The House Forgotten - ABDSP

In the 1945 July Desert Refuge article written by Marshal South he describes an old Indian rock shelter they discovered on one of their many exploration trips out into the desert area. In the Marshal South Book, the oldest son Rider South also recalls his father referring to it as "The Fortress" since it appeared to have many smaller shelters built up all around the main shelter providing what appeared to be a protected fortress.

On a recent hiking/exploration trip out into the open desert over the centuries old sun baked volcanic rocks I stumbled across this very shelter. I was not aware at the time what I had found but later a person with more knowledge about the area and the Marshal South history pointed it out to me. I later went back and read the article by Marshal South published almost 66 years ago and was amazed to see the resemblance of the rock shelter and how a few of the plants sketched by Marshal South were still growing in the same spot I had photographed.

Here is the sketch Marshal South drew in the 1945 article

Here is the photograph I took in July 2011

Replace a failing drive in a ZFS Zpool

I had a hard drive start throwing some sense key errors on one of our big Sun servers at work today. Besides dealing with problems from a major power outage in Southern California recently this was just one more thing to deal with. Good news is it was part of a ZFS zpool and after some refreshing of the commands I needed to use I was able to replace the drive in a matter of minutes and there was no downtime for any of the users on the system. We have about 1,000 zfs file systems on this particular zpool, mostly all being very active user home directories. It is also a print server for about 1,000 users.

ZFS is amazing.

If you need to replace a failing drive in a ZFS zpool, maybe seeing what I needed to do will help you. Follow along to see what was needed.

Here you can see the sense key errors in the messages file

Running the zpool status command shows me only a single read error. This is enough for me to swap out the drive, this would be the c1t5d0 device.

The Sun server has many drives in it and I wanted to make sure I pull the correct drive out so I use the luxadm command to flash the amber light next to the drive in the system. These are fiber channel drives so luxadm is used. Next I tell the zpool system to take the drive offline so I can hot swap it out of the system. I run the the zpool status command to verify the drive is offline. Now I need to run to the data center, find the flashing light on the disk drive cage and swap it out with a new one.

Once the drive is replaced I run the devfsadm -C command to tell the OS to scan the system and add the new drive so it is usable to the zpool system. Now tell zpool to replace the failing drive with the new one. Since I was doing a direct replacement from the same slot in the system the command was very simple, "zpool replace zdata c1t5d0", "zdata" being the name of the zpool itself. Now running the zpool status command you can see it has already begun to rebuild the new drive back into the zpool volume.

With just a few simple commands I was able to hot swap and replace a failing disk drive in a very busy Sun server with no downtime at all. ZFS is an amazing piece of technology.

I hope this post might be helpful for you if you need to replace a failing hard drive using ZFS.

Grapevine Mountain / Bitter Creek Canyon - ABDSP

I started looking thru some of my Jerry Schad books for some ideas to go hiking in Anza Borrego Desert State Park. Jerry Schad is unfortunately not doing to well these days and I know many of us wish him the best and are so thankful to him for his books that we have used for many years. I myself have the original 1987 copy that I still use.


Finding somewhere to hike in Anza Borrego is never a problem, instead the problem is just trying to make up your mind where! I settled on hiking up to the peak of Grapevine Mountain using Jerry's route as described in his book. I drove down Grapevine Canyon from the Ranchita area the day before and camped out at the starting area of the hiking route. The full hiking distance was about 6.3 miles and the elevation gain/loss was around '2500. This was a great hike that only took about 7 hours to complete and that includes 95 degree temps and lots of lolly gagging on my part. I would recommend a hike up thru Bitter Creek Canyon alone as I found it a fascinating area.

You can see all of my pictures from this trip and many others on my photo webiste

Google Earth map of my actual route as recorded by GPS
Stuart Spring had plenty of water and bees guarding it
It had rained heavily early in the day, the dirt roads were muddy and the morteros near Angelina Spring were filled with water
The first dry fall heading up to Grapevine mtn. Jerry Schad's book recommends bypassing it on either the left or right but I was able to easily go right up the middle
This is looking up at the saddle as described in Jerry Schad's book. The white dot just above the saddle is the moon
Grapevine Mtn peak way off in the distance, behind and just to the right of the peak at about 10'oclock in the photo
Sorry, I am a sucker for scat..
Grapevine Mtn peak straight ahead, not much trail to follow on this hike
I love the blue Juniper Berries in this scat
The register, this peak does not seem to have much activity as almost all of the entires are months apart. The last one before mine was March 18th, seven months ago. If you look at the entry in the jar you can see it is from park ranger Robert Theriault dated 1985. I tried to find an entry from Jerry Schad but did not see one on any of the sheets. I did see many entries from the Monday Maniacs over the years, they seem to like this peak
What's left of old survey markers
Looking west at the Volcan Mountains
Looking down at the ridge I would descend. The ridge starts in the lower left of the picture and goes generally west down towards the center of the picture. This is the steep descent Jerry Schad decribes in his book for this hike
Where I first dropped down into Bitter Creek Canyon. You can clearly see an animal path thru the grass
Here is an open sandy area thru the canyon
Bitter Creek Canyon was very interesting, there were many rocky areas and some wide open sandy areas
Honey comb up in a small rock shelter. The honey comb looked old and abandoned but when I climbed up to get a picture bees started flying out
This old bathtub is at the bottom of Bitter creek Spring. You can see old pipes going up to the spring from here
Bitter Creek Spring is right at the base of this palm tree. I poked my head in there and only saw moist ground with a lot of bees
This was an interesting piece of pottery I found in the creek. I thought it might have a pattern drawn on it in black but after closer examination of the photo at home with Dstretch I think it is just from age
My little field mouse friend
Anybody ever notice these petroglyphs driving thru Ocotillo? Not much patina, fake is my guess

Why do they always crap right in the morteros??