hardware

 I recently bought another IBM Model M (1395660) on eBay the other day, not thinking that it is actually a terminal keyboard. I thought it has a detachable SDL cable like my current Model M (1391401). I was wrong. Turns out it has a non-removable RJ-45 plug instead, thus being a terminal keyboard. Well, aftering some researching, some were able to get it to work by using an ATMega. I was able to find a pinout of the RJ45 plug on the keyboard, and simply just wire it up to a PS/2 cable. Though apparently, the colour of wire for PS/2 is not standardized, which led to testing each pin to see what it does. I cannibalized an old Microsoft keyboard for the cable and was able to hook the wires up straight to each other.

Linux, one way or another, really brings out your inner hacker. I've been tinkering quite a bit with DeLicate Linux. It's a lightweight distro made for old computers that uses the 2.4 kernel. Right now, I have DeLicate running on a Pentium 166 with 64MB of RAM. Surprisingly, Fluxbox and Xchat run without any huge problems. Replacing Bash with Dash helped free up some RAM as well. DeLicate uses pacman as the package manager, so building new packages is as easy as creating a PKGBUILD file.

I have also set up a DeLicate package repsitory and a Git repository for the PKGBUILD files.  So if you have an old Pentium laying around, go fire it up and check out DeLicate. There's an active community too.

 Kobo just released their Vox eReader a couple of days ago and I've had the chance to play with it this weekend.

It's quite heavy compared to other ereaders. I found that it's even heavier than the mighty Kindle DX. See below for a comparison to a Canadian quarter.

(As you can see, there's some nice greasy fingerprints on it). Having never played around with Android before, it's quite easy to use. After firing it up the first time, it had to update the firmware, which over wifi, takes a while. After the update, I was finally able to play with it. Checking the version info in settings revealed that it's running Android 2.3.3 atop kernel version 2.6.35.3. 

I finally did what I always wanted to do: add external antennas to my 701. Drilling the holes were a bitch. First, I tried at the right hinge, but the end of the RP-SMA connector was too large. Then next to the VGA port and no luck, Oh, but perhaps next to the second USB port on the right hand side? Nope. Well, what I ended up doing was putting the connector on the outside. Check out the picture:

Edit: here's a better picture

A little while ago, I wrapped my 360 in a  wood Oblivion Xbox 360 skin. Lately, I've been getting more RROD's than usual. I'd be in the midst of a game and it'd shut off with three red flashing red rings. I've had the Nyko Intercooler on my Xbox for the last couple years and, I thought, would make the RROD problem go away. Apparently not. So today, I took off the Intercooler.

^{Picture is of the Intercooler.}

Nice scorch marks there.

^{The power connector on the back of my Xbox 360}

So I got this Dell PowerEdge 6400 and wow. First, this thing is gigantic. Eight hot swappable SCSI bays in the front. Free is a good price ;)

Inside this thing has two Intel Pentium III Xeon processors, running at 750MHz each. Where you see the RAM is actually a tray of RAM. You can remove the tray and fill up 16 DIMMs. Hot swappable PCI ports too. Three redundant power supplies in case a tornado hits or something. I'm planning on getting a SCSI drive or two and getting Solaris running (or perhaps Nexenta).

I've had these Xeon processors sitting around for a while now and I thought it's about time to get a motherboard for them. Two are clocked at 3.0Ghz/1MB/800, other two are at 2.8Ghz/512/533. I ordered a Super Micro X6DVL-EG2  from eBay for $120 of which I seen this motherboard up to $250. Anyway, came the other day and finally put it together. Heatsinks didn't screw into the case as it should, so I had to screw the nut right onto the heatsink. 

^{Photo by psilver}

I'll skip the whole 'I haven't posted for two weeks' intro. 

It's only October and it already snowed, a couple of inches and it's still here. Mornings are sure colder.

I finally put together my new fileserver, and up  from my one harddrive server before. I was going to do a RAID1 configuration, but instead went back to a normal partitioning setup (XFS on the secondary HDD for the files). Recieved another computer the other day, so I'm at a total of 7 servers.

I've been profoundly confused on what to do with two new servers. At the moment, I have a total of three servers; a BitTorrent tracker, web server and NAS (NFS server). Now, what I was thinking was setting up a load balancing scheme using VS via NAT. Essentially, build one of the servers as a load balancer and turn the other one into a http node. The only problem with that is redundancy. Say if the load balancer fails for whatever reason, I'm screwed.

Same as my NAS, no RAID so if the HDD fails, I'm screwed again. Still, it would be a cool journey on getting a load balancing scheme set up...and working. That, and I just want to use all the ports on my 24 port switch. Then, depending on the load on the NFS server, I could run MySQL/Postgres on it for use with the web servers.

Thought I'd take it upon myself to create a mail server on 'roppie' (me server). It's now a log server also, I even got my router to send logs to it too. Interesting it is though, I have 'jlap' sending all its logs to roppie too. 'roppie' also runs a minimal web server (lighttpd + mysql, same as jlap) but also serves the logs out on HTTP so I can view them anywhere.

  I've been using SFTP on roppie since FTP didn't work for a loooong time. I tried to FTP to it today...and well....proftpd wasn't installed in the first place. So now I have that up and running so its all good.