Small/cheap notebooks are all the range since the Asus Eee PC-701 launched. Interestingly many of them come with Linux installed instead of the more typical Microsoft Windows. My current Dell Inspiron is showing it's age, it's way to slow and the case is breaking in quite a few places. I don't use or need a notebook much so I've been unwilling to buy a new full price notebook, even a cheap £300 Dell Inspiron.
The initial Asus created quite a stir and there are now several members of the Eee family and several alternatives from their competitors. The Acer Aspire One looks rather nice and works pretty much out of the box with Debian. Maybe I'll buy one, or then again perhaps I'll not...
This morning the SCSI sub-system on my development server Turing gave up. I switched him off took his disks out and put them in a spare chassis and rebooted him. All told he was off-line for about 5 minutes. It took an hour or so to rebuild the disk mirror and now it's all okay.
I now hope this box will last a little longer and eventually we will be able to migrate my Linux systems off their current antique hardware platforms onto a more modern VMware virtual platform.
On Monday morning both SCSI disks on my test system had died. We left the machine to cool and it successfully restarted later on. This morning one of disks again died, so I swapped it with one of my only two remaining spares. So far both disks are still running but I am expecting the older of the two disks to fail at some point this week. It's also possible that the SCSI sub-system it's self will fail, it's been a common failure on these Compaq DL servers.
I now have a new stack of salvaged disks from other decommissioned servers in my desk for when the next drive fails. Eventually these machines will be pensioned off and replaced with virtual systems within our VMWare solution but for the mean time they are real machines with real failing hardware.
I've replaced my home server Herisson with Lapin. Pretty much everything about the new server is an order of magnitude faster or larger, the disk is two orders of magnitude greater (though in practice less with mirroring enabled).
I now have Lapin partitioned up into the default system "Bleu" and several virtual machines "Noir" and "Rouge" for specific uses. The remote access works and I'm just waiting for Xen to trickle into Debian Lenny then I'll have KQemu, VirtualBox and Xen all at my disposal.
Today I finally copied the last files off Herisson and then splatted the disks by installing a fresh copy of Debian on top with a LVM2 layout that was quite different from what was their originally. Shortly thereafter he went off to a new home, where I hope it will prove as useful as it has here.
Herisson: Gone but not forgotten.
Today I wiped my new box and started the procedure to install it
to replace my old home server. The Debian "Lenny" β DVD I
downloaded and burnt to DVD didn't work, it got stuck in the
partitioning stage, so I had to give up on that and fall back
to an older "Etch" DVD. The "Etch" disk worked okay and once
I'd got the basics on, I did a quick
aptitude dist-upgrade and Lenny was running okay.
For most of the afternoon I've been copying files from my desktop system onto the new server and files from the old server to the new one. NFS over a 1Gig network just isn't fast enough anymore, how people manage with WiFi I'll never know...
Tomorrow I'll get most of the key services running and by the time the we have to move house I'll have decommissioned and given away my old home server.
At long last my new box has arrived. Following my standard naming convention, it's going to be Lapin-Bleu. Lapin will be replacing Herisson, a three year old box that work were junking. Lapin is in most ways an order of magnitude more powerful than Herisson, except disk space where it's a two orders of magnitude improvement.
There are only three down-sides of the transition, the new box will draw more power, could make more noise and I'll have to arse about to make the transition. I've yet to double check but when I booted the new box for the first time, it was actually quite quiet, so it may be only the increase in power demand that is my long term problem.
At long last I decided it was time to replace my trusty home server. It was old when I first got the machine and that's three years ago now. After some fiddling and dithering I've bought another AMD box from Digital Networks UK. The first two proved to be okay and they dealt with the defective Iiyama monitors to my satisfaction.
The new box has an AMD Athlon 64 X2 processor, plenty of RAM and two SATA-300 disks. I'll put Debian Etch (possibly Lenny) on the box, run the disks with software mirroring and run my home network services on the box (DNS, DHCP, NFS, Web, SSH etc). The current box doesn't have enough disk space nor a disk mirror so the new machine will be both a lot faster and a lot more capable.
Next week my home server will be three years old. In normal circumstances that would mean it has come to the end of it's warranty period. In this case the machine was already scrap to start with, work gave it to me instead of throwing it away. I will eventually have to replace the machine, it is too slow and too noisy but it has worked reliably for three years and a Pentium 2 running at 233 MHz (TDP ~35 W) does not use as much electricity as a more modern chip, e.g. a Pentium 4 (> 70 W).
What I do want is a new home server that uses a low power notebook part, such as the Intel Core 2 Due or AMD Turion 64 X2 that deliver plenty of processor grunt while consuming less power than my current Pentium 2. Low power helps to keep the running cost down and tends to make for a cooler and hence quieter box.
This week AMD have announced that they will publish the full documentation of their ATI range of Radeon graphics cards so that the open-source community can work with them to produce a new range of 2/3D graphics drivers that are both open and free and therefore suitable for all flavours of Linux/BSD/Solaris. Not only will there be official open-source drivers - as Intel have announced, but the documentation will also be available in case anyone wants to go it alone. All that has to happen now is for Nvidia to open up, and we'll be in graphics card nirvana!
At home I don't run a wireless network. My computers all live within a few metres of my ADSL router and are all connected by high speed wires. This week I got a "Wife Friendly" networking solution that isn't the traditional wireless solution, I bought a pair of Devolo HomePlug AV, Ethernet over the domestic mains units. I can now access my network from anywhere in the house without having to mess with a silly WiFi solution!
When I got my new PCs last year they came with Iiyama ProLite monitors. One of them failed with tip. This year the second also failed. Both have now been swapped and seem okay. I'll never buy Iiyama again, for a premium price, I expect a premium monitor and they are no better than the bargain basement units we have at work.
On Saturday morning out AEG Santo 2642-6 KG fridge freezer decided to stop refrigerating. We had a mad panic eating everything that had defrosted - a month's supply of meat in two days! Now we are just waiting for a replacement thermostat to turn up.
This week a colleague at work replaced a SD CRT television with a HD LCD television. After one night, even with a digital HD feed and much messing he wasn't happy. After the second night where watching a SD feed from DVD was unwatchable he took the television back to the show for a refund. The retailer said that most people don't like LCD it's not as good as CRT and wasn't keen to refund his money as there wasn't anything wrong with it. Eventually the retailer gave in and gave him the money back, my colleague is now happy* with his SD CRT television now.
I knew that LCD and plasma wasn't as good as CRT last time I looked but I had thought that in the last 12-18 months that LCD had overtaken CRT technology, evidently I was mistaken.
* Actually he isn't but that's another story.
Today our trusty Mellerware Sona model 84300 "Home Bakery" passed away. It had had been making excellent bread for us, every day for over four years. Today the paddle seized up and the transfer plate shattered. We came home to find a tin of unmixed bread-flour, and pieces of plastic in the bottom of the machine...
Tomorrow we will have to buy a replacement bread machine.
Yesterday one of the Wintel servers threw a fit and stopped working at work. After some effort the Wintel guys got it running again. This morning it had died again. Ironically this server is one of the few that actually does more than one task, so Windows home directories, department shares and DHCP were knocked out.
After a few hours of panic they managed to bring the disks up in another identical (but functioning) chassis.
The problem with our server room is that over the year servers have been upgraded and densities increased and the air conditioning has not been upgraded to match. On a normal autumn day it is a balmy 30°C around the Wintel kit. Over time HP/Compaq Intel kit just can't hack it - our IBM Power kit is naturally cooler and better made and is quite happy.
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