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DHL sucks

Sunday, May 8th, 2005

Well, it seems DHL can’t get its acts together worldwide, or at least DHL USA are fucking morons.

I have a tracking number for a package sent from the USA, but DHL France (and, from what I’ve been told, all of DHL except DHL USA) can’t use this tracking number; it’s an 11-digit number, and the rest of DHL in the world uses a 10-digit number. And no, the DHL website can’t give me the corresponding 10-digit number.

The DHL guy I talked to on the phone on Saturday got angry to me once I mentioned DHL USA, which really didn’t help.

Thanks DHL, but I’ll be going with UPS from now on.

Update (2005-05-09): The package will finally be delivered tomorrow. It turns out that the guy I spoke to on Saturday isn’t working for DHL, but for another company which handles the customer service on Saturday; so the above must be taken with care.

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IBM/Hitachi HDD reliability … or lack thereof

Sunday, May 8th, 2005


May 7 14:36:11 arrakis kernel: hde: dma_timer_expiry: dma status == 0x20
May 7 14:36:11 arrakis kernel: hde: DMA timeout retry
May 7 14:36:11 arrakis kernel: PDC202XX: Primary channel reset.
May 7 14:36:11 arrakis kernel: hde: status timeout: status=0xd0 { Busy }

This is the second Hitachi HDD that breaks this year. The first one was a 6-month old 120 GB SATA drive, this one is a 2-year old 120 GB PATA drive.

Oddly enough, I have a couple of 60GXP and 75GXP drives that are still running fine with the updated firmware.

This drive should still be under warranty, but the Hitachi website tells me the warranty expired in Feb. 2004… given that the disk was manufactured on Dec. 2002 and that there’s a 3-year warranty, I’m going to phone them and get my RMA.

If only they could focus a little bit more on reliability instead of capacity … my 10-year old 342 MB IBM drive, my very first hard drive, is still running happily. That really doesn’t match the definition of evolution in my book :-(

Thanks to the Linux software RAID for keeping the server running.

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