Sun Dec 17 16:50:50 CET 2006
Hmmm ... Upgrades!
During the last weeks my old AthlonXP started acting up even more than
lately. Downclocked to 1,5Ghz (from 2) it was still close to overheating
and had some of those nice "MCE correctable error" under load. Nothing
critical, just a sign that it was falling apart. Then hda (160G Samsung)
started to ignore DMA settings , so ... I thought "lets replace it".
Shut down the machine, swapped disks, booted up ... and sdb (160G Samsung SATA) was missing. It just quit. 'k, RAID1 and all that, I hadn't lost any data. But ... here's a funny thing: Without the load from the disks the power supply became unstable. Now about the only thing working as expected was the keyboard ;-)
Thus I upgraded the machine, with the following specs as result:
Athlon 64 X2 3800+ EE (energy efficient, uses less power and costs the same ...)
2GB RAM
4x250GB SATA II disks in a software RAID5
GeForce 7300 graphics card (passively cooled)
I do notice the lack of a dedicated disk for / - under IO load a single RAID5 responds slightly worse than two dedicated disks. The machine is quite silent, but the noise it makes is lower frequencies than the old box, so it is still noticeable. There's also a "bug" in the hardware, on a cold startup it doesn't boot, I have to hit the reset switch once. Maybe the power supply doesn't deliver enough for all the disks spinning up at once ... who cares, rebooting is for weenies ;-)
I also cleaned my keyboard, and I must really urge you to do the same. It's been about 6 months since the last cleaning, and ... eeeeeeew. Eeeew. Please. Clean it. Now.
The tinderbox is offline at the moment as I'm still working on a few modifications. The last testrun I did started and ended with glibc being unmerged ... that was a bit silly. I think I might have used the wrong list over there... and ... ah well, I hope I find some motivation to get it fixed. Next stop would be Sunrise then :-D
Also I have changed my mail setup to be a bit saner, now I'm using fetchmail + procmail + dovecot instead of simple pop3 polling from the client. That also means I don't get vendor lockin ... thanks, gnome, I really needed to be reminded of Microsoft. Next step is adding spamassassin and all that stuff ...
Shut down the machine, swapped disks, booted up ... and sdb (160G Samsung SATA) was missing. It just quit. 'k, RAID1 and all that, I hadn't lost any data. But ... here's a funny thing: Without the load from the disks the power supply became unstable. Now about the only thing working as expected was the keyboard ;-)
Thus I upgraded the machine, with the following specs as result:
Athlon 64 X2 3800+ EE (energy efficient, uses less power and costs the same ...)
2GB RAM
4x250GB SATA II disks in a software RAID5
GeForce 7300 graphics card (passively cooled)
I do notice the lack of a dedicated disk for / - under IO load a single RAID5 responds slightly worse than two dedicated disks. The machine is quite silent, but the noise it makes is lower frequencies than the old box, so it is still noticeable. There's also a "bug" in the hardware, on a cold startup it doesn't boot, I have to hit the reset switch once. Maybe the power supply doesn't deliver enough for all the disks spinning up at once ... who cares, rebooting is for weenies ;-)
I also cleaned my keyboard, and I must really urge you to do the same. It's been about 6 months since the last cleaning, and ... eeeeeeew. Eeeew. Please. Clean it. Now.
The tinderbox is offline at the moment as I'm still working on a few modifications. The last testrun I did started and ended with glibc being unmerged ... that was a bit silly. I think I might have used the wrong list over there... and ... ah well, I hope I find some motivation to get it fixed. Next stop would be Sunrise then :-D
Also I have changed my mail setup to be a bit saner, now I'm using fetchmail + procmail + dovecot instead of simple pop3 polling from the client. That also means I don't get vendor lockin ... thanks, gnome, I really needed to be reminded of Microsoft. Next step is adding spamassassin and all that stuff ...