So I’ve been attempting to upgrade the forum (currently 2.3.5) to 3.0.2 but I keep running into problems.

It all started off when I see this error “ALTER TABLE ibf_members CHANGE id member_id MEDIUMINT(8) NOT NULL auto_increment;
Duplicate entry ‘1′ for key 1″

After this my member_id table get deleted and it causes a chain reaction of errors that made it impossible for me to upgrade the forum.

After spending a few hours, I finally found the solution.  First I found an IPB thread that talked about something “funky” on the members table.

Well my brain finally noticed something strange on the members table.  Basically THE FIRST RECORD I had was a 0 with no username (just a blank), this was what was the problem.  I deleted that first record and everything started working.  Incredible that I didn’t see this from the beginning.

DOH!

I have been looking forward to the Affliction 3rd show Trilogy but thanks to Barnett, it is now over.  What I don’t get is why he would do this.  Why juiced up on his most important fight of his career?  He know getting caught would means a disaster for his career.  Now he has killed the show and pissed off alot of fans such as me.

So I was watching this movie last night since the review were good and it was suppose to have inspired Bruce Lee’s fist of fury. I have to say I was impressed by the movie. It was pretty good for an older style of martial arts and filming style.

I also watched it dubbed in English and the dub was great. They seem to be inserting alot of artistic creativity in the dub with all the cussing in the movie. Of course you also get alot of Chinese slapstick which you have to be used to enjoy it.

The thing that seriously cracked me up was the “Pinky Promise” scene that keeps occuring.

First example, the young warrior meets his teacher and they decided to make a promise to keep secrets.. Now the boy then do the pinky promise.

All right. So it seems reasonable that the teacher would do the pinky promise with his new student to humor him.

Since he was a nice fellow and all.

Now as the movie progressed, the teacher left while the boy was still a kid. The boy becomes a powerful warrior by reading a book that the teacher left behind. He grew older and stronger and surprised his father by kicking the ass of a guy who came to take over his dojo. He starts to represent China and beat up a Russian boxer and some other random funny characters.

As fate would have it, he eventually meet his teacher again. Now what do you think the first thing he would do is? I mean they movie really cracked me up when as a kickass warrior now meeting his now really old teacher.. The first thing he does is this.

WHAT THE HELL?? I laughed so hard.

For the past few days I’ve been struggling and trying to get this new Xen Platform to work.

Basically the problem lies in the fact that after the OS install (CentOS 5), the machine would refuse to boot with 2 kind of error.  One of a frozen initial boot screen and the other is a kernel panic (can’t find VolGroup00).

Since the total space of the harddrives were more then 2 terabytes (6 750 gb drives in raid10 and 2 hot spares), I had to either have autocarve on OR use a boot volume and thereby converting the 2nd (sdb) into a GPT format.

Since I can’t get the machine to boot, my initial reaction was to update the 3ware raid card and the motherboard to the latest BIOS version.  But I still can’t get pass the frozen screen or the kernel panic screen no matter what I did.  I tried every possible senario I can think of and we’re talking EVERYTHING.

Ram tested good, HDs are fine, tried IDE cdrom, DVDrom, sata dvdrom,

Found some interesting threads

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?p=1073621

http://www.3ware.com/kb/article.aspx?id=15388

But nothing worked although the thread on the fedoraforum looked interesting and I thought I had something with it but ended up with NO results.

Then I had this bright idea of reducing the speed of the bus to pci-x 66 from 133. Now I start thinking perhaps something was wrong the card since we bought a used one. Well the install went fine but afterward during the brute force test, a ton of errors pop out on the screen and the thing just looks horribly flaky.

I called 3ware and asked them for some tips. The guy was very helpful giving me some things I haven’t tried yet (although I have tried pretty much everything else). I tried his tips and nothing worked.

Well finally I took the card home and plugged it into my Tyan server at home (my sweet new fileserver) and bam it worked FLAWLESSLY.

This is when I started to realize that it could be the motherboard itself. I did try a little bit more random stuff and finally just decided to RMA and cross ship the board. We use supermicro boards at work and even the server I built for SW used supermicro. I mean this is how much love I have for supermicro that I didn’t remotely even considered that it could be the board being flaky.

Well when the new board arrived, I plugged the parts in and it was basically a WAM BAM THANK YOU MAM. Worked flawlessly. It looked like the PCI-X ports for the board was just bad. Perhaps if the raid card was PCI-E, that slot might have worked perfectly.

Lesson I learned: Don’t think that the motherboard (just cause the brand is hot) isn’t the weakest link.