Japan Earthquake 2011

After reading all the articles about the earthquake that happened in Japan recently, and despite the fact that there may be more earthquakes in future, it only further fuelled by desire to live there.

Many shops remained open to provide free shelter to people who couldn’t go back home when the trains had to stop running.

When they had problems with their power supply and requested everyone to co-operate by cutting down electricity usage, many shops did. In Akihabara, the famous electronics district, shops switched off their monitor displays. Some remain closed for business.

Square-Enix shut down their FFXI and FFXIV game servers too and offered to compensate players by making the month of April free.

Everyone is working together to overcome this huge challenge placed in front of them.

In Singapore, we’re fortunate that we’re safe from all these natural disasters.

But in return, it has made a lot of it’s citizens pretty selfish and uncaring towards others.

Update:

I’ve also did my part and made a small donation to Red Cross Japan via google.

I’ve never made donations before and I probably never will in Singapore with all the donation scandals that’ve happened here before.

The case of the undeletable files

Recently came across a few spooky IT-related situations.

Let’s start with the story of my company’s NAS.

It’s a QNAP TS-201 with 2 150GB harddisks configured in mirror raid. When the disks have less than 10GB space, it will emit a beeping sound like every 10 minutes and I’ll have to clear it’s “Recycle Bin” to free up space.

When you delete files on a NAS, it gets deleted instantly unlike deleting files on your desktop where it goes to the recycle bin first.

So I sent in a request for some new 1TB drives to upgrade to. Spent my weekend upgrading it because that’s when no one needs access to it.

When Monday came, I got a report that excel was creating .tmp files when saving the document and they weren’t deleted when the excel file is closed. When I tried to delete the .tmp files manually, the files disappear but reappear when the page is refreshed.

Thinking it was an access issue, I SSH-ed in and set ownership to Guest, group to Everyone, chmod777 every file but it still didn’t work.

Then I decided to try SSH into our second NAS which is used only by my department. I compared the folder structure of both NASes and see that there’s a missing “Network Recycle Bin 1” folder on the upgraded NAS.

To fix this, I logged into the web administration panel of the NAS, went to the Network Recycle Bin page, the checkbox that enables this feature is already ticked, so all I did is just click the save button.

I checked the folder structure and see that the folder has been recreated.

Tried to delete a file and it worked.

Case solved.