JDPFu.com 2012

Nothing really to report this week. Doing RMA stuff on an old Antec 550W PSU and getting an estimate to fix the Dell laptop.

Last week, my main laptop died taking my main xUbuntu installation with it. Ok, it really didn’t take it, since I have backups and the hard disk was fine. Further, because I run it in a VirtualBox VM, picking it up and moving it to a different physical machine was fairly simple, once I had a machine ready for VirtualBox.

Anyway, I’ve spent the last week building a new machine, migrating Linux servers around, rebuilding a Windows7 Media Center machine, fighting with a bad power supply, poor connections in DVDs and network cables. Finally, everything is starting to work as expected. I was feeling lucky, so I decided to update the main xUbuntu desktop VM from 8.04 LTS to 9.10. Yes, I said update, not do a fresh install. BTW the 8.04 install was an upgrade from 6.06 originally.

xubuntu 8.04 —> 9.10

Today I migrated a RAID5 external array from 1 server to my newly built Core i5 server. I specifically chose to use software RAID when I installed it in 2007 just so this migration would be possible and easy.

Basically, everything went as planned with only one small issue.

Last evening, I noticed that my Dell 1535 Laptop wasn’t responsive. It was recording a TV show with the Hauppauge 950Q USB QAM tuner at the time, among other things that it always does.

Below I’ll discuss symptoms, trouble shooting methods and my resolution

This is a series of articles around building a new Intel Core i5 server for use in a small business. Please start with New Server Build Part 1

• Part 1 – Parts is Parts
• Part 2 – Build
• Part 3 – Burn In and OS
• Part 4 Conclusion

In Part 3, I ran a few tests. They all completed cleanly.

Lilo / XFS

About once a year I need to compare laptop and desktop CPU performance. I find myself searching the normal PC hardware websites like

So with all the equipment here, I began the server build. Refresh your memory for components by reading New Server Build – Part 1.

• Part 1 – Parts is Parts
• Part 2 – Build
• Part 3 – Burn In and OS
• Part 4 Conclusion

The Old Machine

Before beginning this build I booted the old machine; it was running FreeBSD previously. It had an Athlon 1800+XP CPU, 2GB DDR RAM and AGP graphics. It also had an S3-Virge PCI video card AND an SMC 1000base-tx GigE NIC. Both the NIC and video card were reused in the new server build.

The old machine also had (3) IDE devices – (1) DVD-RW and (2) WD 250GB disks. The motherboard only supports 1 IDE cable, so I’ve connected it to the DVD and 1 of the disks. At some point, I need to boot off USB or get/scrounge a SATA boot disk. I do have a spare 3.5" 1GB SATA, but that is used for weekly off site backups currently. I’ll probably try using a 2GB SDHC flash drive for boot since the host OS only runs the hypervisor.

Bad Parts

I’ve needed to build a new server for about 6 months, but delayed spending the money as long as possible. I’ll be reusing many old components and have purchased the main new items listed below.

• Part 1 – Parts is Parts
• Part 2 – Build
• Part 3 – Burn In and OS
• Part 4 Conclusion

Server Purpose

A Newspaper with no Date

Crazy, right?

We’ve all come across web article pages that don’t have date on them. In the web-time, days or years can matter, yet when a website doesn’t tag every article with a date, you have no idea how current there information is. This is fine for a very small subset of articles, but when reading an article on Windows7 or Xen virtualization, certainly you can understand that the date of the article provides context for what the writer knew. If the Windows7 article was written in August 2009 or earlier, they were looking at an RC, Release Candidate, not the final publicly released version.

Reading a blog or article that isn’t a date tagged is like getting a newspaper without a date.

This applies to any document. Think of how much adding just a date to a page and document tell each reader. What happens when there are 2 or more versions of a document? Well, if every page has a date on it, there is not issue. The reader KNOWS which is the latest information.

Time matters, so please put a date on your articles, blogs, websites, AND paper documents.