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| Ronald M. Clifford |
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| Monday, September 10, 2007 |
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Burn baby, burn! Posted: 11:12:00 AM 0 comments |
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Saturday morning, I woke up early and made the trip over to Micro Center again, this time to replace the motherboard. I got the same model, as it is working in Kathy's computer and I really didn't think it was the cause of the short. I get home and take the time to install it. One thing that interested me was the fact that it really didn't seem like it took a whole lot of effort for me to unplug everything, remove the old motherboard, put the new motherboard in, and plug everything back in. It's been a while since I've done it, but I breezed right through it like a pro. Maybe it's time to put the other two servers in the boxes that await them... Anyway, I booted it up, and the short was clearly gone, as I got the post screen. Windows began to boot up, but right as it was about to get to the part when it would tell me to Ctrl+Alt+Del to boot up, it immediately shut down, just like the first time when the motherboard shorted out. I was afraid I had just tanked another $150 by blowing another motherboard, but to my surprise the computer successfully turned on again. But again, right at the Ctrl+Alt+Del screen, it shut down. Thinking that I had an incompatible setting in the BIOS, I set out to change the BIOS settings. I had a surprise waiting for me at the "PC Health" screen, though. The tempurature of the processor? One hundred and three degrees. Celcius. I immediately turned the machine off, not wanting to burn the processor to oblivion, which has already happened to me once. I did some quick inspection of the processor, and decided it was high time to get a new heatsink/fan combo. Back to Micro Center yet again... What annoyed me about the new combo I got was the fact that I had to place something underneath the motherboard to screw it into, instead of snapping it into place like the old one. But perhaps that was for the better, as when I booted it up the next time, I got a nice and frosty 29 degrees Celcius on the processor. The computer has worked perfectly since. I have my memory back in the dual channel slots and am getting no crashes, no blue screens, no nothing. Best of all, the graphics are extremely impressive. The framerates I had Friday evening were still extremely fast, and I have decided to keep my display at max resolution, 1920 by 1440. What sucked about this is that the unplanned upgrade sucked about $700 from my credit card, which translates to about one paycheck's worth of debt at a time when I'm really just wanting to get everything paid off again. With vacation and Christmas (WTF! Already?!) coming soon, I'm just about ready to call it quits on the break-even point coming this year. Seems there's always something to push that back. Although there's still some hope. For instance, I can win big again at blackjack at the casino in Niagara Falls. Labels: Servers |
| Saturday, September 08, 2007 |
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Dead Ox Posted: 1:44:00 AM 0 comments |
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Well, Ox tanked today. I have been having a lot of problems with Ox, my main computer, with it crashing when the video card is working in a game. I decided yesterday that I had put up with it long enough, and ditched the X1950 for an ATI HD 2900 XT. I picked it up from Axion Technologies today. It's got a nice $400 price tag on it, but I figured since it was going into Ox, it would be money well-spent. Turns out the 2900 requires a 550 watt power supply. Fortunately, that was the exact watt rating of the PSU in Ox, so I happily installed the new card. I immediately liked the new card, as it would perform really well at higher refresh rates on my monitor, better than the X1950, meaning that there was little distortion on the screen. After setting everything up, I loaded up World of Warcraft. Immediately I noticed a difference. Everything was smooth, my frames were up, and all was well. So, I cranked up the settings to my desktop resolution of 1920x1440 and put all the video settings on max. Simply beautiful. Best part is, it wasn't crashing. I was playing for a good 20 minutes and had just joined a group for a dungeon when it hit. The screen went blank, sound went dead, and the computer actually shut itself off. Figuring that I had misjudged the crashing problem my computer was having, I simply tried to turn the computer back on. Nothing. The fans would whir for about half a second before dying, indicating that it was a power issue. My first guess, and the only one I was able to act on so late in the evening, was that the power supply tanked. So, I hit Micro Center, picked up a ThermalTake 750 Watt power supply just to be sure (and ThermalTake is a brand I've been trusting for 10 years), and installed it. Nothing. I did some quick research, and my initial reaction was correct, that it was a power issue. However, that doesn't limit it to just the PSU. A short could be the cause, either by the motherboard touching metal on the case somehow, loose parts in the machine, or a short or damage on the motherboard itself (which happened to me with my old computer, Gigamonster... I still have the burnt chip to show for it, too). I did everything I could to eliminate a physical problem by disconnecting and reconnecting every and all connection, moving memory around, I even reseated the processor. Finally, I added washers to the motherboard screws, just in case. Still nothing. By now, I had given up, I just wasn't ready to screw around with my computer anymore tonight, so I've reverted to Successor in the meantime, although I'm not installing anything on this computer, as it's turned into a reference computer for me when I'm full screen on Ox more than anything. Tomorrow I'll be headed back to Micro Center to get a motherboard replacement, and hope that resolves the problems. I hope I don't have to get into replacing the memory or the processor, as I'm not really keen on spending over a thousand dollars just to fix an infrequent crash. Labels: Servers |
| Thursday, June 28, 2007 |
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What to do Posted: 4:53:00 PM 0 comments |
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Successor right now is in a state of... well, I'm not sure what you'd call it. Just recently, I wiped it clean of all the software that was on it, and decided to try to use it as a web server. Well, it's Windows XP Professional, and that didn't go over very well. That means that if I want to use it as a web server, I will need to upgrade it to Windows 2003. $700+. Ouch. I very quickly decided that I won't be doing that any time soon. I looked into alternatives, but nothing looks good, so Successor currently sits around crunching BOINC, and occasionally is used as a second computer when I'm running a full screen game or something. I honestly have no idea what to do with it right now, so it just sits around, taking up space. Until I can get up the money to throw Windows 2003 on there - and that is very low priority on the list of things to do... like, last - I guess it'll just sit around whirring away. I never thought I'd see the day where I had too many computers. I'm sure I'll think of something. Labels: Servers |
| Thursday, April 26, 2007 |
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Broken Things Posted: 4:11:00 PM 0 comments |
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I have been quite annoyed over the past couple months with things that aren't working the way they should. First is Kathy's computer. Mind you, the specs on her computer and mine are exactly the same. However, she's having serious issues. Firstly, her network card sometimes doesn't fire up with the computer, leaving her networkless until she shuts down and reboots. Second, she's got a KVM that doesn't seem to want to work with her new computer, causing the keyboard and mouse to not work, forcing a physical reboot of the machine. I could attribute these problems to Windows Vista, except my computer works just fine. The KVM could be the KVM itself, but Kathy's been unwilling to test it out. She lives with it, but if it were me, it would drive me straight up a wall. Second is her monitor. I got her an LCD for her birthday in December. Now the red channel's gone. Apparently I'm going to have to send it in for a trade. Lastly is my UPS. Yes, the big $1,000+ one that cost me $60 just to get it from the leasing office and into the apartment, the one that took me hours to install into the rack. Well, it doesn't work. That's right, I got a big, thousand dollar paper weight in the bottom of my rack. I haven't gone through all the troubleshooting I should with it, so I'm hoping that it's still salvagable. However, I'm not liking the idea that there is a strong possibility that I will need to return this UPS. It costs hundreds of dollars to ship, which is about how much it weighs, too. I'm not happy. The rack is mostly done, but I just haven't had the energy to disassemble and reassemble the two Linux boxes and put them into the rack. That said, the rest of the rack is fine, and I'm quite happy with where the setup is going. There are still too many cables to worry about, but that comes with the territory of so many servers. Labels: Servers |
| Friday, March 16, 2007 |
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Easy Come, Easy Go Posted: 11:05:00 AM 0 comments |
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Not too long ago I had to format Amused because the machine was apparently acting up. I'm not quite sure what happened, but apparently myPhpAdmin was not working right. Well, after formatting it, SSH wouldn't accept connections from anything outside my local network. After playing with this for a few days, it was decided that the box would be sent to San Francisco, so that the people still involved with the project could work on it directly. This means I'm going to be short one box in the rack, which isn't a bad thing really. It was the loudest of the bunch, and for the most part was just sitting there whirring all day. The worst part about this is going to be redoing the rack that I just set up. The HP is between the battery backup and Understudy, with Successor on top of that, so I'm going to need to take Successor and Understudy out before removing the HP, and then putting the two Windows servers back in. The last of the parts came in this week, so I'll also be setting up Reborn and Modplug in order to fit them into the rack. The UPS will get fired up this weekend, too, and hopefully everything will be good to go once and for all. Labels: Servers |
| Wednesday, March 07, 2007 |
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Yet another cancellation Posted: 4:01:00 PM 0 comments |
Now I'm getting pissed off.Hi Ronald. The hell's it going to take to get these last two Black Ox II cases? Labels: Servers |
| Monday, March 05, 2007 |
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Server update Posted: 11:16:00 AM 0 comments |
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Well, all the servers are finally back up and running. I simply put everything back on the crappy UPS's they were originally on - or in the case of Amused, back on the surge protector - and fired it all back up. Until I can get an adaptor for the 5-20, this will be the setup. Coincidentally, the product I'm looking at is the ADP-1520 by Furman. Amused got formatted and is running Fedora Core 6. This should help Saurin get his project going again. He's tried to get me back on the project, but I don't know. The level of frustration I was having still grates at me at times, and I'm not sure I could step back into that any time soon. It's far, far too late in the development process for anything to seriously change, which means I'd have to accept it for what it is, and what it is doesn't excite me. Why work on something that's not fun? That said, I'm still going to host the project for as long as the hosting is wanted, and as soon as that final part's in, it too will be on battery backup, and then I can give the UPS to Kathy for her new machine, something that she needs. The last two cases still haven't shipped. I ordered them on Tuesday of last week, yet the order still shows "Pending Approval". What is it with these Itox cases that everyone seems to have them, but when it comes to actually placing the order, they seem to vanish? I have had at least 6 cases vanish in this way. I know they exist because I have 3, but 3 for 9 is a bad track record. They are also very hard to find, and I may be forced to order these from Itox themselves at a cost of 3 to 4 times what I'm paying now. Hopefully, this order will ship. Labels: Servers |
| Friday, March 02, 2007 |
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5-20 Posted: 10:00:00 AM 0 comments |
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You won't be able to read this post immediately when I put it up. Why? The server upgrade came to a dead halt after I realized that the plug for the APC UPS was a 5-20, not your standard 5-15. Fortunately I can get an adaptor for that, but in the meantime, my entire network is down. I plan to pick up the adaptor on lunch to get things working again. Labels: Servers |
| Thursday, March 01, 2007 |
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Still Setting Up Servers... Posted: 4:10:00 PM 0 comments |
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Well, for the past couple of days I've been trying to make some progress on the rack setup. Successor's been down for a couple of days, and I haven't even started Understudy yet. At this rate, I might actually get the last two rack cases before I'm done... I realized recently that I don't have the manual to Successor's motherboard, so I can't figure out easily where to put the case cables so that I can, you know, actually turn the computer on. Aside from that, though, I'm going to be putting the Audigy into Ox so that I can listen to my Inno on it, I didn't realize how much I'd miss that thing without any way to hook it up. The rack's a monster, though, and despite the slow progress, I still can't wait to fire 'er up and figure out whether or not it's going to blow up and destroy the apartment, heh. I've checked and double checked, though, and so far I'm setting up everything correctly. Hopefully by the weekend it'll be all in. Labels: Servers |
| Tuesday, February 27, 2007 |
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Network Upgrades Posted: 11:04:00 AM 0 comments |
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Over the past couple of weeks, I have been buying a lot of computer equipment, including a 28U rack, a 6U battery backup solution, and lots of rack cases. Yes, it's the first phase of the server upgrades! I should have the first incarnation of the setup online and functional tonight or tomorrow night, depending on how fast I work. This will not include the two Linux machines Modplug and Reborn, because Itox's Black Ox II case is impossible to find. When I do find a pair of them, I will be adding them as well. The major change to the structure of the network is going to be the addition of Successor, my old desktop computer, to the mix. It will remain running Windows XP Pro, but I will be installing IIS on there and having it connect to Understudy for things such as SQL Server and other fun stuff. Eventually Understudy is going to be pulled off of the external network, with Successor taking its place. I can do this because I now have Ox, my new desktop running Windows Vista. Vista has its quirks but overall I'm pretty happy with how it's running. It's also in a Black Ox server case, because eventually that will get to go in a smaller rack along with a bunch of music gear. Kathy's also got a new computer with almost the same specs as mine, except I threw a basic Audigy in hers, and she's got a regular desktop case. 3.4 GHz Pentium D, 2 GB of RAM, 160 GB hard drive space, it's wonderfully fast. What's in the server rack? From the bottom up, I've got an APC 3U battery backup, and a 3U add on module to keep the power running. Apparently, it's going to be able to handle the load I'm going to put on it, plus have enough juice to run more than an hour should the power ever go out, a constant issue in the summer with the thunderstorms the Houston area gets. On top of that is Amused, the 2U HP server that's running Saurin's project. On top of that will be Successor and Understudy, both in their new Black Ox cases, which will fill out the bottom 16U of space. The top 12U will go to a pair of Dell switches, and eventually Modplug and Reborn once they get new cases, leaving me with just 3U leftover. The fun stuff has been getting this actually into the rack. The battery backup system weighs in at 350 pounds! I had to get professional movers to get it up from the leasing office to the apartment, and then I had to take the batteries out to even hope to get the units off of the ground. The servers are now 45 pounds each, and the HP machine is upwards of 60. There's my workout for the year. Once I get everything installed, I'll get a snap of the rack online. I've been having quite a bit of fun putting this one together. Labels: Servers |
| Saturday, November 11, 2006 |
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Idiot Hackers Posted: 10:43:00 PM 0 comments |
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Some morons have decided that my logs website has a vulnerability that they want to take advantage of. It's gotten so bad that in the month of October alone I got 267,816 hits. The problem is these idiots are looking for some PHP file that apparently has the vulnerability they are looking for. Being strictly an ASP/ASP.Net Windows 2003 server, there's no PHP on here. Really, what kind of fucking idiots would continuously hit a site that doesn't have the vulnerability they are looking for? What is the point? Idiots. No matter, it's not killing my server yet, but I'll keep an eye on it and, if necessary, have some fun with it. Labels: Servers |
| Tuesday, October 31, 2006 |
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Correction: The HP Server Posted: 3:19:00 PM 0 comments |
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I later discovered the HP server is an HP DL380 G3. What's the difference? About 0.75 GB of RAM and 1.6 GHz on each of the processors. It's a sweet machine, and it will be fun to work with. Labels: Servers |
| Saturday, July 08, 2006 |
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Uhh... Posted: 3:30:00 AM 0 comments |
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Computer hardware can be strange sometimes. I went into a CD bootable program to do some diagnostics on my hard drive. Since those took a while, I went to sleep for some six hours or so. When I woke up and rebooted, the hard drive was back into UDMA mode. WTF? Labels: Servers |
| Friday, July 07, 2006 |
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One Week Later... Posted: 2:07:00 AM 0 comments |
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Wow. That was annoying. It took me the better part of the last week to get my system back into a usable condition with all of the software installed again. Some of the many things that went wrong: - The hard disks have gone from UDMA mode to PIO mode. This means that any disk activity is slow, and probably was the main cause as to why this took so long. No amount of registry hacking or device uninstallation has fixed it. - My Blackberry won't install the latest drivers from the Windows Update site. It says the drivers have been downloaded but when it goes to install them, it fails with no useful reason as to why. To resolve this, I had to download the Blackberry Desktop Manager from RIM's site. - Creative's drivers took about 5 attempts to install. I literally spent all day Sunday on this. It was a complete disaster, every time they looked installed, something would cause them to stop functioning. They have been stable for a few days, thankfully. I had to install more than 100 programs, but I took the opportunity to upgrade some key pieces of software, including a full Adobe suite, the latest MadTracker and Skale Tracker, the latest SoundForge (I had no idea Sony bought SoundForge), and a host of other upgrades. I'm afraid I'm still going to be spending much of the weekend with Windows trying to get my hard drives back into UDMA mode - or buying new SATA's. Hopefully that won't mean another complete reinstall, I don't think I can take another one. Labels: Servers |
| Saturday, July 01, 2006 |
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Reinstallation Fun Posted: 12:48:00 AM 0 comments |
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I decided a while back that I was long overdue to reinstall Windows. Thusly, tonight I begin to take the plunge. Why not? A 4-day weekend, so in case anything goes wrong I will have lots of time to fix it. See you on the flip side. Labels: Servers |
| Sunday, June 04, 2006 |
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Port Forwarding: Finally Posted: 10:22:00 AM 0 comments |
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After weeks of struggling with ipfw and natd port forwarding, I finally got it working. Turns out natd doesn't forward the packets right, so they have to be forwarded manually in the ipfw rules. Why? I don't know. Nor do I care, it works now, and that's all that matters. Yes, I was up all night looking at this, of course. Labels: Servers |
| Wednesday, May 31, 2006 |
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Yet Another Long Night Posted: 4:31:00 AM 0 comments |
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I hate it when I get momentum to work on something after midnight. So I took a look at Reborn's ipfw/natd problem today. I actually tried to use pf, but I couldn't get anywhere with it, so I started to try to resolve the existing problem. I did succeed in getting the DNS working, although that was more of a problem with dnscache not able to listen on multiple addresses than with ipfw/natd. One problem solved. The other problem had me baffled, though. I had absolutely no ability to VNC into my internal network from outside, where I had before I "upgraded" to FreeBSD 6.1. This is because I lost all of the configuration files when I went to upgrade. Anyway, just tonight I figured out my problem. Basically, a remote machine will send a request to Reborn on a port that it is to forward. It does this fine, and the machine it is forwarded to processes the request fine, returning it to Reborn. The problem is when Reborn sends the response back out, it is sending it from the wrong address, namely the local ten-dotted address. And I have absolutely no idea how to fix it. But at least I know what the problem is now. Hopefully I'll have one of my Linux techie friends know what's wrong with my configuration and be able to fix that. But for the love of Chick-Fil-A sweet tea, it's 4:30 in the morning, and I have a meeting in 5 hours. The curse computers put on us these days. Labels: Servers |
| Monday, May 29, 2006 |
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BOINCing around Posted: 3:26:00 AM 0 comments |
 Not so long ago, I got full into using BOINC, the new software that drives the SETI@Home application. As you may recall, I was running a SetiQueue for a couple of years until they shut the classic application down. I was a bit reluctant to get back into it, but after some time, I've bit the bullet. I've found there's now a ton of applications out there using the BOINC structure to do the type of grid computing that SETI@Home made famous. The result? Me adding almost a dozen and a half different projects to share the free resource time among the six computers that I use (Successor, roncli.com, Reborn, ModPlug, and the two I use at work). SETI@Home has a huge head start because of the fact that I was running it on one computer for quite a long time to see how I liked it. Well, I liked it. There's a site called BOINC Synergy that displays stats for all BOINC projects, even ones not listed on BOINC's site, including alpha and beta tests and projects that are under development. If you're into BOINC or any type of grid computing, this site's worth checking out. Projects range from search for extraterrestials, to finding a cure for cancer or AIDS, to security cracking challenges, to Chess960 algorithms, to 3D rendering... the possibilities of grid computing seem endless. Labels: Servers |
| Tuesday, May 16, 2006 |
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Reborn is reborn Posted: 12:46:00 AM 0 comments |
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What I refer to as my 4th computer, known as Reborn, has been... well, reborn. On Thursday, I logged in to find most of /bin gone. No idea what happened. I did an in-place reinstall of FreeBSD 5.4 and everything seemed good, minus an unusual lack of space on my / partition. It wasn't a big deal, though. I spent the next two days on and off portupgrading and otherwise making sure it was running fine. Sunday, I got brave. I decided to in-place upgrade to FreeBSD 6.1. The lack of space on the / partition killed the upgrade and left me with a non-functional system. Someone suggested I had a virus of some sort, or even got hacked. Argh! So I reinstalled most everything Sunday, and today I finished up configuring the DHCP, NAT, and Firewall so that the box was back to normal. The good news in all of this is I finally am getting a feeling of comfort within Linux. I now know more about rc.conf, what /usr/local/etc/rc.d is used for, how to configure and upgrade applications, and so on. I'm not quite ready (read: not ever going) to make Linux my primary machine, but the server side of it is really making me consider my options in terms of my choice of servers when I do things. Labels: Servers |
| Sunday, February 19, 2006 |
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Internet on the PSP Posted: 2:49:00 AM 0 comments |
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Yes, it can be done. I know little about game consoles and their handheld counterparts, but I was shocked to see this in my OSMusic.Net log today: Mozilla/4.0 (PSP (PlayStation Portable); 2.00) I did some digging and found that people view the forums on the D3TL and download the Modplug software. I am almost interested enough to get one and see what it's like. Kudos if you surf with it, I can't imagine it being easy. Labels: Servers |
| Tuesday, January 17, 2006 |
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Bleh Posted: 5:18:00 PM 0 comments |
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Being sick is no fun, but it does give me a bit of time to drop in here. Nothing too exciting going on. I've been playing more games than are probably healthy for me, but it's been quite the relaxing month so far. That's coming to a swift end, though, as I have restarted up a project I'm working on that's due at the end of the month. That's one way to kill off laziness. Aside from that, I curse my mom for getting me a subscription to EA's pogo.com, as I spend much online time there these days. I've been trying to get myself back into chess in the meantime, playing more at work during breaks than at home like I had intended, and I have downloaded many, many chess programs to try to learn from. I just haven't had the time to take it seriously. I don't know where my desire to compose music electronically has gone. I haven't touched Reason, literally, in months. It's not that I've become less musically inclined, it's just that I don't have the will to move it from the head to the computer. Labels: Servers |
| Monday, October 24, 2005 |
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Of UPS's and Procrastination Posted: 11:49:00 PM 0 comments |
A letter I wrote to Kim today, pretty much sums up my day.At about 11 AM this morning, Reborn (207.235.121.202), the new DNS cache for the ModPlug box as of... what was it, Saturday?... and my entire network, failed. It was clearly due to a power blink that the UPS that it was on couldn't handle. I've been meaning to replace it and... well, this moved my hand so to speak. Labels: Servers |
| Sunday, October 09, 2005 |
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Slowly Learning Linux Posted: 4:21:00 AM 0 comments |
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After finally getting fed up with my ISP's DNS server, I decided that I was going to just do it myself. Unfortunately, that meant having to learn a bit of Linux. But after some work, going through error messages, and relentlessly searching Google, I have commanded just enough knowledge to get daemontools svscan working, a copy of djbdns installed with dnscache, and dhcp configured to use it. All without breaking the ftp backup. In fact, it works better. Now ftpd doesn't have to choke when the DNS server chokes. Slowly but surely, I'm finding enough uses for FreeBSD to make running it worth it. I don't plan on moving my web sites over there anytime soon, but all the back end stuff is really starting to fall in place. Labels: Servers |
| Friday, September 30, 2005 |
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Taking the Good with the Bad Posted: 1:25:00 PM 0 comments |
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I finally got my hands on a decent 4-port KVM switch for my workstation and three servers. I hooked it all up last night, and it was very slick. The problem is my NAT server won't pick up the USB keyboard, so I've got some playing to do when I get home. Not too bad. I also decided to upgrade ModPlug's web server last night. Big mistake. After installing, I rebooted and found no hard drive. After much attempting to recover the data, I gave up and just formatted it. I hope Mr.X & LPChip got a decent back up. All in all, I was up till 4 am getting things mostly settled, which will make for a rather long day today. Labels: Servers |
| Wednesday, September 28, 2005 |
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Network problem solved Posted: 10:36:00 AM 0 comments |
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Now playing: DRAX - Burning Bridges (3:00) Well, patched at least. I learned yesterday that if I right click my network connection and hit "repair", it fixes the problem with the network not being accessable to the outside world. So I went out and got a script that does the connection repairing for me, put it in a batch file, and scheduled it to run every four hours. Whether or not this actually works is yet to be seen, but I have a good feeling about this one. If I have to run it more frequently, I can if need be. It's touch and go right now. Labels: Servers |
| Saturday, September 24, 2005 |
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Whoops Posted: 3:53:00 PM 0 comments |
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I lost my style sheet, so my blog looks like crap now. That's cause my server is down, I didn't have the presence of mind to move it. I'll try to look for a backup. Labels: Servers |
| Monday, August 22, 2005 |
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End of Hard Disk Worries Posted: 6:58:00 PM 0 comments |
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Took the time and money and got myself an external 250 GB hard drive today... Now I can clean up all the MAME crap I have accumulated on my main hard drive. 40 GB for that stuff if you can believe it. In any case, I'm glad to finally have free storage space again. No doubt I'll fill it all up in 3 months. Labels: Servers |
| Wednesday, May 18, 2005 |
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New Linux box Posted: 8:58:00 PM 0 comments |
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I finally got my 250GB hard drive running. As a result, I put together a machine based on one of my old motherboards to get a new FreeBSD box running. I'm starting to get comfortable in Linux, it's scary. The process was a pain, though. First, I had to upgrade the firmware on the ATA card. Then I had to move the CD-ROM off the ATA card cause it wasn't bootable. Then I downloaded and burnt the latest FreeBSD. Then I had to figure out the geometry for the hard drive so it could install. Once that was done, though, it was pretty smooth sailing. It even got me to playing around a bit on the ModPlug box without worrying about breaking anything. Labels: Servers |
| Wednesday, March 02, 2005 |
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Side Effects Posted: 1:01:00 PM 0 comments |
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Now playing: Sagal - National Geographic Mix (11:37) I don't know where or why, but at some point I lost Open GL capability on my Raedon 8500. I ended up going to ati.com for the latest drivers just to be safe. It didn't fix my OpenGL problem, but the next time I showed up in the Display Properties, I had a surprise waiting for me - more video options! For the past several years I've been running at a 1600 by 1200 resolution, largely because my 19" Mag Innovision monitor supposedly can't do more. Well, these new drivers certainly put this monitor in it's place. It can go as high as 1920 by 1440! Unfortunately for me, that is only available in a 60 Hz refresh rate which kills my eyes, I have found through testing I need at least 66 Hz. However, I was able to squeeze another 384,000 pixels out of my desktop, expanding the right edge of my screen by a full 320 pixels to a new resolution of 1920 by 1200, running at 75 Hz! It's going to take a while to get used to the horizontal compression I'm sure, but hey, I'll take all the pixels I can get. The more, the merrier. I've heard of some programs that allow you to tweak the refresh rate of your video. I may try that later and see if I can't fake out my monitor to run the 1920 by 1440 at 66 Hz or more, which is approximately the lower limit of comfort for my eyes. But for now, viva la desktop real estate! Oh yeah, if you know how to fix my OpenGL, let me know... Labels: Servers |
| Tuesday, March 01, 2005 |
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Clearing Up Space Posted: 10:17:00 AM 0 comments |
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Well, after about a week or so of struggling with my quickly evaporating hard drive space, I decided to do something about it. I went through all my Program Files and uninstalled everything I didn't use anymore, and deleted all of the shell folders that were left behind from previous installations. Everything went crisp and clean, and to my knowledge I didn't delete anything I needed. The problem started when I compared the output from Disk Size Manager to my actual free space. Approximately 76,000 MB of hard drive space, approximately 6,000 MB free. DSM reported I had used 62,700 MB of disk space. 76,000 - 6,000 > 62,700. Where were the other 7 or so GB? My first instinct was permissions. I quickly logged out and logged on as Administrator. Of course, my user account has Administrator access, so the 62,700 persisted. Now, 6 GB is a lot of space to be honest. The problem is with NASCAR SimRacing wanting 4 GB for some ridiculous reason, and I still have about 5 GB left of CHDs to download for my full MAME collection. So I probably wouldn't have even dealt with it if I didn't have a need for the space. Anyway, I did some searching around on Google and found a couple of possibilities. The one that worked for me was the System Restore option. Sure enough, I go in, and there it is taking up 10% - A full seven and a half gigs - of disk space. I move that down to 1%, reboot, and for the first time in months, I have double digit free space! What annoys me the most about is is that, although Windows is reporting free space correctly, it's not reporting used space correctly. Where does Windows put the System Restore data if not on the C: drive? It's stupid. Oh well, that's one problem licked. That's what matters. Labels: Servers |
| Friday, February 25, 2005 |
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No more spam! Posted: 7:26:00 AM 0 comments |
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ASSP is now out of test mode on my server, and that means the 150+ pieces of spam mail I have been getting per day is gone forever! The filter has been working very well, making few mistakes, and even the mistakes it makes are not critical. It's a very powerful SMTP filter, and hopefully Kathy and Martin will benefit from this as much as I will. Labels: Servers |
| Monday, February 21, 2005 |
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Hard Drives Posted: 6:25:00 PM 0 comments |
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Once upon a time, when I was a Mac person, I had a computer that had a 40 MB hard drive. Surely, I would never be able to fill that up! From the 40 MB hard drive, to the 2 GB, to the 6 GB, to the 8 GB, to the 20 GB, to the 40 GB... Each step of the way, there was absolutely no way that hard drive was going to be filled up. So here I am, staring down 5.7 GB free on my 80 GB hard drive, and yet I have 6 GB to download to complete my MAME 0.92 CHD collection. I should just get a terrabyte drive and be done with this mess! The time it takes to go through and clean up the hard drive is painfully long, and it's time I could be spending doing other important things. Like gaming. Labels: Servers |