After some final testing, my main PC is completely fucked. I took all of the parts out and new memory in and it still doesn’t work. That means it’s either the board or the CPU, they’re the only parts I haven’t changed. Then I noticed what looks like a small melted component about a millimetre square in size on the top right of the board. Thats the only reasonable explanation. That means new PC time. I need a better ventilated case anyway and I have all of the rest of the parts, just need a new board and CPU.

I don’t know what motherboard/CPU combo to go with though. Intels are faster, AMDs are cheaper. AMD64s work better than IA64 and things are going 64bit so I’m better off doing it now than being the last man still running 32bit machines as it will serve me for at least the next 2 years. This will run as my main desktop so graphics and sound support are important for games and music and I don’t think Linux is quite there yet with those on 64bit. But what about Xeons, Semprons (the replacement for Duron right?), Opterons (3 types from what I can gather) or the 4 types of Pentium 4 and the different cores in all of them?

Recommendations are welcome for architectures Intel/AMD/64. I’ve lost the thread of where CPUs are these days. It used to be plain ole’ Pentium 3s or maybe an AMD Thunderbird only around 3 years ago. Now there are too many to be able to reasonable choice without spending days that I don’t have researching the difference between all the different types of processor.

I’d also like some kind of stability in terms of case ventilation and disk failover (can Linux boot happily from SATA now?) which might mean looking at RAID. I have a pair of Intel i960 SCSI RAID controllers but SCSI disks are expensive. Too many choices. SCSI RAID, SATA RAID which doesn’t work under linux with most embedded SATA RAID controllers as they use Windows drivers to implement software RAID, but I could do IDE software RAID, but I hear thats sloooooow.

I need a lot of PCI slots, an 8x AGP slot and lots of USB(2.0) ports. If I can choose a good, robust, well ventilated case with lots of hard disk bays – between 6 and 8, with some means of suitable cooling for those disks and I can then choose a suitable processor family, I might then be able to settle on a disk interface and finally a board. Please, if you can help me understand the myriad of options in any of these catagories I would be very grateful.

I could just buy one off the shelf, but I can build it myself, save money and ‘commercial hassle’ on the purchase and get exactly what I want.

Out.

OK so it wasn’t the PSU.

I attached the PSU from another machine to my workstation and the problem was the same. The machine powers up immediately, but doesn’t give any visual or aural output, holding in the power switch to turn it off causes the machine to attempt to power down, but instead of turning off, the power just dips and stays on, attempting to start up again without any output.

I removed pretty much all of the components from the board and it was still the same. I moved all of the components to another machine and that machine works fine with them. In fact, for the second time in 24 hours, I’m writing this on a new machine, but this one contains all of the old parts with the exception of the motherboard, CPU and RAM. Arse. I still have all of my files and installation, just that I’ve gone from an AMD XP 2400 (2GHz) with 1GB 333MHz RAM to an old AMD Thunderbird 1200 MHz with 256MB 100MHz RAM; and slower ATA channels and AGP port.

Still, at least I have a machine with my existing installation. I thank your God (I don’t have one) that Linux system disks can be moved from one machine to another without problem unlike fscking Windows. Now just to test the motherboard with different RAM, I don’t have a spare CPU for that board, so if it’s not the memory, then it’s going in the bin. Actually thats a lie. I have a garage full of old P100s and P200s that barely work that I can’t bare to throw away. It will go in ‘the pile’ waiting for me to diagnose the problem and replace the offending part. That could take years with the amount of stuff I have going on…

Anyway, I’m back on my feet. Just slower 😉

Work. Oof. Tired 🙁

Besides that, I am poor as usual, my first months wages are due and my credit card company are on the brink or reminding me that I am banking with them and not the other way around. Really, I have nothing left and nowhere to go. Should be ok when I get paid though.

Top of the list is a new exhaust as I have recently discovered the booming noise coming from my exhaust is getting worse and I will finally have the money to pay for a new one. On close inspection there are 3 holes in it, one is big enough to get a smallish hand in.

Next in line, but most likely to get bought first is the fact that my main workstation has died again. This time the problem looks to be the PSU. It started making a weird hissing sound, then it started hanging, now it doesn’t turn on or off properly and makes a mild electrical burning smell, it powers the board up, but kind of skips if you know what I mean. It better be the PSU and not the board or the CPU. I can’t afford the cost of a new deskstop machine with my first wages. I was going to buy a new case anyway as the one I have is shit and poorly ventilated, which I suspect to be the cause of the apparent overheating and reboots I was suffering before I took the side off and also the cause of the repeatedly dying hard disks.

So, my main machine won’t boot, which leaves me with my work iBook and my own laptop, neither of which I find particularly comfortable for heavy usage. In a bid to save my files, I moved my 160GB /home disk to my project machine to copy the files across to my iBook as I have some uni work to do, but some of the files are unreadable on the project machine and the iBook can’t connect to the project machine’s Samba shares. *Rage*. I’m hoping that this is just a quirk of the machines in question and not a symptom of greater problems with my machine and particularly my new disk that holds all of my files. Anyway, I’m hopeful that a new PSU will solve the problem, my dad is going to loan me the money for a new PSU while I wait for pay day.

In the meantime, to get a workable desktop machine, I used my iBook to get Debian Sarge for Sparc as the iso I have is unreadable on my 160GB disk and did an emergency install on my Sun Ultra 10. It went ok. I’m writing this on it now. Bit sluggish for a desktop and I have a Sun Type 5 US keyboard and mouse which is making typing a whole new learning process, but meh, I have a desktop machine for the interim period.

As far as installing Debian goes, it was a breeze. No problems. Easier than ever, even on an unfamiliar architecture. I had to change the mouse in XF86config-4 as I got it wrong first time round and add in 1024×768 support to make it bearable on a 17″ TFT monitor, but other than that it was cool. I also installed mozilla-firefox and a few other things to make life better. Strange that I didn’t get to add an ftp apt repositry during the install, but I did this easily enough using apt-setup.

Besides all that, What the Hack is in just over a month, V Festival is a month after that and I think I will be going to France for a weekend the week before V. Busy (aka expensive :().

As for work, it seems to be going well. I got dropped in at the deep end last week, I’d been there a week and my boss (aka the other admin) went on holiday. Barely knowing the network I was left to keep things ticking over, with assistance from the other senior director. It went ok, but as the week went on, while I could keep things going which wasn’t much work, just your average admin tasks, the new jobs I was handed took me ages to get anywhere with as for the most part, it was the first time I had ever done them and I didn’t really know the network or the setup I was working with. This included writing my own init scripts, adding new domains to BIND, Sendmail and Exim, getting SNMP working and using MRTG to query it and so on. I also did my first messing with sed and awk. Most of this is stuff that I had mostly either avoided due to it’s messy nature or never had cause to learn. It’s good to get around to these things because otherwise I probably never would. Being a Debian boy I am also learning the Red Hat/Fedora way, which isn’t much different to be honest. You get setup rather than debconf and dpkg-reconfigure and /etc/init.d is symlinked to /etc/rc.d/init.d so it makes no odds. I’ve been doing loads of other stuff too like setting up a new mail server to use maildir instead of mbox, multiple domains, and authenticated SMTP blah blah. It’s been cool but I was glad to see my boss today to take the load off me, zip through some of the things that I’d been struggling with and for me to ask about the stuff I had been unsure about all week. Anyway, I’m sure you’re all fascinated.

Oh before I forget, LUG Radio Live is on Saturday and yours truly is hosting the Lightning Talks stage.

Apparently.

Phew 🙂

Today, after 2 months of organising, I have finally sorted out whats going on with my degree. I’m going to finish my project over the summer and do my remaining modules next year. Phew. Glad thats out of the way. Few people understand the relief involved I feel about this.

Also, my immediate financial future is secured. I banked some money lent to me by my girlfriend to cover this months bills and also by pure chance happened to see my student banking lady, the only person in the bank authorised to grant me an overdraft extension. I’ve been trying to get hold of her for 3 weeks, maybe 4. About 8 individual visits and an answerphone message have all failed to find her, then I see her purely by chance. My overdraft is now extended and my bills are payable 🙂 All I have to do now is wait until the end of the month and I will even have, gasp… wages. Bonus.

And work have bought me an Apple iBook which should arrive tomorrow, maybe Friday. I’m hoping tomorrow.

By the way, comments are off for the moment as I am getting 100 spam comments per day. I’ll turn them on again when the storm has passed. If you have anything useful to say, email me at drinky76 at yahoo dot com

Things are looking good and I am enjoying my new job.

Smell you later 😀