Category Archives: IT

Do you know what is better than having 1 video card in your computer?

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Two video cards, of course!   I have had the current rig for awhile, and one of my goals has been to “finish it 2008 style” – the motherboard supported AMD/ATI’s Crossfire multi-video card technology.  I have already put the fastest processor it can handle in as well, so adding another older video card was the finishing touch.  Over a year ago I bought an AMD 4830 (the lowest of their top tier card offerings at the time) for a steal on the Anandtech For Sale/For Trade forums where I get all my good used computer goodies.  I told myself when I saw another for $50 I would buy it.  That never happened, but I found one for $60 a couple weeks ago and picked it up.

You might be wondering why this would be exciting – two video cards means twice the heat, twice the power and twice the noise.  They also bring in almost twice the performance 🙂  Well, sometimes as you can see below…

Frames Per Second



Frames Per Second

For my $60 I am seeing a solid increase in performance.  100%?  No, but we can see that there are solid performance gains across the board that I am fairly impressed with.  The 2008 Power Rig is now complete… Time to do a full PC upgrade, right 😀

There will be a couple follow on posts talking about the benchmark choices and some  more pictures of the dual card goodness.

–Nat

Computers are fun…

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Precious blog time has been consumed lately by issues with the home computers.

As the NFL season is ramping up along with new seasons of Survivor and The Amazing Race, I thought it would be a good idea to refresh the Media PC. The one that was there was put there in disgust when I couldn’t get the last refresh built out of some Frakenstein components and smallish case that was a little too loud and ran the drives a bit too hot. Makes sense to recombine a few parts that I had been hoarding from “great” deals to refresh it, right?

Well, this became a huge time waster. The new machine was totally silent, a little bit speedier and looked a lot nicer than the old one. Great, eh? Until it would randomly freeze. This was particularly distressing as that was what had forced me to abandon the earlier refresh in frustration. Just like I did about a year ago, I started down the path of replacing components to figure out the problem was.  I accepted that the power supply was good as it had been in use for over a year and was a solid brand right in the same Antec case, so no worries about electrical  shorts and extremely horrible power supply.  By using integrated graphics, the power footprint for the new media center PC should have been very tiny.

I was convinced that components shared with the previous failed media center build out where the culprits – that was limited to the CPU, heat sink and memory.

  • Changed out the heat sink.  No change.
  • Changed out the CPU. No change.  Ran PRIME95 for hours.
  • The old, failed setup was running better with a newer CPU.  Picked up a used, newer CPU.  No change.  (the PC sat in the corner for a couple days here)
  • Ran memtest4 overnight, no issues. (memory checked out)
  • Plugged the PC right into a surge protector rather than the UPS.  Now getting a “signal lost” freeze when watching TV.
  • Changed the tuner out for a different Hauppauge tuner.  No change.
  • Replaced the power supply with a brand new one.  No change.
  • Added in a ATI all in wonder 3650.  BAM.  Blue screen.  Reinstalled Windows 7, same issue.

I had to think about this for a while.  So, the only repeat part that was still in use from the previous, failed build was the damn ram. Replaced that, no more blue screen.  Theory?   The integrated graphics were using the RAM that was bad, hiding it from memtest.   Tonight I am going to put that ram into a box that isn’t using integrated graphics and test it out.

Lesson learned?  Dammit, maybe memtest doesn’t work with new AMD chipsets (as the memtest forums indicated)?  Bleh.  Too much wasted time.

–Nat

Ubuntu 10.04 SSD Tweaks

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Reduce “swappiness” to 0

This prevents the swap file from being used unless it is actually needed, preventing unnecessary write cycles on the drive.

Code:
vm.swappiness=0

Edit /etc/sysctl.conf by using your favorite editor :
$sudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf

If the line doesn’t exist, you will need to create it.

After reboot vm.swappiness is 0

Enable TRIM (if applicable)

Uninstall proprietary (ie, video card) drivers first. The 10.6 cats included didn’t like the newer kernel and it really garbled up the video driver install process.

Update to a newer kernel. 2.6.33+

Edit your /etc/fstab file so your SSD line looks like this:

UUID=of your SSD here / ext4 noatime,discard,errors=remount-ro 0 1

After reboot TRIM should function.

Links I found useful:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php…1&postcount=43 (swapiness syntax)
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=9740235 (fstab discussion)
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonHD (link to Kernel versions and an explanation of how to update)

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2069761 (incredibly informative forum posting about SSD drives in general)

Enjoy!

–Nat

Municipal Broadband – Broadband Internet for Everyone

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Today Ars Technica posted a couple great articles about broadband in the United States, one covering how communities are stepping up and providing their own high speed access while the other covered the new Broadband Plan set before congress.  What interests me most is the support for broadband for all of the U.S., including rural areas.  The FCC recently proposed a plan that would set the goal of all households receiving a minimum of 4mbps internet at a reasonable price by 2020 – a little above the typical DSL speed of 3mbps and about 80 times faster than 56k dial up.  To put this into perspective, that would equate to download speeds of about 500KB per second or the ability to stream Netflix in high quality while still doing some low impact web surfing.   When you consider the number of internet connected homes that have more than one concurrent internet user, it is easy to imagine that this is constraining.  On the other hand, the number of homes and users connected to the internet via dial up and satellite that technologies such as flash and streaming video have rendered quite obsolete it is obvious that this is a great step in the right direction.  The plan also has a goal of 100mbps in 100 million homes by 2020 as well in urban areas.

What is troubling, however is how far behind the rest of the developed world we are in internet access.  Given that the information age is here and the very competitiveness of our schools and workforce relies the internet and related services it is difficult to understand how we are not more ambitious.  That is where the Municipality driven broadband speeds shine as a great example.  In the article linked above, it is noted how the area around the Wisconsin Dells has urban internet hosted by the city that features two tiers; 10mbps for $50 per month and 5mbps for $40.  Using federal grant money and private investment, they are going to push this service to all of their users via fiber optics, including those far out in the rural areas that currently only have access to dial up or satellite.  The community feels that this will allow them to sustain a thriving rural atmosphere that doesn’t make moving into town for internet required to work remotely or take classes online necessary.

Some might think this is a waste of federal tax funds, but for all the projects we endeavor on with our federal funds this one not only delivers value to constituents but enables our country to continue its rural heritage and remain relevant in an ever increasingly connected world.  I am really thankful that Butler-Bremer offered DSL to the farm when I was there as I feel it was critical to my development as an IT professional, hopefully more rural towns will follow suit.

I mean, what is life without You Tube?  Empty!

–Nat

Home Data Protection Schemes, pt. 1

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Having more and more digital “stuff” that’s somewhat important to retain, I’ve started looking at some solutions.  Already, we put all of our “important” files on our Windows Home Server because it has disk redundancy and is available from anywhere internet is accessible.  Our pictures, tax information, etc. is all stored electronically and it is important that it be protected.  The question then becomes how data is protected from there.

What are we protecting against is probably the first and most important item to detail.  What could happen?

  • Windows Home Server failure (hardware or software) resulting in corrupted data.
  • House fire/natural disaster.
  • Theft.

After that, we have to decide how much data loss would be acceptable.  If we could potentially lose thirty days worth of data, is that reasonable?  One day?  One hour?  One year?

Tiered backups is also something that has to be considered.  Some data, like important documents, likely needs to be more secured and backed up more often than the photo collection. The photo collection likely needs to be backed up more often and securely than the TV show collection, etc.

Some strategies will come in follow up posts…

–Nat

VMware Lab Manager 4.01 Review

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This isn’t going to interest most folks who are reading my blog.  I need to get this written out though, because some guy was looking for Lab Manager feedback and couldn’t find constructive criticism.  Here is mine, and I am sure Google will index it.

As of 4.01, VMware vCenter Lab Manager has its uses, but it has huge gaps:

1) Total lack of storage resource monitoring tools/information that would be useful. You can’t export storage usage, linked clone tree structures, etc. If you aren’t familiar with CoW disks, linked clone chains, etc. you soon will be and you’ll be wondering about this in a big way when you need to constantly buy huge chunks of SAN disk with little hard data.

2)No exisitng backup solutions. Want to back up your library entries? Enjoy manually exporting them and hitting them one by one. SAN replication IS NOT a backup mechanism, folks. Backup is to tape or similar.

3)Very little in the way of customization. We have users that constantly fill up LUNS and IP pools when they have open space in other LUNS and pools because they just use the defaults. We’d like to set the default to blank in many cases, but that isn’t available.

4)Redploying VM’s nets them a new IP. This is a huge issue at times if you have IP sensitive configurations, especially when dealing with fencing.

5)Active Directory is a mess with fenced VMs, etc. Not really Lab Managers fault, but that’s the state of things.

6)Scalability. Using host spanning networks you are limited to 512 distributed switch port groups that each fenced configuration uses. In large deployments, you are likely to collide with this, necessatating another vCenter/Lab Manager instance and fragmentation of resources.

7)Maitenance issues. Maitenance Mode even with host transport networks enabled is borked because of the little VM that Lab Manager locks to each host. This is fairly ridiculous and convulutes what should be a very straight forward process.

8)Get ready to work some enourmous LUN sizes vs what you are likely used to. We have 2TB FC Luns and the only one we extended to 4TB is having locking issues, etc. NFS is the way you need to go.

9)Enjoy adding another Server 2003 instance to your infrastructure, because 2008 isn’t supported as an host OS for the Lab Manager services.   Oh yeah, all your important data is located in a little SQL express database on that server too. This is Enterprise software, right?

THE biggest issue I have with Lab Manager is the fact that Lab Manager accesses the ESX servers directly. Do us all a favor and use vCenter as an abstraction layer so we can actually see what the crap is going on and rely on a proven set of administration tools. Ideally Lab Manager would be a plugin and wouldn’t be harboring its own database, etc.

Bottom line is that you need to be sure you have the right needs for Lab Manager to be useful.

Original Thread:

http://communities.vmware.com/

–Nat

Computer news, circa 1991

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Kristin’s parents brought some kindling to the cabin this weekend, and I made the mistake of looking at it.  I found these awesome gems:

Click to read.

Click to read.

Oh yeah, you read it here.  Solaris x86 and SPARC, ready to pave the way to Sun dominance.  Solaris x86 did pick up some steam in the last couple of years, too little to late I suppose.

Click to read.

Click to read.

Dayum, that be one GB.  We’ve come a little ways in 20 years, eh?

Click for a larger version.

Click for a larger version.

What a deal!  Hard drive, 3.5″ and 5.25″ drives for the ultimate in compatibility.  Gotta love that In-Order, cacheless, sub 1M transistor goodness!

–Nat

Setting up the Internet CS:S Server

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This was very helpful information:

Call this entry CSS1

it should be like so

Check the enable box
Service name: CSS1
Incoming ports: 27020 – 27039
Destination IP Address: “Your Internal IP here, for example 192.168.2.4”
*Destination ports: 27020 – 27039
Port type: Check TCP

Press submit

Now we need to create another, this time call it CSS2:

Check the enable box
Service name: CSS2
Incoming ports: 1200 – 1200
Destination IP Address: “Your Internal IP here, for example 192.168.2.4”
*Destination ports: 1200 – 1200
Port type: Check UDP

Press submit

Now we must make a final one, we will call it CSS3:

Check the enable box
Service name: CSS3
Incoming ports: 27000 – 27015
Destination IP Address: “Your Internal IP here, for example 192.168.2.4”
*Destination ports: 27000 – 27015
Port type: Check UDP

Courtesy of FPSBanana, a site that seems to live on in Google’s cache.

Server config generator is here…

The server is up, by the way 🙂

–Nat

An adventure in storage expansion

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In this great age of rapidly expanding storage, I’ve decided to stop throwing things away in a digital sense.  We are talking storage that is under $0.07 per gigabyte.  This means that each 3.5 megabyte picture I retain costs $0.00002.  Someday the real issue will be keeping track of these things, but that is a separate discussion.

First up, the fun part of this post.

Before

Before, 1.59TB of available space

After

After, 2.96 TB of available space

One 1.5TB just doubled the storage capacity of my Windows Home Server.   When I put the 750 GB and 1TB drive in there, those were the $100 drives of the time.  The 1.5TB drive cost $102 shipped.

Now, here is the complicated part.  They (the hard drive industry as a whole) are changing how the data is laid out on hard drives that is not very compatible with Windows XP and Server 2003 (which is what WHS is based on.)  There are a number of technological issues at stake here that a number of sources like Ars Technica have covered this in depth so I will spare you that.  Basically, you get bad performance with the new drives on old operating systems – and WHS is effected.

What do you need to do?  Well, you basically have two options.  On most drives, there will be jumpers on there like there were on hard drives for a long time that limited their capacity to 2GB for 16 bit file systems that will fake out the operating system.  The caveat?  You can only have one partition per drive.  If you read the above article, you’ll know that this is intended for big drives, so you’ll be committed to something like a 2TB C: drive if you go that route, which is pretty ugly.

The second option is to use software to “realign” the partition after it has been created which allows for whatever layout you want.  The caveat here?  You could lose your data and any time you redo a partition you are going to be using this software.

Being the idiot I am, I didn’t use the jumper to fake out the operating system and I promptly put data on the drive by adding into the WHS storage pool (which you have to do to get the partition created that you can later realign.)  I tried to go back in and save myself with the bootable software, but this dropped the 1.5TB drive out of the pool and corrupted all my PC backups.  Then I shut it all down and did the jumper thing, which also made WHS freak out until I told it I really wanted to drop the drive out of the pool permanently and added it back in again.

Moral of the story – I wasted about three hours of my life and lost about 300GB of PC backups because I didn’t take time to set the jumper first.  If you are buying a hard drive for WHS or XP in the next few months, you are going to need to be aware of this issue.  Trust me, the jumper is easier and apparently neccessary with WHS as covered in the forums over at www.wegotserved.com.

–Nat

Pandora, how have I ignored you for so long?

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www.pandora.com – the awesome streaming radio site that is free.

A while back I had tried it out but wasn’t too happy with what I was hearing… it uses a system where you give “thumbs up” to music you like and likewise a “thumbs down” to music you don’t like.  I was finding that I wasn’t hearing anything that I didn’t already have in my collection or heard way too many times on the radio.  So I stopped using it until just a few weeks ago.

I decided to try to a whole new genre compared to what I already listened to.  Say what you want, but I get a kick out of the Lady Gaga “Bad Romance” and I have listened to pop music, well, ever, so I thought it would be a good way to hear some of the hits I had likely missed out on.  So, I fired up Pandora, started a station with that song and proceded to thumb up everything I liked on that station.

That’s the wrong way to do it.  The station quickly lost its focus from pop dance beats into something more resembling a pop variety station.  Fed up with that, I decided to move back to my Metallica channel to see if I could salvage it.  I undid all my previous ratings and saved the “thumbs up” for only the stuff I really liked.  Evntually it happened upon some Iced Earth, which is great… Hammerfall, which I also really enjoy.  My Metallica station has morphed into a late nineties to current thrash/power metal station (artists like Dream Evil, Testament and Dragon Fire) with some Anthrax, Iron Maiden and Judas Priest thrown in for good measure.  Giving death metal genre songs a couple thumbs down and the consistentcy of quality has been great and I keep getting introduced to new bands.

Thanks Pandora =)  I am actually thinking of buying a premium account for the ad removal and the higher bit rate music.  I don’t know if that works with all of the set top boxes, like the Roku, that act as Pandora receivers for your more typical home stereo, but I am hopeful…

Check out Pandora if you haven’t yet, it is a great way to enjoy a lot of free music.

–Nat