Thursday, July 10, 2008

How to Check System Temperature Under Linux

One of my Linux web servers (running Fedora) starting coming up with these messages:

Message from syslogd:

kernel: CPU0: Temperature above threshold

CPU0: Running in modulated clock mode

I couldn't tell how slowly the CPU was running, but it was dog slow, and the server load was outrageously high.

I was curious as to what temperature the CPU was running at, so I took a look at the pseudo file:

/proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/temperature

using cat and the ACPI sensor showed a whopping 83 degrees Celsius. I called the hosting company and they found a faulty CPU fan and replaced it.

Just thought I share this in case you didn't know how to check the temperature of Linux boxes and want to find out.

Monday, July 7, 2008

Tivo HD Hard Drive Upgrade - The Best Way

I got my new Tivo HD (model # TCD652160) today, and before even turning it on I wanted to upgrade its built-in 160GB SATA hard drive (Western Digital WD1600AVBS). I had a spare 320GB WDC SATA HDD laying around so I wanted to use it as my new Tivo HD hard drive, which would effectively double the recording space from 20 HD hours to 40. Anyways I Googled around and found this guide:

bumwine.com/tivo.html

I used Knoppix and did the dd command and everything, and it took like 40 minutes to copy over from the 160 gig to the 320. Then came the command to expand the drive to full capacity:

/home/knoppix/Desktop/mfstool add -x /dev/sdb -r 4

It failed miserably with the messages:

Primary volume header corrupt, trying backup.
Secondary volume header corrupt, giving up.
mfs_load_volume_header: Bad checksum.
Unable to open MFS drives.

Ouch. Then someone mentioned on the net that using MFSLive would work, but the funny thing was that when BOTH the original Tivo 160 gig HDD and the newly dd'ed 320 gig HDD were in the system, Knoppix/MFSLive/Windows would refuse to see the second drive despite the drive appearing in the BIOS fine.

Someone also said that the new Windows-based too called WinMFS has excellent support for Tivo HD. The latest version is WinMFS beta 8. After downloading it (I had to register in their forum before I could find the link to download), I had it make a BACKUP of the original Tivo drive. Then I shut off the computer, disconnected the orig. drive, attached the 320 gig, and then had WinMFS RESTORE to the drive. When it was done it asked me a beautiful question- do I want to fully utilize extra space on the new drive. Yes- of course- and everything worked like a charm after that. I suppose that if I had avoided the instructions from "bumwine.com/tivo.html" in the first place I wouldn't have had this problem. But no where on that guide did it say that it wouldn't work for Tivo HD- it fact the author claims that it will work. Well it doesn't- trust me! In theory you could just use WinMFS to directly copy the source Tivo HD drive to the target. But since I did the "dd" both drives refused to show up at the same time so I had to do the backup and restore (B&R) method (which went really fast BTW). You might actually want to go for the B&R on a brand new Tivo HD because it should be much faster than the direct copy. The direct copy will work to preserve your settings and shows, however.

So to those of you wanting to upgrade the hard drive on your Tivo HD/Series 3- do it the WinMFS way and NOT the dd/mfstool method. You will save yourself time and headache which unfortunately I experienced....