so very many problems.

ughhhgh, there i was happily hacking away last evening, when suddenly everything goes to hell. advancing a line in Konsole yields a popup notification that it couldn't write to /tmp. running anything but trivial commands hits immediate read errors. those which can be run inevitably hit similar errors processing their arguments. it's just as if a network drive dropped out from under you, or you unplugged an external drive without properly unmounting it. well, indeed, intel had unplugged one of my 128GB 320 SSDs for me, an apparently well-known bug which manifests itself as a serial number of BAD_CTX [hexval] and only 8MB of zeroes available on the block device. annoyingly, this was my primary device (/, /usr, /home, everything but active torrents, a few VMs, and bulk storage). that'd not have been much of a problem, but—most unfortunately, i realized as i sat up with a bolt—i'd pulled apart the mdadm software RAID1 which typically backed these data last week to stash aforementioned VMs. indeed, the dead SSD had three partitions on them, two of them degraded halves of my raid. yep, boom, with that i'd lost everything aside from media on my machine. at least a day lost to rebuilding it, i knew, if rebuilding was even possible.

well, i managed to rescue...most everything, i think, though i'm only finishing up now (around 0400 tuesday) after starting at 0700 monday morning, and working continuously. utterly fucking wasted day. a horrible time. i'm shocked and appalled by intel's shoddy work here, especially given the reliability premium i'd happily paid them. admittedly, the problem appears to be in the firmware as opposed to the NAND flash, and it's not as if intel makes the firmware/controller, but still, augh, the product ought not be on the market. this failure case is hard and fast, from all i can tell. i've got some new data, by the way, for anyone dealing with this issue (from the fora searches i've performed, there seem to be a great many of you):

• The 8MB being reported is definitely a firmware failure mode as opposed to some arbitrary bitrot. If you run hdparm -g to dump “physical” geometry (SSDs do not, of course, have heads or cylinders), you'll see that only 1 cylinder is being reported.
• I burned an ISO of the firmware update, and successfully booted it. It detected my SSD (so long as it was on the motherboard's builtin AHCI controller, as opposed to an expansion SAS/SATA board), but was never able to apply the update. I tried this in both native AHCI and legacy IDE configs.
• hdparm -N clearly reveals a Host Protected Area (HPA) in use, likely set up by the firmware as a world-communicable failure litmus. This makes plenty of sense as an error-signaling mechanism, or enough sense anyway. the result sure sucketh ass though.
• attempting to remove the HPA via hdparm -Np resulted in EIO
• attempting to restore original Device Configuration Overlay (DCO) information also resulted in EIO
• sending the device into hard sleep mode, then waking it, did nothing to resolve this, nor did a hard reset of the device. that works to effect a T13 defreeze.

so i'm fairly certain my data is still there—likely not in any recognizable form, due to what are assumedly profoundly fucked internal mapping tables, but certainly able to be dd'd off the drive for tedious dredging—if i could just zorch the fucking HPA. it has nothing to do with T13 drive security settings when i refer to this, btw. so i'll keep this thing around for a bit and see if i can't pull my most recent data from it at some point. in the meantime, the next intel employee i see is losing exactly one tooth.

whilst reinstalling my box, i took a few quick notes on problems i noticed in sprezzos. ordered in order that i noticed them, allow me to reproduce this list. totally not daunting at all:

1. ssmtp needs a rebuild (gnutls)
2. pack net-ip-perl, io-socket-inet6-, digest-hmac-,authen-ntlm-, authen-sasl-
3. pack guile-1.8 or move users
4. rebuild nullmailer (gnutls)
5. still not running gpm -- not even installing, actually
6. when gpm is installed, warning about /usr/lib/gpm/gpm_has_mouse_control
7. once installed, "systemctl start gpm" does indeed work
8. ...though it still doesn't start at boot
9. still not bringing up interfaces on boot
10. writing allow-hotplug entries to /etc/network/interfaces twice
11. need fix usb keyboards yesterday
12. need run setupcon on boot
13. pack surfraw
14. pack iselect
15. pack screenie
16. pack libcache-perl, libclass-*-perl, libdata-*-perl
17. pack libfeed-find-perl, libunicode-map8-perl, libaudio-scrobbler-perl
18. i think we've lost our aptitude defaults
19. should rsyslog really be running with systemd?
20. colorize prompt by default
21. really must move to physical naming for disks
22. turn on syncookies by default -- lost sysctl settings?
23. nvidia doesn't build out of the box against our shipped kernel
24. need run detect-sensors and add discovered modules to /etc/modules
25. ssh-agent is running through pam but need generate ssh key for added users
26. pm-utils recommend obsolete cpufrequtils
27. clutter-2.0-gst conflicts with clutter-1.0-gst
28. compiz9 doesn't recommend/depend on plugin, backend, or settins manager
29. udisks2 recommends obsolete cryptsetup-bin
30. gconf2 APT hooks bitch about dbus when run from console
31. default xdg directories are terrible (Templates? Videos? fuck you)
32. need rebuild qdbus with epoch >= 4 or old one gets reinstalled over it
33. konsole throws up a 'knotify crashed' dialog for invalid tab completes(!)
34. top needs be colorized by default
35. need solarized vim theme by default
36. smarttools ought be installed by default
37. smart doesn't run automatically once installed
38. smart needs a semi-sensible config
39. probably want a more useful default xinitrc than "xterm"
40. why is notify-osd installed to /usr/lib/notify-osd where it's useful to no one?
41. compiz8 also doesn't recommend backend (does get plugins)
42. compiz-kde isn't installable
43. nouveau 9.1.1 doesn't appear to work -- warning about can't open nouveau dri
44. looks like we're missing a nouveau_dri.so in /usr/lib/dri
45. what the hell is agetty? use mingetty by default
46. mpd ought start lastmp and lastfmsubmitd for me
47. at the very least, lastmp ought start lastfmsubmitd or vice versa
48. why the hell are we installing 3.7.2 spl/zfs
49. need upgrade spl/zfs to 0.6.0
50. wtf on login: "-bash: data/zeitgeist-daemon.bash_completion: NSFoDirectory"
51. set up wireless interfaces as wpa-roam/manual with an example .conf
52. our python-libxml2 doesn't get discovered by autotools
53. raptorial needs depend on apt-file unless it wants to download contents files
54. investigate this "too big file to journald" crap (maybe systemd-coredump?)
55. nautilus appears to be missing most of its icons
56. gnome/gtk are both horrifically ugly out of the box (fonts are not so bad!)
57. gnome-session fails (use --debug to get more info)
58. why does udisksd burst as much cpu as mdraid_resync+mdraid_raid6 (no gui used!)
59. growlight's corners in non-fbterm console are abominably ugly
60. holy fucking shit cert is only good for www.sprezzatech.com we use no www augh
61. editing profile preferences crashes gnome-terminal
62. when you go back an entry in growlight, if the previous entry was not on the
63. default set of entries listed, you get that set and nothing highlighted
64. growlight crashes on exit sometimes
65. growlight crashes if 'h' is pressed while blocked on a slow disk during init
66. ccsm doesn't have any icons or text (patch at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compiz/+bug/1130941 works)
67. lightdm doesn't start (/usr/share/xgreeters/default.desktop missing)

fuck me gently with a chainsaw!

the one positive thing is that the two 256GB SSDs i ordered to eliminate Intel 320 SSDs from my life forevermore are by....Plextor! nostalgia for my 17 year old hella warez-burning self overwhelms me :D.