Linux Notes, tips and things to remember
http://code.google.com/p/open-monica/
MoniCA is a versatile real-time monitoring system originally developed for use at the Compact Array and other radio observatories operated by Australia’s CSIRO.
The server allows data to be collected from an almost unlimited range of devices and archived to disk. A graphical client program allows real-time and historical data to be displayed in a flexible manner, printed, or exported for deeper analysis.
and of course the weather site….
Gparted for a GUI interface to parted which barely ever works….
mkfs.ext3 to format stuff, ie mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdc1
cfdisk /dev/sda1 for old school reliable partition tool…
fdisk -l to list the crap in there!
after many failing bits, dodgy RAM, corrupt data and general lack of anything decent in terms of FPS during so of the even least intensive games it was decided that it had to go…well not quite it will get farmed downstream for something else, but definietly without the dodge bits…
so let me start from the beginning..or close there of…
got donated a Abit NF7-S from a mate, hence decided need a new case and obviuosly at that point matching processor and RAM, if I remember correctly it was a AMD athlon 3000XP or thereabouts…
Nice setup in the case, multiple HDD’s buy cooling was a bitch and the northbridge fan screamed fromtime to time…something after this minor upgrade was the additon of a decent (at that time anyways..) videocard. NVIDIA 5700 ultra – was never particularly impressed by it, ran loud and heated up my case!
Next came the cooling upgrade, quite a whule after the video card came out, so a tracked down a dirt cheap cooler for the vid card from www.pccasegear.com.au, on special for $9 or something silly. Also picked up a stack of nice quiet nexus 80mm fans…..so what about that northbridge..yep fixed that screamer with a passive cooler..looks funky too.
so this setup ran nice and quiet and had reasonble performance….could run CSS on its defaulted selected values (no HDR etc) and get about 35fps in the benchmark…nothing to write home about…but hey its worked!
decent cooling and a fairly stable system resulted in some overclocking, mainly on the video card…
using rivatuner (excellent program by the way) I bumped the 5700 ultra up to a core speed of 580 and memclock speed of 1100. With these setting I was getting a nice 48-50fps in the CSS bench, cooling was no issue barely even noticed it.
typically 23-25 degrees during idle and up to 50 degrees during stress.
So finally the 2008 upgrade, here are the specs. Note made the switch from AMD to Intel for the Proc on this occasion.
Proc: Intel E8500 (runs dual 3.16Ghz)
RAM 4gb Geil (nothing really special just 5 stuff)
Mobo: MSI P45-NEO2
Video Card: Gigabyte ATI/AMD HD4850
Power Supply: Corsair HX620
new 500gb seagate 7200.11
existing 500gb seagate 7200.11
existing 320gb seagate 7200.9?
Well I think the heading pretty well spells it out, here I am everything travelling ok and one day i get an error from within my Counterstrike Source stating error after 4 tries – hmm strange, now everthing else is working, browsing the web, mail, even finding CSS servers and Steam connection, it all worked fine. The only thing was trying to connect to a server..whack thanks for coming..no CSS for you :).
A little research pulled up a similiar problem from the Gamearena forums with a clue regarding the recent Telstra change of the MTU value – note there was very little info and related cases…. Now wtf is a mtu and why is telstra messing with it.
Referring to the wonderful Wikipedia, MTU stands for Maximum Transmission Unit. Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) refers to the size (in bytes) of the largest packet that a given layer of a communications protocol can pass onwards. MTU parameters usually appear in association with a communications interface (NIC, serial port, etc.). The MTU may be fixed by standards (as is the case with Ethernet) or decided at connect time (as is usually the case with point-to-point serial links). A higher MTU brings higher bandwidth efficiency. However, large packets can block up a slow interface for some time, increasing the lag for further packets.
Read on…it gets interesting 🙂
SO… if you live in a dust bowl like I do you probably experience the pleasure of remove caked on dust from inlets, outlets, grilles boards…basically everything! From time to time I get a seized fan, depending on the cost and quality they can be given a new lease on life or it can be worth just chucking it and getting a new one. PSU fans are potentially the most under-rated fans in the system, with one of these stopping things can get very, very interesting.
I tend to get decent quality PSU where possible, these are typically, but not limited too, Antec and Silverstone. These usually have a single large fan or two slower fans, these fans can be hard to get, even though they are not soldered in. Here is an example of a Antec fan that seized and was repaired with a good clean and a few drops of machine oil. Any sewing machine oil is suitable, as long as it is light Machine oil.
Obviously do at your own risk since this can potentially void your warranty – Note the “No user-serviceable parts” decal!
Remove the cover of the PSU – note voiding warranty now!
Problem fan!
Fan mounted…
Remove the plastic sticker and clear plastic cover on the DC motor….there is a little plastic cir-clip which needs to be removed, this holds the fan into the assembly, without it, the fan will take off when started!
Well this is what I get all the time on computers, with enormous amounts of data, from work stuff, pdf librarys, drawings, pictures you name it. I am fairly careful about organising stuff and and fairly consistent in the backing up, but there comes a point where you need some form of effective search, I am not talking about the search crap that comes with any O/S, these take days to search thru pdfs and documents. Vista’s search has not yet convinced me either! So I went on a search for decent, opensource or at least free searching and indexing software. I am not fussed if it runs on a desktop or off a server thru a java applet or some other means.
I was looking for something that was relatively simple to install and configure, I dont mind tweaking stuff and spending a bit of time to get stuff to work, but taking days and days to install and sort out problems is not good enough! I wanted somthing that, ideally, could search thru MS format files, Open Office format files, pdf’s, generic text files and CAD files, it also had to provide results based on file name and path, not really much to ask. It is important to note that g$$gle provides some SOHO options for this kinda stuff, in particular the g$$gle mini, this little box would do most of what I need, but is limited to 200,000 docs and cost shitloads of money, probably would not reach 200,000 docs but the 6kUS is a killer…..so off to the alternatives I went 🙂
There comes a time when have ALL your junk on one box is just not on…..Over the years I have slowly converted my hardcopy multimedia to a more useable format on my desktop, this however becomes cumbersome when others on the network require access and you want to keep some sort of respectable performance and temperature on your desktop.
So theres only one obvious answer 🙂 get another box……
Slowing starting to get tired of a flaky extremely cheap duron piece of crap as the proxy server, firewall and gateway…with that said I am still using the machine 🙂
Nontheless, and for the sake of a play with a 1RU server, I picked one of these older whitebox style machines off ebay for 40 odd dollars. The bloody thing sound very sick when I first fired it up so there was nothing to do but pull it apart for a look 🙂
These 1RU machines use very fast 40mm fans which kinda suck from the silent point of view and this machien used very cheap thin 40mm fans. Out with those and in with some old semi decent 40mm x 20mm guys running at a reduced voltage and things started to sound a bit better, the loudest item is the PSU now.
Probably the only part they skimped on…a single toothed gear in the fuser assy, this fuser appears to have been installed with a dodgy toothed gear – the gear seems to be a hard plastic or at the very best a too soft mild steel. As can be shown by the pictures, a few teeth fell off and hence caused some havoc!..The hot roller also has some strange marks on it – strange for one with such low time ~ 70 000 pages.
2nd hand HP Laserjet 5m off ebay with a good fuser unit and a bonus duplex unit and we are back in business….these units are great to pull apart and put back together!
v1.15, August 2002
This document provides information on how to setup a transparent caching HTTP proxy server using only Linux and squid. Read More
Well, after quite some time dicking around with exim, i decided to give another mail server program a go…sendmail was outta the question, qmail i tried but was too fiddly…plus just did not work! so last on the list was postfix….i read mixed comments regarding this mail program…but hey, why not give it a go…in addition it has i good webmin config….
spent one weekend on and off installing and tweakin’ the config file…all up the actual config was quick easy and painless, the most problem i had was configuring the firewalls and bloddy telnet to let access to the system….maybe the system is a bit to secure…or unusable…
none theless the mail server is operational and mail can be sent from the user accounts on the server and can be recieved…..only thing to get working now is the pop server and remote mail delivery!!!
*did u know u can burn ur knoppix cd onto the hardrive and use it like a real distro….that is so awesome…
*Ultimate Bootbisk 3.0 – excellent live cd….has all the great tools for system rescue and admin, but also has a neat live cd bit call INSERT, which is based on knoppix and used fluxbox as the window manager…very very cool….
* mail server is getting a few steps closer….really need some guidance tho..gotta hit patrick up!!!
