Home Hardware Upgrades

I received a couple of early birthday presents today. A 2GB RAM upgrade for the main desktop PC in the house running Fedora 8 and a 320GB SATA drive. Installed them after dinner this evening and am now enjoying the new RAM and extra hard disk space. That brings the main desktop machine up to 4GB of RAM and about 800GB of attached storage.

I run several VMs on the newly upgraded machine, several of which I use when I help the Fedora Unity crew test their re-spins. Now I can throw a little extra RAM at those VMs and shuffle them off to a different spindle and one with more cache to speed those tests up a bit.

Basement Cleanup

With a long weekend we decided to clean up some of the junk in our basement. It really wasn’t that bad, a good portion of the task was just breaking down lots of cardboard boxes, sweeping up the floor, vacuuming the corners and making our storage piles a little more organized. By the end we easily created enough space for the kids to ride bikes in the basement – a nice feature for when they start feeling trapped inside due to winter temps or unfavorable yard conditions.

I also took the time to finally power up some of the hardware I have down there that I have acquired over that past year or so. Despite my having moved to virtual machines for nearly all my testing, I have a really hard time saying no when someone offers to give me some hardware. So there were several machines that I had down there that I simply needed to power up and see what I had.

One was an older Dell desktop, nothing particularly noteworthy, I was hoping for an upgrade for my parent’s old machine or perhaps a machine for my son. But it didn’t have any RAM. I labeled it and put it off to the side, I am sure if I dig into one of the other carcasses down there I can find some RAM for it – but that was not today’s project.

I also had four rack mountable “servers” that I had played with yet. They were no-name servers and really more of a PC stuck in a rack mounted case. Two of them were without RAM, so labeled and off to the side they went. The other two were decent machines for home server use. One was a PIII 600 with 256MB of RAM and a 20GB hard drive. Looks like it had a copy of Windows 2000 Server on it – that will be replaced with Fedora or CentOS when the time comes to use that box.

The other was a dual processor PIII 700 with 1GB of RAM. It had a Clark Connect Linux install on it. I had never heard of Clark Connect before, but it appears to be based off of a Red Hat OS and judging from the Clark Connect website it was probably a Gateway version. I did not play with it much, I was mainly just trying to get the hardware specs from the machines and determining if they were bootable. I will probably play with it just a bit more before I blow it away and replace it with Fedora or CentOS.

I also had an old machine I use to “host” at a friend’s house with a high speed connection when we first moved into an area without high speed several years ago. I powered it up just to see if it still booted and to remind myself as to what the specs were for that machine. It was from an era when I used to run Debian and it still booted with no issues save for a really noisy fan. Nothing noteworthy hardware wise.

And finally I powered up an old SGI Indy I came into. It booted up with no issues. I did not have a login for the box, so it will be another day when I reset the root password on that box and actually poke around more on it. My primary interest was to see if it booted – and it did.

I labeled all the machines, stacked them back up and now I just have to figure out what I want to do with them. I will probably not make any decisions to that end until I go through my old stash of test machines I used to use and decide which ones of those to finally get rid of.

Bye Bye Vista!

Last night I rebuilt my main desktop computer and I now have it running Fedora once again. It feels good to be back! As mentioned in other posts, I was running Vista for a couple of reasons. One, my $dayjob involves supporting Windows networks. Two, I kept hearing the stories about Vista but hate to base my own opinion solely on what one reads on the Internet – that is just not wise. Three, running Vista myself helps me understand better what Fedora does well and what Microsoft does well.

My Vista experience did not start out so bad. But over time and as I started to do more and more real work I felt the OS was consuming too many of my system resources and limiting what I should be able to do with my computer. It seemed to do what is typical of many Windows systems, exhibit a performance decrease over time. With the holiday break it was time to move back to Fedora – which is what had been running on the desktop before the Vista trial (my laptop has been running Fedora).

I installed off the recent Fedora Unity re-spin to save myself some updates. I used a DVD install and it went along without any issues. I was soon up and running with Fedora 8, followed by a quick ‘yum update’ to catch the updates since the date of the re-spin.

Everything pretty much worked out of the gate. In fact, installing the printer was the easiest, most pain free printer install I have ever done – on either Microsoft OS’s, Apple OS’s or Linux OS’s. I just chose Add Printer, pointed it to the IP of my network printer, it knew it was a Brother printer, I selected my model number (7820N) and said Okay. It was that easy. It was more work to install the same printer under Vista than it was in Fedora.

There is an Nvidia GeForce 6600 GT in this machine. I headed off to install the driver for it. No issues installing and Compiz worked well.

The only downside is if Compiz is enabled the Fast User Switching breaks. Unfortunately I need Fast User Switching to work as the main machine is used by several family members. I ended up disabling Compiz and even with the proprietary driver installed the Fast User Switching still appears to be working. A little disappointing, but I can get the eye candy on my laptop – so that will have to suffice for now.

I consider this another great success. Every release is easier to install and just have things work. As I mentioned, I did more configuration work to get Vista in proper order than I did to get this Fedora 8 install running.

Agh! Vista.

Agh!! Vista is driving me nuts. Yes, I am a Windows and Linux admin, so I need to work with Microsoft OS’s as well. I have been test driving Vista for the past few months. At first, it wasn’t so bad. But as real work needs to get done I get very frustrated with its performance.

Example, I was running Fedora as the main OS on the machine I run VMware Server on. I could run about four or five VMs in the background and you tended to forget they were even running in the background. Now I am running Vista with VMware Server. Ugh! Even running *one* VM is painful! Just to start it and the OS starts hitting the disk heavily. Once it gets running it isn’t too bad – but keep in mind I am running *one* VM compared to the four or five I used to run.

Google Apps

I am giving Google Apps a try for one of my domains. I really hadn’t been planning on trying it, I was relatively happy with my current hosting situation. Several months ago I started forwarding all of my email to the various domains I have to Gmail. The Gmail interface worked for me, I could access it from any computer without needing to setup IMAP settings on each PC. And now that Gmail offers IMAP access I always have the possibility of using a thick client if I feel then need. This setup has worked well for the past several months.

Then this week happened. Any emails forwarded from my hosting provider to Gmail have been taking 12 to 24 hours to get passed through. The hosting provider is aware of the issue and is supposedly working with Gmail to resolve the issue. But as of yet, no change for the better. Most of the mailing lists I subscribe to are affected by this forward. Now I could have resubscribed to the lists with a gmail address directly, but the reason for the forward is to minimize me ever having to change the subscribed address – I could just update the forward.

After three days of this I decided to setup a Google Apps account for one my busier email domains. The setup was pretty painless. I still have to play with some of the features, but for now my email is happily flowing without delay.

Even more nx7400 LCD Display Issues

The display on my primary laptop, an HP nx7400 has once again quit working. This is the third time this has happened in one year. The laptop boots with no issues, just no LCD display. Looks like another trip back to the repair depot for it…

HP nx7400 Display Issues… Again!

Last fall work provided me with a new HP nx7400. The thing seemed great at first and then the display issues started. Occasionally when the thing hibernated the LCD display wouldn’t come back. Power off, power on and sometimes that worked. Other times you had to pull the battery, do the dance and sacrifice a chicken to get it to come back. About two months ago it finally came to the point where nothing I did would get it to come back. That resulted in a return to the warranty depot for an LCD replacement/repair.

Now, today – I just had the same issue happen. No LCD. The laptop boots, you can hear it booting. But there is absolutely no display. I will call them again in the morning and see what happens – probably another trip back to the warranty depot for the laptop. Unfortunately, this is about the worse possible time for this issue to resurface. Over the next few weeks I will need to be working from home a bit more than usual and that laptop was the only machine I have that actually runs Windows on it. Hopefully the repair will once again be quick and I won’t be without it for too long.

Hosting Provider Outage

My hosting provider was down in the early morning hours today. The first portion was due to an emergency planned outage to repair a building UPS. When the power came back on there were issues with one of their core routers. Looks like things are back to normal now though.

DSL Upgrade…

I finally got around to calling the phone company today to see if there were higher DSL speeds available and to make sure I was getting a fair price on our DSL server (cable isn’t available in our area). Turns out I am getting kicked up to 3x our current DSL speed – 512kbps to 1.5mbps – and saving $15 a month! I guess sometimes it does pay to talk to the phone company! The change is supposed to take place on Monday.

VMware, AMD X2, Windows Installs

I am finally getting around to setting up a Windows test network in addition to the Windows boxes I already have. My base OS on my AMD X2 machine is Fedora Core 5 running the most recent VMware Server Beta. The other night I tried to install Windows 2000 Server and it just hung at the Starting Windows 2000 during the very initial parts of the install (before you even partition the disk). I initially thought it was a bad disk or one that wasn’t playing well with VMware.

Tonight I tried another disk. Same thing. This time I was off to Google and found that there were some hits on this in the VMware forums. Adding:

processor1.use = “FALSE “

To the .vmx file for the virtual machine fixed the problem right up. Now Windows Server is installing with no issues.