Steve Dougherty's Blog

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.

Hot! Wait, What?

The BOINC zombies were hot to the touch this morning! I may have to shut them down until we get CAT6 to the basement if it gets worse. I opened the window, pulled on zombie in front of the cool air, set a fan in the closet, and turned on the house fan to pull the cold outside air through.

Web Roots

I have been having problems allowing Irfan to upload files to his web root directory in his home directory without having the webserver being forbidden from serving his site. It turns out that it works if I chown -R his directory with irfan:www-data (www-data as set as group in apache2.conf) and chmod -R everything to 755.

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.

Hooray!

I think I may have found why my server has been intermittently becoming non-responsive until a reboot. I had tested the RAM, questioned the hard drive’s integrity, and gotten pretty annoyed. The server went down two times today in rapid succession. The first warning sign was all the dust in the rear exhaust fan. This was finally enough to get me suspicious enough to open the case. I took off the side and gacked at the sheer amount of dust filling seemingly every route air could take. The filter I have over the CPU duct was clogged with dust, and that doesn’t even have a fan mounted! (It is above the CPU fan, though…) After cleaning the CPU duct filter, I wanted to see if I could get more filters, but Vertex said they didn’t have any. I guess Newegg is the next stop.

Hopefully this will improve server stablility. I will probably have to do this intermittantly. If we can get the house wired, I can move it into the basement where I think the cooler temperatures coupled with the more humid air (less airborne dust) will further aid stability.

EDIT: It went down again today. I didn’t clean dust out of the CPU heatsink, maybe that’s it? I sure hope that’s the only problem…

Aha!

So that’s why gas is $4 a gallon!

Glee

Glee: noun – hilarity, mirth, mirthfulness, glee, gleefulness (great merriment)

I HAS IT.

Valve is porting Source to Linux! ^^

With a Steam client logically accompanying the port of the Source engine, this will mean I can stay in Linux! In my current arrangement, while Wine can run Steam and Source games to an extent, I reboot into Windows to game. I can stay in Linux for Starcraft, though.

Native Steam and Source will be awesome!

Fans

Why do fans make noise? Go ahead and turn one on. It whirs, right? Now turn it off. While the blades are still spinning and the motor is off, it is mostly silent. How do electric motors make noise?

Behold! A Snag!

Yup, I hit a snag. I was impressed with the Debian LiveCD. I don’t think it was slower after initial boot – ramdisks can work wonders! I think it mirrored itself into RAM or something, but I’m not sure. The problem was that I didn’t have enough RAM (124MB…) to have the system, install the needed software, (I even deleted the .debs in the APT archive) and download a workunit. I came up 17MB short. My first attempt after clearing the archieved .debs was to see if BOINC could use an external flash drive. According to both my attempts and the BOINC manual, (guess which one I did first) BOINC will only use free space on the partition on which it is installed. That would have meant that I needed to install BOINC to the flash drive, something that while maybe it could be done, would at the very least be somewhat annoying. Plus I’dÂ have one less spare flash drive. Now I’m on to attempt running the thing as a diskless workstation.

Copyright

The government can now search and seize your computer if you are suspected of copyright infringment! Seriously!