Hardware – Page 4 – Steve Dougherty's Blog

BOINC

It took me this long, but I finally figured out that Rosetta@Home is far, far more memory-bound than Seti@home. Zombie 1, which has a Celeron @ 432 MHz and 123MB of RAM, had if I recall correctly an load average that was maybe 2 – 3. I suspended Rosetta, and what I had thought was the power light turned off. It was the hard drive light. The thing was eating swap like no other. I have to get more RAM in the poor thing. Zombie 4 was using swap too, although to a much lesser extent. It has a Pentium 3 @ 728 MHz and 124MB of RAM, so the CPU is a factor too. For now I’m going to detach Zombie 1 from Rosetta and start it back up on Seti@Home, where I don’t remember that happening. In the longer term, I’m probably going shopping for some RAM.

EDIT: Success. Load average is now 1.00.

pfSense

My network at mom’s is now running off pfSense! I took Zombie 6, gave it a second ethernet card I bought from the school, and installed from the LiveCD. Fairly simple, it even let me figure out which card was which by plugging it into the switch! That was cool. The install was uneventful. It started working! I configured the port forwarding and even some fancy DNS options I’d been looking forward to. The domains I host now go straight to the LAN IP of the server when accessed from within the LAN. I think before that it was going out to AT&T and back. DNS seems much faster, although I haven’t put it through a scientific test, nor do I intend to at this point. I set the pfSense box to query the AT&T DNS servers that the modem was querying, although I’m not entirely sure if it’s doing that. Then it broke. I spent what I’m pretty sure was hours going over the configuration of the modem and pfSense box. Then I turned on the monitor, and it was spamming errors which I now unfortunately cannot remember. Google revealed that it was a problem with the PCI bus and ethernet card I bought from the school. (10/100 Mbits, WAN side, a Gigabit card is LAN side) I took down the machine and moved the card to another slot. It started working again, then failed in the same way. I swapped it with the ethernet card in my sister’s machine. It worked instantly in the pfSense box! After another reboot and some nagging, the other card started working on my sister’s Ubuntu box. I then, after some effort, set my Linksys router to be a switch and wireless access point. I had to set the advanced routing option to router instead of gateway, disable its DHCP server, assign it an IP out of the router’s DHCP range, and plug one of the LAN ports (not the uplink!) into the pfSense router. Hooray! The only problems out of all this are that Xfire file transfer didn’t work when Brad tried to send me a file, although it worked a few minutes later for Pat, so whatever, and that for some reason my SRCDS server can’t be seen from the Internet now. I’ll have to check the pfSense forums when I get time, and if worst comes to worst there’s always commercial support… Zoneclient is awesome. I was able to just point it at the modem connection status page, from which it found and used the IP. Surprisingly easy.

Rig Changes

I added my old 120GB server hard drive to my eMachine. Windows and Ubuntu now have drives to themselves. I spent what was probably literally half an hour staring at the JKDefrag screen, until I realized that because my Firefox profile was on the Linux drive I could browse without locking up too many files. QDB FTW.

When I put the drive in I was hoping they would be cable select, (ATA >.<) but they weren’t. Luckily, I had taken one of my 20GB drives from the school over here, and took a jumper from that to set the drive to secondary. Before installing Intrepid, I tweaked the BIOS. Apparently I had reset it to defaults after messing with the fan speeds, so I once again disabled the onboard sound and video. After some research, I also enabled ROM shadowing and some other stuff in the hopes of extra speed. Intrepid is shiny.

It’s nice to have more space. The extra space allowed for a thorough defrag. I ran JKDefrag twice – once to sort everything alphabetically, another to defragment. Woo.

Computer Move

I just moved all my Pentium 3s into the basement. I’m not too proud of the specs, but they do everything I need them to do. The things the current server doesn’t do (can’t? haven’t tried) are a Ventrilo server and a Source dedicated. I hope to get a Pentium 4 – the school is selling some. I haven’t been able to get specs or a price point on those yet though. Anyway, after Ryan came over and put the end (a female end, he found that easier as it doesn’t involve crimping) on the cable, I started getting ready to move my boxes to the basement.

I moved the cables downstairs just fine. I had to move the computers on to the floor. That isn’t all of the cables, I took this in the middle of setting everything up.

My mom wouldn’t let me carry them out of concern for my hips. (I wanted to, though.) So I had to wait for someone to carry them, and my mom wouldn’t do it because she’s having trouble with her shoulder and back. That left our neighbors – who are amazingly strong – to help. In the background there you can see the pile of faceplates I took off, and the case of the dead server. I think it still has a mobo and PSU in there. When I moved the stack, the floor had a noticeably cleaner spot on it – they were heavy.

The alarm is the only one left in my room. It is now inside the closet.

When I moved the switch, the router got its box all to itself. It has a box so its lights aren’t distracting at night. The speakers there are plugged into the alarm machine, which is running Fluxbuntu Gutsy Debian Etch [EDIT: Changed when I noticed that I was running out of my 256MB of RAM just to play a sound file. I uninstalled X, but didn’t feel like taking the time to figure out how to add a virtual console and whatnot.] and has a cron job to launch xmms [EDIT: MPlayer] to wake me up every morning. I used the nail file on that nail clipper to press the power buttons – they are recessed when without faceplates. I now use a paper clip.

Here’s a shot where I was trying to figure out where the keyboard port was by taking a picture of the back of a machine – there isn’t enough room behind the shelves. 🙁 You can see the purple label just below the green – it’s the lower PS/2 port.

Here’s the very machine that’s serving you this website RIGHT NOW! O_O Doesn’t take much to run Apache. 🙂

Here’s everything all finished up:

Another angle so you can see the monitor. I might want a KVM, but it wouldn’t be useful that often.

In the dark!

Coding, and Bootable CDs

The coding of the final project is going well. I’m adapting our first 3D project – a crate with collision detection that you can jump on – to a crate maze with the addition of crouching, illusionary crates, and external level files. There is currently an anomaly with collision detection where, because of the library I’m using, the player is shaped like a capsule, which is a line segment with a radius coming out of it in all directions. This means that it’s possible to partly fall off an edge and not be able to get back on except by jumping. The instructor has told me that I can combine a box and an infinite column to get the cylinder I want – something he has not yet implemented. I may yet do that, but I should finish the other features first. One interesting bug that I ran into, which seems to be mostly fixed now, is that if I jumped into the bottom of a crate and held jump button, I would not fall, and it would think I was on the ground, which would allow me to float around on the bottom of the crates if I continued holding the button. If I floated off the edge of a box, I would fly upwards. This was because it would check if I was on the ground if, after minusing 150 for gravity, applying the z axis was invalid. If this move was invalid, it took it to mean that we were on the ground. If the velocity was upwards, running into the bottom of a crate would mean this was true. I made it so it checks to see what the velocity is relative to zero. This is fixed, but an upper collision does not absorb upwards momentum, which looks weird. I hope I’ll be able to fix this one too, probably by making a statement checking to see if an upward move is invalid and killing upward momentum if that’s the case.

The server was down due to my own fault once again. I applied updates remotely, and one of them was a kernel upgrade. I had to reboot so it could load the new kernel, and avoid potential module problems if the latest modules are not loaded. Even though I checked after I had run the reboot command, I guess it had been unmounted by that time, as I had left a bootable CD in the drive, which the machine happily booted into. My mom was nice enough to take out the CD and reboot it for me. I really should change the BIOS boot order to hard drive first, but I’m hoping I won’t have to use this Pentium 3 box as a server for much longer.

Fan

We have two fans in our dorm room, one a ground fan and the other an oscillating upright fan. The upright has power and speed LEDs. If you look at the speed and power lights straight on, they’re both solid, but if you look at the lights through the spinning blade, the speed light appears to flicker, while the power does not. Weird.

Also, massive subject change, but if you’re in for an hour-or-so long interesting and inspiring lecture, (By, sadly, a professor who died Friday,) click thusly: O_O;

What was that?! Too much coding. I ended a sentence with a semicolon. I’m leaving that in…

Box!

I got a box! It’s the parts for my grandma’s computer! Specs:

Asus Micro-ATX with onboard nVidia GeForce 8200

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ @ 2.5 GHz

1 GB DDR2 1066 RAM (The motherboard doesn’t support it that fast with an AM2 socket processor, though.)

80 GB Western Digital SATA Hard Drive

Pioneer SATA CD/DVD Burner

So yeah, I’m excited. This is also a wakeup call for me, because what I can put together for $300 bucks is better than either of my current gaming rigs! (Not as far as RAM or HD, but better proccessor and graphics, although admittedly it is an onboard.) I’m going to install Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 GNU/Linux on it. It’ll be an email machine.

In other news: Joss Whedon and Nathan Fillion are in Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along!

Oh Well…

I was reading a sysadmin blog, I think it was this one, and it mentioned the importance of documenting your machines, network, and shutdown priority. (what to shutdown first if needed) I did this, and was dismayed to find out that out of my BOINC zombies, although the one I’m using for my server has a large amount of RAM, it does not have the fastest processor. Oh well, it’s working so I don’t think I’ll bother to move it now. I have zoneclient running again after an IP changed and nagged me into doing so… In unrelated news:

Wally wanted it,

Wally got it. This is how Wally wants it to stay.

Wewt

I got my dad’s machine together. I’m installing XP (gag) on it now, and I’ll install Ubuntu (yay!) afterwards. I’m currently in the process of downloading the XP drivers for the new machine. ASUS’s website is really slow.

Specs are as follows:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ @ 2.7GHz

2 GB DDR2 800 RAM (Dual channel)

XFX nVidia 8600 GT

640GB HD

It also has a Rosewill PCI slot fan underneath the graphics card, which is nice. It’s Micro-ATX, so it’s nice and compact, yet not so much so that building it was a pain. I really like AMD’s heatsinks, they’re very solid and easier to install than Intel’s socket 775. With the AMD2 socket the heatsink fits over mounting tabs, then you turn a lever and it locks solidly in place. I also really like the AMD2 processor mount. With Intel’s 775 heatsinks, you have to loosen then shove four tabs into holes in the motherboard. It is difficult to do and can be alarmingly jiggly and loose. I’ll post more updates as the situation develops.

Back From Downtime!

I have a good excuse. I’d been having problems with the server becoming unresponsive, as mentioned in previous entries. Yesterday I decided to clean out the heatsink because the server was still unstable. I set up a “server down” message on my alarm computer, then took the server down and started my work. I planned for it all to take around half an hour. While I was at it, I decided to apply some Arctic Silver 5 and re-mount the motherboard. I figured out how to get the heatsink off, (press down on the catch – this was new to me) vacuumed out then scrubbed the heatsink and processor. I put the processor back in, removed all the motherboard mounts but the ones it would use, remounted, and put the heatsink back on after applying Arctic Silver. I had to take the PSU out for a bit to put the heatsink back in as I needed room for leverage. I hooked everything back up, and hit the power button. Nothing. Fans didn’t even spin up. I spent the next frantic hour trying to find where I had gone wrong. I couldn’t find anything. This afternoon, Mom kindly drove me to Vertex, where I found to my dismay that the problem was the motherboard. Vertex did not have a motherboard that supported my processor, graphics card, (although that wouldn’t matter) and RAM type. Neither did Discount PC.

I needed to get my site back up, but my server was dead. I used my sister’s machine temporarily to see how I could get my files back. I had neglected to make proper backups of my databases. I couldn’t get the network interfaces to come up, but then I had the idea that I could perform a MySQL dump locally and just go from there. So that’s what I did. I then moved my files over the network to my gaming rig, where I pushed them out to my BOINC Zombie #3. I brought the databases up and updated my IP listing on ZoneEdit, as the power had gone out during the day.

Well, the site’s back up, and what was supposed to take half and hour took a day. Lesson learned: (hopefully) backup before maintainance, and don’t buy computers from disreputable sources. (eBay cough cough) That leaves only the RAM from the original eBay machine remaining.