The Second World War, Volume 1: The Gathering Storm by Winston S. Churchill

Beginning Linux Programming (Programmer to Programmer) by Richard Stones and Neil Matthew

11 juin 2003

Continuing the conversion to Gentoo I finished installing Gentoo Linux on 3 of my old Linux boxes (2 to go). It runs very smoothly. I am really impressed by Gentoo Linux. I am upgrading my OpenMosix kernel to 2.4.20-3 and I face some little quirks. Hopefully they'll be resolved soon. I also finally configured succesfully distcc. Not every ebuilds use it: MySQL doesn't but ntp does. I guess it's a case-by-case type of thing. Hoepully X and KDE will take advantage of it otherwise it will take a week again to compile everything... I'll get one more used PC tonight: an IBM PG300GL. It will likely replace one of my old Digital PC5100. Or it may be added to my cluster. I'll see... I'll probably have to go on a business trip next week, to be confirmed. 1:29:43 PM    comment []  - See Also:  Linux OpenMosix

29 mai 2003

Lilo.conf on an HP Vectra VL I am having problem with lilo on an old HP Vectra VL. If anybody has a functional lilo.conf to share with me, let me know. 7:24:47 PM    comment []  - See Also:  Linux

20 mai 2003

Benchmarking the SX6000 new drivers/firmware. I did some tests using ATTO to check if upgrading the firmware/drivers on my SX6000 would speed up thing. The answer is yes! It improved the write speed a lot (700%) for small blocks and quite a bit (50%) for large one. The read situation improved a bit but not as dramatically as for the write. This upgrade is advised! 11:42:36 AM    comment []  - See Also:  SX6000 RAID WD1200JB

19 mai 2003

Updated drivers and firmware of my SX6000 I finally upgraded the drivers and firmware of my SX6000. It seems stable. I am testing it now by moving 20GB of files from my RAID-5 array, controlled by the SX6000, to my software based RAID-0 array, controlled by my Adaptec 29160, over 1000Base-T. Data flows normally. I'll do some more formal speed test tomorrow. Preliminary test showed me that writing is a bit faster. 8:44:56 PM    comment []  - See Also:  Adaptec 29160 RAID SX6000 WD1200JB

Upgrading firmware/drivers of my SX6000 I'll soon upgrade the drivers (version 1.10.0.41) and firmware (version 1.20.0.1b) of my SX6000. Anybody had good/bad experience doing it? 3:02:02 PM    comment []  - See Also:  RAID SX6000 WD1200JB

Edirol DR-7C with Adobe Premiere? Is there a way to use the Edirol DR-7C controler with Adobe Premiere under Windows XP? If you find how, let me know... 11:27:40 AM    comment []  - See Also:  Adobe Premiere Multimedia

4 mai 2003

A broken fan Another hardware problem today: A fan on one of the SCSI hard drive of my RAID 0 array let me down. After two years of almost 24/7 operation, it's not that bad. I'll buy another one tomorrow morning. 8:26:42 PM    comment []  - See Also:  RAID

10 avril 2003

I upgraded my network infrastructure I finally installed my brand new Gigabit switch. It wasn't complicated in itself: I had to disable the onboard NIC of 2 of my boxes (my S2466N-4M and my K7SEM), remove the cross-connect cable linking their Intel 1000Base-T cards and add a network card to my old workstation (based on an Asus P2B-DS). The only problem I had was when I powered back the Asus one and tried to install the drivers. I couldn't because the card wasn't seated well-enough in its PCI slot. I re-installed it and everything was fine on the hardware side. On two of my machines I had to modify hosts and lmhosts and configure the drivers to use DHCP. After that it was up and running. Informal benchmark showed transfer speed around 240Mbps (when copying files from a RAID-5 to a RAID-0 across the network) I also installed one more WD1200JB to my main workstation because of the strange noise I was hearing last week. I was hoping to mirror the disk I already have but I just can't. I followed carefully the instructions in the help file but when it says to right click the volume and select "Add mirror", the "Add mirror" is greyed. I tried through the command line utility (diskpart) but when I issue the command to create the mirror, it tells me that this functionallity isn't available for my version of XP (XP Professional). I am sure it can be done. If you know how to do it, let me know... 9:52:29 PM    comment []  - See Also:  K7SEM S2466N-4M WD1200JB

9 avril 2003

Gigabit switch I bought a 1000Base-T switch yesterday. I'll be able to put my 3 fastest machine on this switch (the 4th port will be connected to my router) and speed up the data transfert. It's only a 4-ports but the price was right. I looked at 8-ports switch in January but the price was still a bit too high. I'll install it tonight and will post my findings. 9:24:46 AM    comment []  - See Also:  Personal

5 avril 2003

Failing disk? Since Tuesday, one of my hard drive is making a funny clicketing noise. It is the one in my main machine (the Tyan-based one). It really freaks me out! Tomorrow I'll mount one more WD1200JB to mirror the (maybe) ailling drive just in case. I don't want this drive to crash. I do back up every night but still, re-mounting installing the whole system would take way too much time. To be continued... 12:37:03 PM    comment []  - See Also:  WD1200JB S2466N-4M dat24x6

17 mars 2003

Linux UDMA Linux UDMA. hdparm -d1 /dev/hda turns on UDMA for /dev/hda. (It wasn't on by default for me). To test to see if it's working, use hdparm -Tt /dev/hda. If you only get 3 megs/sec when reading, either UDMA is off or you are using a really old drive ;-) Comment [Second p0st] Useful 11:23:25 AM    comment []  - See Also:  Linux

15 mars 2003

CDRW under Debian Linux Getting my CD writer working. The aforementioned nForce2 box has a CD writer. Finally got around to getting it going today. It turns out that to get it going under Linux, you have to fool the kernel into thinking it's actually a SCSI drive If you have to do this, the following script will make life easier for you. Save it as /usr/bin/cdburn, and from now on use cdburn instead of cdrecord. BTW try cdburn -scanbus first to make sure that it works. If you get an error about not finding /dev/pg* or you needing to be root, try rebooting or removing all the modules and running it again. It didn't work for me until I tried running cdrecord in the experimental ATAPI mode, which locked the system up, forcing me to reboot. #!/bin/bash # http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin/tips/src/debian-cdrw.html rmmod ide-cd rmmod cdrom modprobe scsi_mod modprobe sg modprobe ide-scsi modprobe cdrom modprobe sr_mod cdrecord $* rmmod sr_mod rmmod cdrom rmmod ide-scsi rmmod sg rmmod scsi_mod modprobe cdrom modprobe ide-cd Comment [Second p0st] Might be useful later on. 7:09:53 PM    comment []  - See Also:  Linux

12 janvier 2003

Sorting SCSI cables While waiting for my auto-loader, I sorted out my SCSI cables. I was surprised by how many I have! I even teached my wife how to differenciate the various types of connectors... This site is especially usefull for this purpose. 6:44:17 PM    comment []  - See Also:  dat24x6

11 janvier 2003

I bought a tape auto-loader I finally bought a tape auto-loader since a declared mine dead. I found an affordable one on Yahoo! Japan. It's a HP SureStore 24x6 DDS-3 External that I managed to get for 20900¥ (about about 176 US$). It should arrive next week. Too bad I'll be in Tokyo. I won't be able to give it a try. I'll have to wait until january 30th... 7:00:17 PM    comment []  - See Also:  dat24x6

My network problem solved itself I had a problem with the two network cards I have in two of my workstations. It seems it solved itself. I can see data flowing through both cards on my Performance meter. Great! 8:40:10 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2007 Charles Nadeau.

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