen in a long time. It was strange to turn up without our boys as they were both abroad pursuing their various adventures. We always go home so well-fed and well looked after.

Finally got outside to take down our Christmas lights. It won’t be long until I’m putting them up again.

Gave our back lawn its first mow of the year. Although so much of what was grass is now moss, seeing it go from shaggy to smartly chopped makes me feel that spring is definitely here.

Media

Podcasts

I found myself getting mad once again about the damage done by Trump, Musk and DOGE last year in Jonathan Freedland’s conversation with Sasha Abramsky. USAID was destroyed. And for what? For me, how much Musk and co revelled in the cruelty is the most shocking part.

Sasha Abramsky: So there were people with HIV dying. There were people with malaria and tuberculosis who were dying. And perhaps most scandalously, there were people, children, who had been told they needed anti-starvation interventions.

There’s this thing called Plumpy’Nut. It was designed by the French in the 1980s. And it’s a sachet of very high-density peanut-based paste. And four doses a day of that for about six to eight weeks can bring a kid who’s on the verge of death and starvation back to the land of the living. And that entire six- to eight-week course costs about $50.

And Taly Lind [senior employee at USAID] was in tears. She said, “Look, I’ve lost my job, I’ve lost my pension security. I’ve lost my income. But here’s what’s keeping me up at night. What’s keeping me up at night is that USAID cannot distribute Plumpy’Nut because it’s now being locked up in warehouses in the US and overseas.” But there Elon Musk is on social media, prattling on about how we can’t afford it and how too much altruism equals death.

Articles

Microsoft Copilot is usually my last choice of AI tool, except where what I am asking is either (a) confidential to work, or (b) a request to help me find something at work. But they do keep bringing value to the tool, not least of which is how they give you access to both OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s models. The Copilot Researcher agent will now have a ‘Critique’ feature to use both models for the same task.

A lack of checking AI output has led to yet another person losing a job. This time it is a New York Times journalist who used AI to write a book review.

Ethan Mollick has written an interesting piece on AI interfaces.

Video

Fallen Leaves (2023) was a strange film that, on reflection, I probably wasn’t in the mood for as I descended into a well of unwellness. Everybody in the film — everybody — is completely deadpan. But fishing around on YouTube afterwards highlighted the subtlety of some scenes that I had completely missed. I could be tempted to rewatch this. Oh, and this song is fab.

I somehow stumbled across a reaction video to another video about ‘27 things allowed in the UK but not the USA’ and watched right to the end. I did not know that parking the wrong way on a street, or having an open container of alcohol as a passenger in a car, are both illegal in America. Watching the video, it struck me again how harsh an environment the US is for the average person. I’ve always felt that in the US, the corporations and the government are king and everyone is expected to fit around them, whereas in Europe it is the other way around.

Went to our local cinema to see Hamnet (2025) and was left in a pool of tears at the end. Mark Kermode makes a compelling case that the film is designed to manipulate this emotional reaction from you, but I am absolutely here for it.

Last One Laughing 2 was very, very funny.

The new series of For All Mankind feels somewhat spoilt by Joel Kinnaman’s terrible makeup and unconvincing portrayal of a very old version of his character Edward Baldwin, but we’ll stick with it.

We are so delighted that the new series of Race Across The World has started. It’s such splendid escapism. My wife and I are convinced that there are rules to the show that we’re not told about, where they have to take time to do jobs or activities and not just race. If it was me, I would focus on getting as far as I could as quickly as possible, only stopping for employment if I got close to my money running out. Instead, each of the pairs seem to spend time ambling about, looking at stuff and earning money when they still have over 85% of their budget left. Can someone please leak the full rules?

Audio

My music library being out of action for a few days meant that I resorted to listening to a friend’s Plex ‘Library Radio’ on a car journey. I’d never heard of Puddle of Mudd or their song Blurry before, and it isn’t usually my kind of thing, but I found myself enjoying it. Wikipedia tells me that it was “2002’s most successful rock song in the United States”. I spent most of 2002 living in the United States, but I guess I didn’t listen to much radio at the time.

Books

Continued with Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint by Robert Gaskins.

Next week: Back to work.

One of these was to implement a small location on the disks to keep log files. The QNAP OS needs this to be an unencrypted location on the disk. Previously, I had allocated all of the storage to an encrypted data volume and was scratching my head as to how I would reduce this to free up a small amount for this log file storage. Rebuilding gave me the opportunity to implement the storage locations from scratch. I also set up local snapshots, scheduled ‘RAID scrubbing’ and S.M.A.R.T. tests, which I had never considered before.

I’m not quite done yet; I’m now running the three good disks in a RAID 5 configuration and plan to add one more disk next month and move to RAID 6.