Phuket Information Technology Blog

With a help of our new SCSI data recovery complex, we pulled 100% of Microsoft Exchange databases from a Seagate SCSI drive belonging to British Curriculum International School. The kind of a failure was quite common for Seagate SCSI drives: SCSI controller shows “Medium Error”;  Drive Capacity is indicated as 0 (or in Linux logs the message “Read Capacity failed” can be seen), the drive serial number is displayed correctly in the diagnostic utilities.

Another successful data recovery from a Toshiba hard disk drive with a bearing problem (this drive has a fluid dynamic bearing). Actually Toshiba is an absolute leader for this kind of HDD failures. This time we recorded an MP3 for you, how the drive sounded when it was brought to us:

Toshiba HDD bearing problem

Today computers in our office, an a few customers of ours, while trying to send email via smtp.totisp.net (or smtp-adsl.totonline.net) received the following message from a server:

“The evaluation license has expired”. For example, my Mozilla Thunderbird shows it like this:

I decided to check the server directly:

telnet smtp.totisp.net 25
Trying 118.175.8.10…
Connected to ruhk-010.totisp.net.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
421 The evaluation license has expired.
Connection closed by foreign host

Looks like TOT did not pay for a software it is using! Remember what TOT is also blocking outgoing port 25, and people cannot use other SMTP servers (unless they use alternate port number)?

Our new SCSI data recovery hardware/software complex should arrive soon, allowing us to do certain new things with SCSI drives we was not able to do before.

Metal grilles beloved by Compaq/HP are not suitable for a tropical climate; this is a worst example as the grilles are contacting with the hands and the sweat make them rust very quickly.

Was sold in China to one of our customers as 1Gb drive for a very low price; the actual capacity of the flash chip is just 64Mb. Controller is programmed to report 1Gb to the PC. Note what the markings on the flash chip are sanded off.

We found a SOMO report on working conditions in some factories related to the hard disk drive manufacturing.

Ants came in and ate the cooling gel on top of the chips inside this cd-rom. We saw three much worse cases, all with the Sony notebooks - probably Sony discovered some yummy recipe for the gel it is using?

The metal bars wrapped with masking tape (shown below the case) were put inside the case just to increase weight and make the adapter feel more “solid” in the hand.

There is one upside to the mindless TOT SMTP filtering: people will start switching to the secure SMTPS protocol if their hosting providers support it, which is a good thing - private information, like e-mail, should be encrypted in transmission by default. Details of the switching to alternative SMTP (or SMTPS) port can be found on our ADSL information page.