So, I’ve had a fun expensive time of things lately. Some of it has just been the luck of the draw when dealing with a house that is 10 years old. No, it’s not an old house, but that is long enough for things to start breaking. (more…)
Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category
More breaking things and the insanity of Sprint.
Wednesday, November 25th, 2009Enough said
Saturday, January 17th, 2009md0 : active raid5 sdd1[1] sdi1[0] sde1[5] sdc1[4] sdg1[3] sdh1[2]
2441919680 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [6/6] [UUUUUU]
Oh, fun.
Wednesday, January 14th, 2009Woke up this morning, and my fileserver had emailed me this:
md0 : active raid5 sdh1[6](F) sdd1[5] sdc1[4] sdf1[3] sdg1[2] sdi1[7](F)
2441919680 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [6/4] [__UUUU]
Looks like I get a trial-by-fire of MD RAID recovery tonight, once I figure out what broke.
Q8200 Overclocking Results
Saturday, December 27th, 2008
Not bad for an affordable motherboard (Gigabyte EP45-DS3L, $85 or so after rebate), some cheap Kingston DDR2-800 RAM, and a $30 heatsink. Core voltage is only 1.28V – I’m not going to bother pushing it harder because at this point the RAM is already overclocked and I can’t run the RAM any slower than the current speed. I’m happy with the speed, a 3.1GHz quad-core Core2 is quite the upgrade from my 2.5GHz dual-core Opteron.
One of these days I’ll probably slap a new video card in here (current one is getting a bit old, 7900GS) but I’m in no rush. Probably when the next-gen midrange gets cheap.
When I update WordPress more often than I update the blog, that’s a bad thing.
Wednesday, December 17th, 2008Yeah, I suppose I should probably update in here more often, though it feels like I don’t have that much to say. I suppose I can throw out an update on the crap I’m working on…
mdadm is awesome.
Monday, September 22nd, 2008So, I’m currently running two fileservers. One at my house which has a 4x500GB RAID5, a 2x250GB RAID0, and runs a few other things for the local network. Pretty much anything of any relevance gets stuck on the server, the actual computers just get by with whatever minimal hard drive was cheapest. The other I stash at my mom’s for backup purposes, just in case something truly nasty happens that physically takes out my box at home. It was originally set up with a 4x200GB RAID5.
Your web server is a fart filter
Wednesday, September 10th, 2008
Back up and running.
Monday, August 25th, 2008Thank goodness for eBay. I’m still rocking Socket 939-era hardware on both my desktop and Kate’s desktop, which unfortunately means that new motherboards are simply not available at reasonable prices anymore – so my only option for a replacement motherboard was eBay. Under $30 shipped for a decent AsRock board, the 939SLI32 or whatever they call it, it’s some strange ‘bridge’ board which can have an optional daughtercard installed to use a Socket AM2 / DDR2 setup instead of Socket 939 / DDR. It’s also ULi’s last chipset prior to being bought out by nVidia, and it apparently features some ‘unofficial’ SLi implementation that’s probably not very well supported these days.
Amusingly enough, though, it’s a solid overclocker, even moreso than the board it replaced (DFI Lanparty NF4 Ultra-D) was. With no other changes I now have the CPU running on a 280MHz FSB – 2.5GHz clock, putting it roughly on par with an Athlon64 5000+. It would only do 270MHz on the DFI. Not bad for an old server chip.
The old motherboard was definitely the problem, but by no fault of its own. I had to replace the chipset fan once a few years ago because the factory one got noisy – apparently I didn’t make sure the pins were still secure since one failed and the heatsink lifted clear of the chipset with no warning. It’s toast.
Now, if I could only figure out why Folding@Home stopped running on my webserver for no good reason…
The things I own, keep breaking.
Wednesday, August 13th, 2008Today, not long after getting home, the power blinked – just long enough to shut down the TV and a couple of computers, including the media center (which has a crappy power supply so that’s no surprise) and my desktop (which was a surprise). Every desktop system I have aside from the HTPC uses relatively high-end power supplies, which I’ve noticed have the side benefit of keeping the system on a bit longer in the event of a short gap in AC power.
After quite a few futile attempts to get my desktop to boot again, I’ve concluded it has now developed a nasty hardware failure somewhere. The random nature (it hangs anywhere from before POST completes to after logging into Windows) makes me suspect the motherboard, but I suppose the power supply could be at fault as well.
It’s really a pain because I really don’t have much time to sit down and diagnose why it’s broken, but at the same time I don’t have a ton of money laying around to throw at problems. I’m actually somewhat tempted to just let the damn thing sit until I can afford to do the upgrade I was planning on – a Nehalem-based quad-core Intel setup.
My day with mod_rewrite
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008I’m a big fan of the Image Redirection script at ImgRed.com. It’s a great script to handle one of the most annoying things out there – posting images that are already hosted somewhere on the internet at another host. There’s no need to be ‘that guy’ who leeches bandwidth that isn’t his, and I’ve found that some other free image hosting services can be limited in functionality or tedious to use on their own.
Anyway, the script is something that I had set up at my old site with relatively little effort. The one thing that continually trips me up on setting it up, though, is making it all nice with Apache’s mod_rewrite functionality, which, for some reason, decided to give me fits on my new server.
Granted, I’m no god of mod_rewrite – setting up regex is hard enough when you can easily see and debug the output! (more…)