Optimized Cable Experience

I just thought I’d take a moment and share the experience I had with Optimized Cable Company. I was searching for a set of HDMI-DVI and DVI-DVI cables for two monitors and decided to try the products of Optimized Cable Company. I found their selection of cables to be of high quality and their prices to be competitive. What prompted me; however, to write about this was the excellent customer service they provided. So often we are quick to post and talk about our bad experiences and rarely do we share the positive experiences we have with companies.

The positive experience I had with Optimized Cable Company is one of those great experiences you rarely hear about. When I ordered my set of cables, which were delivered very quickly (I might add), I realized I had not paid close enough attention to the connectors. One of my monitors had an HDMI connector, while the other had DVI; however, both of my video cards had DVI connectors. When I realized my ordering error I promptly called them and explained my mistake and they said to just send them back the incorrect cable and they would promptly send me the correct cable, which was slightly more expensive than the one I originally ordered. They did an even exchange and I received the cable I intended to purchase at no additional cost to me or hassle.

Based on the quality of the cables I received, prompt delivery, and the ease of doing business with them. I will direct my future needs for cables to them and highly recommend them for all of your cable needs.

Thank you Optimized Cable Company!

Optimized Cable Company

http://www.optimization-world.com/

Linux and USB Hard Drive “fsck died with exit status 8”

I decided to setup an old AMD 1.7 GHz system I had as a BackupPC server to back up a few machines I have and experienced an issue with a USB 2.0 Hard Drive. I thought I’d share my situation in case someone else runs into a similar situation.

My BackupPC server has 2 internal IDE hard drives and an external USB 2.0 750 GB SATA hard drive, which is used to store the backups. After I had completed the installation of Ubuntu 9.04 Server edition and rebooted I received the following error during the file system checks.

Failed to open the device 'UUID=2b1da3c5-d190-47c9-8f39-760100368e2c' : No Such file or directory

fsck died with exit status 8

    ...fail!

* File system check failed.

A log is being saved in /var/log/fsck/checkfs if that location is writable.

Please repair the file system manually.

*  A maintenance shell will now be started.

CONTROL-D will terminate this shell and resume system boot.

After researching the error and trying various suggestions I realized that all I needed to do was exclude the external USB hard drive from having it’s file system checked during startup. I solved the issue by editing /etc/fstab and setting the entry for the USB hard drive’s PASS column to a 0, which essentially tells fsck to not check the file system.

Before:

# /var was on /dev/sdc1 during installation

UUID=2b1da3c5-d190-47c9-8f39-760100368e2c /var            reiserfs relatime       0       2

After:

# /var was on /dev/sdc1 during installation

UUID=2b1da3c5-d190-47c9-8f39-760100368e2c /var            reiserfs relatime       0       0

After this little modification to /etc/fstab, I rebooted and once the system came up, I manually mounted the device for my USB 2.0 hard drive as such and all was good.

sudo mount /dev/sdc1

By the way BackupPC setup and configuration can be a little challenging, so I recommend aside from the official documentation the following link, which I’ve found to still be relevant for both Debian and Ubuntu.

http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_backuppc