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Friday, May 02 2008, 11:15 PM

Touching on a few things from my last post...

Moving the bed to the other bedroom seems to have helped. I've slept pretty well the past few days. This is a good thing.

I was finally able to get the firmware on my RAID card updated. It only took about 5 hours worth of time, 5 wasted CD-ROMs, and a lot of annoyance. The result? The RAID array rebuilt itself for two days (pretty damn long for an array of that size), and the card promptly kernel panicked upon reaching 100% on the rebuild process. At least it didn't start over again like it had in the past.

I think I might need professional help. This morning, I built a small cardboard baffle (?) to direct air out of a HVAC duct towards the servers in my closet. People more sane than myself would probably say things like "you should have fewer computers", "why do you have so many computers?", or even the dreaded "you're freakin' weird!" I, however, build cardboard ducting.

I also caught this guy outside my window the other morning. I'm surprised the picture came out so clear... the window I took the picture through is dirty as hell.

frustrations hp photography raid

Tuesday, April 29 2008, 11:14 PM

So, I'm sitting here in my newly reconfigured den/office/computer room/whatever (more on that later) waiting for CD images to download. Multiple CD images. I'm trying to upgrade the firmware for a SATA RAID card I eBay'd a few weeks back to handle the new 2TB RAID array I was building. It seemed to work fine, but after some use, it showed a nasty habit. The firmware seems to be buggy somehow, as I receive messages in my server's dmesg output about the adapter kernel panicking. I found it strange that a RAID card could kernel panic, but it makes sense when you consider the fact that firmware is just software for a hardware device. The card seems to recover itself about 80% of the time, but that other 20% involves hardware hangups, and hard reboots. No fun... especially when this box is providing storage for multiple other machines.

Back to the firmware. I'm trying to download the latest firmware for this card, but HP isn't making at all easy. Instead of putting a link to a specific file, or set of files, they just have links to their "Firmware Maintenance" CDs, which contain updated firmware for damn near everything they've unleashed upon the world in the past X years worth of product releases. Thing is, there's no documentation anywhere I can find about what each CD covers, what firmware versions are present, or anything like that.

Case in point - I downloaded the newest CD listed on the support page for the RAID card, and it didn't have any firmware for the card listed whatsoever. 650MB downloaded and a CD wasted, all for nothing. I try the oldest CD they have listed, and sure enough, it has firmware on it for my card. I was left wondering if there was a newer firmware somewhere on one of those intermediate CDs though. So here I am, downloading more CD images, and wasting more CDs. Grand! What's really great is that if I want to actually install one of these firmware updates, I need to find three working floppy disks that I can use to actually perform the upgrade because the embedded boot process won't install things automatically. Why? Even though the server is a HP-branded server, it's not of the proper vintage, so the boot loader/installer thing won't work. What a pile of crap.

Now that I'm done venting about stupidity (while downloading yet another CD)...

I've been feeling pretty run down over the past month or so. I attribute it mostly to what I would consider poor sleep. I typically sleep for a good 7-8 hours, but I haven't woke up feeling rested in quite a while. I have one working theory as to why, and it involves the server I'm working on right now, strangely enough. The simple fact is that the thing is loud. It's buried in my walk in closet with my other server gear, but it still had no issue polluting my bedroom (which is attached to said closet) with gratuitous amounts of noise. It seems like my poor sleep roughly coincides with the introduction of that machine into my closet, so I decided to shift things around a bit to see if it would help. I switched the roles of my two bedrooms - the larger bedroom became my office/computer room/underground lair, and the smaller room became the bedroom. It remains to be seen whether it will help much, but I liked this arrangement better when I used to have it. It also allows me to move the second cat litter box out of the bathroom, which is reason enough to move everything around in my opinion. They've never really been very good at keeping litter off the tile, which sucks. I'm not really a fan of walking on cat litter, especially when I'm fresh out of the shower and my feet are wet.

cats frustrations hp raid

Monday, April 30 2007, 2:08 AM

More news regarding cool new stuff. My old TV has been going south for, well, like 5 years. It used to belong to my grandmother, and it came to me quite a while ago. It's been getting pretty bad lately, so I decided to take my income tax money and get a new TV. I initially planned to get a new standard definition TV with a digital tuner, but I found a 32" LCD TV (Polaroid 3211-TLXB) on sale for a reasonable price. It's got all of the inputs that I was looking for - VGA, HDMI, and Component. My DVD player doesn't seem to output a good Component signal, so I'm stuck with using S-Video for now. Oh well, I'll live.

I also need to stop going to eBay. The server I bought is working quite well, but my tendency as an impulse spender could easily get the best of me. I already bought two more servers. One is a dual P3 1Ghz with six 36GB SCSI drives that I bought mostly for the SCSI drives. The other is a Quad P3-level Xeon machine with 2GB of RAM. Having a quad-CPU machine just sounded cool. While I was looking through some of the eBay stores, I found an external twelve drive RAID enclosure that would connect perfectly to the dual P3 machine. I shouldn't buy it since I don't really need it, but it would be cool. Someone stop me!

compaq dl580 ebay hp lc2000r netserver polaroid-3211-tlxb

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