y’Know – I hate these twist-suck mouth-pieces they put on the bottles, but I don’t want to take it off for fear of spilling some on the computer equipment. Yar – I be postin’ from ye olde Eee I Catalyst lo!
I’m here to try a new motherboard on one of SVRNi‘s SAN nodes. I’m replacing a Tyan S2882 with a Gigabyte GA-7A8DR-H. The Tyan had been crashing a lot on us, it seems that the Broadcom GigE (bge) interfaces were a prime culprit, but we can generally knock the machines over with heavy PCI-X traffic (ie: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0), and in a SAN member, that is a frequent situation and not a good place to have crashing. I suspect we’ll have to replace the motherboards in two other machines… but UF1 has an S2882 as well, but it’s never suffered a hardware crash. (mod_perl leaks, RAID failures and runaway apaches on the other hand…) The Gigabyte board has some nice features that surprised me: Dual Intel GigE (tho not the same chip…?), really nice RS232 redirection for the BIOS all the way thru the OS boot, offBoard (but included) dual channel UW SCSI and no cruddy Silicon Image SATA controller. Obviously all of the above are areas the Tyan was deficient in, but what I am missing from the S2882s are the lack of fan connectors, our SAN cases have about 15 fans, an all but 5 of them could be connected to the board. The S2882 also had an Intel 82559 (fxp), but the GA-7A8DR-H more than makes up for this with the dual Intel GigE. A few things that bug me about the GA is that it’s unreliable for auto-start on AC applied when warm… bench testing was not good, but when I put it in the rack it started with only one of the power-supplies jacked in. Also – there’s fewer front panel connections on the board, so I no longer have my front-USB or network lights working.
And we all know what kind of travesty it is to not have more blinken-ligchstzen. ‘specially because they’re all sexy!
Alright! Enough about computers!
Well, maybe not, my laptop is dying… the LCD flickers – in the 1 in 3 tries just to get it to turn on, the indicator LEDs only work intermittently (I’m SURE it’s on and running even though the LED says it isn’t.) Oh! And the USB ports are practically useless for anything that draws more than 15mA… even if the device is externally powered. Argh. And the WiFi doesn’t work on the 2.6 kernel, but it looks like there’s been some work done on the ENE chips lately.
Want. But considering the vehicular situation and Christmas’ fast approach, I could settle for a nicely loaded D6200 Lifebook; considering it’s spex and size, it’s significantly cheaper than my current 2 year old piece of junk… and just generally a better unit.
Okay – really – enough about computers now.
I sent Chris out to pick-up our pizza for dinner. I made sure he wouldn’t get lost 🙂
It’s probably better for my waist-line that we don’t have Mamma’s in Ottawa.
Also had a few nibbles on the sale of the van, happy about that. Only one loser so far, asks me how much I want, “$500 is the current bid, I’m hoping for more” / “But without a transmission I won’t pay that much, $300” / “Right.”. Selling the Prelude was a similar situation since it wasn’t drivable either, cheap repair tho. It was much older and had more miles on it. I actually sold it to the second highest bidder because the highest (by only $50 mind you) was he was being a total jerk about it. Or he was just doing a mind-job on me to make me think it was worth less, which is really ironic considering he was the highest bidder.
I miss the ‘Lude.
I’m really missing having a large vehicle now even more though. ‘course, me pops and I still have to figure out who gets the proceeds from the sale… I mean – I have been doing all the repairs and maintenance on it in the past 2 years. Maybe I’m making a mistake selling it, or am I completely deluding myself by thinking a dealer will give me a better value as a trade in…
Anyway, the plan is to return to Ottawa tomorrow afternoon, maybe meet up with Dave on the way back. Hopefully this drive will not be as tense as the one on the way down, what with it being the first snow, Chris’ first long trip, the deer we missed by 12″ (I thought it was less) and night time.