Yep. Now I’ve lost the sound card too. Needless to say I think this Pioneer amp is too fast and too furious. So I’m gonna be removing it from my lineup. Now all I have to do, is convince Logitech to send me another set of speakers, which I know I’ll get right this time.

There’s only one problem: I’m now stuck with the crappy AC ‘97 audio built into my motherboard and I lack a MIDI port, something that I use extensively. So I’m gonna be looking around for a half-decent sound card and probably a job to pay for it (and possibly *more* new speakers). Looks like fate has finally caught up with me.

216 days and 17 hours. That is how long my server was up without interruption according to the uptime command as of this afternoon. Not bad for an area that gets power outages like crazy this time of year (it hasn’t happened in exactly that many days).

The important thing is that I beat Neal Gompa’s record, 200 days. We’ve been in friendly competition about it for quite a while now and I was quite excited when uptime counter finally reached 200 days. There is a good and valid reason that it’s over now.

Last night I was fiddling around with NFS shares trying to make the Ubuntu live CD bootable with PXE. (I have no life. :P) Unfortunately I messed something up and got rpc.mountd to deny all mount requests, thus locking me out of 80% of my home directory from Nighthawk, and messing up my network boot system which uses Pelswick as a TFTP server. A reboot looked more and more imminent as I could not seem to get nfsd to unload (it’s built as a kernel module). Today in the late afternoon I took Bigmomma to runlevel 1 and gracefully stopped enough services to be able to peacefully umount /home, after which nfsd unloaded.

The problem came when I remounted /home and realized that I had been meaning to mount it with extended attribute (xattr) support enabled. I realized that I had not done this and once again umounted the device. When I did so, I got a big fat kernel panic, the first one I’ve seen in kernel 2.6.14.

So I let it sit there for a minute thinking about all that the server had been through during the last 216 days and decided that Bigmomma was about due for maintenance. So I turned the system off, pulled out the CD burner and 3.5″ floppy drive that were only used during the installation, blew 7 months’ worth of dust out of the case, replaced the cover, and booted her back up. She’s happily serving files and web pages again.

I did end up with a few “double free or corruption” messages from rpc.mountd so NFS isn’t quite perfect yet. It’s still a little unsteady even after recompiling the nfs-utils SRPM. Still working that part out.

Well, whaddya know. I suppose that I’ll have to rewrite a little of my story but I think it will be better now that it’s more complete.

Basically what happened is I got two dead babies. One of ‘em was shipped from geeks.com and the other straight from Logitech. Both were completely dead on arrival. That’s the short version.

The long version is this: I ordered a new set of Logitech X-540 speakers from geeks.com for $115 including shipping. They were all that fit in my budget, and I figured they would be okay for the price. They came in and I got them all installed and they were working OK for an hour or two. I was adjusting some cables on my amp when it accidentally got switched to FM mode and started sending static to them - moderately loud static.

Now, mind you, this has happened to my old speakers, in fact they took tons more abuse than even that. But the fact that Logitech makes their DSP boards *that* cheap is just insidious. The speakers immediately stopped working, with strange noises being produced when turning the volume control and several other weird problems. IMHO for $115 these things should be able to withstand that. If I remember correctly they weren’t even turned up all that loud, which means absorbing that signal should not have been a problem.

Since the item got shipped manufacturer-direct, I contacted Logitech and they said that I had a defective set. Understandable. They also told me to go back to the seller since I had the item for less than 30 days. The resulting e-mail conversation was quite a funny one:

Support rep: “Please reply back to this email if you have purchase the X-540 speaker system for more than 30 days. The replacement unit will come from us if you have purchased the speaker system for more than 30 days. I look forward to your reply.”

Me: “According to my records I placed the order on April 12, 2008. I’ll e-mail back and re-open the support case on May 12 or so if I don’t have any luck with geeks.com. Thank for getting back so fast last time, I really appreciate it!”

Support rep: “Thank you for taking the time to reply my email and elaborating further on your issue. Since 30 days has passed since you have purchased the X-540 speaker system, I would like to proceed with issuing a replacement unit for your defective X-540 speaker system. In order to proceed with this, please provide me with all the details below.”

Me: “Attached is a screenshot of the order history window showing the purchase in question. Again from my previous message, I placed the order on April 12, 2008. So a month has not in fact passed yet since my order. The retailer from which I purchased the set has not replied to my message that I sent a week ago as of today, so as far as I’m concerned Logitech is not obligated to send out a new set until approximately May 12 assuming the retailer chooses not to provide support. Thank you again for the support.”

Support rep’s boss two days later: “Your fulfillment has been shipped. The following products were included: 1 | X-540″

No tricks, no cheating, that’s what really happened. They said it would take 10 to 14 business days to process; it took 1. That was a good sign, +1 for Logitech’s customer support.

Now if only their products were half as good. The new set was dead on arrival - I got absolutely no sound out of it and saw that the power LED was dimmer than it should have been. What a mess. So I now have two completely unusable subwoofer units and 10 satellite speakers sitting in my basement waiting for me to learn their fate.

I hope Logitech takes this as a lesson. No doubt that they built good speakers - the construction is solid and setup is straightforward and simple. But there is a huge problem with the circuitry that drives those speakers, and that is that it’s just way too cheap. It can’t handle even a normal signal - one would have to turn the output volume on their PC down just to avoid overloading the circuitry. That’s a problem because most users will leave the software volume all the way up and control the audio volume with the physical knob on the control pod.

Either way, I’ve e-mailed both geeks.com and Logitech about this and am waiting for them to reply. Chances are that if one doesn’t do something then the other will, but the worst that could happen is me being out $115 and learning an important lesson: to avoid Logitech hardware at all costs.

Due to a little problem with my MySQL management script I just did the unthinkable and accidentally dropped the database for this blog. Not pretty, but I gotta deal with it. The most recent post I made a few days ago is gone, but that’s it, the rest is in Google’s cache, and posts since October were just restored from a full database backup I made. (Yeah, I’m due for another one. Long overdue, really, considering the fact that I’ve been so good about keeping Germantown backed up. Silly me…)

So things are going to be a little hairy for a few days. I will have to manually restore a lot of posts, which will take time. Hang tight.