A client at work needed a super powerful machine for demo purposes. Dell couldn’t really give it to us (especially since we needed in an as-small-as-possible case), so we decided to build it ourselves. This is probably one of the most powerful machines out there (without overclocking, just standard hardware):

•  AMD Athlon FX-60 (Dual core, 64-bit, 2600MHz)
• 2x 2x1GB (Dual Channel Set) OCZ DDR400 with golden heatspreaders
• Geforce 7900GTX with 512MB Video RAM
• Gigabyte something-something mainboard with nForce 430 chipset
• 2x Western Digital Raptor X 150GB in RAID0

The system is running a 32-bit Windows however. 3DMark hovered around the 10300 points mark, HD Tach reported 120MB/sec average throughput, 6% CPU utilization for the disks and I/O bursts of up to 215MB/sec. Not bad, eh? All this will be placed in a Silverstone SG01 case, but it hasn’t arrived yet – we needed to test the hard- and software beforehand, so it’s all layed out on a table near my desk… Surely has attracted a lot of visitors, and everone passing by needed to know some more. Geeks and hardware…

But not all is that well.. The RAID controller drivers need to be on a floppy for the XP setup to recognize the controller… but

• We didn’t have a working floppy drive. I dug up 2 old ones from the serverroom storage but neither did the job.
• Gigabyte packed the wrong drivers on their CD for the RAID controller. So we needed to get them from the ‘net.
• Once the "Windows kernel" part of the setup is loaded, Windows no longer sees a USB floppy drive anymore, so can’t get the drivers
• Slipstreaming the NVidia drivers into the XP setup CD is quite difficult, in fact we wasted 7 CD’s on it and did not completely succeed.

I went home in the evening and we installed from my One And Only Working Floppy Drive+Cable Combination(tm). A few bluescreens later (Thank you, BIOS-graphics-booster overclock-thingamajig option set to Enabled) we got the thing working… finally. Caused a LOT of frustration.

We also bought an Adaptec SATA RAID controller for it, which plugged into the PCI bus. PCI bus means it’ll be capped to 133MB/sec (or thereabouts) with no way of bursting over it… Which was indeed the case. Same average throughput, but no bursting at all. Pity there wasn’t a PCI-X or PCIe x8 slot on the board (MicroATX..) or an Areca controller would really have kicked some major ass. I must note slipstreaming the Adaptec drivers into the XP cd went without ANY problem, and XP installed first time. Thumbs up Adaptec! 

I converted my OpenWrt installation on my WL-HDD to boot from harddisk, as 4M flash isn’t a lot if you want to make a print/scan/webcam server out of the little thing…

root@nalia:~# df -h
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root                 3.2M      2.9M    324.0k  90% /jffs
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1     9.2G    134.3M      8.6G   1% /
none                      7.0M     20.0k      7.0M   0% /tmp

Lookin’ good 😉

Update: Oh, eck, wait , a few minutes after this post the harddisk made a loud click and everything started giving bus errors. Now it doesn’t boot anymore. :'(

Been looking around for toys -errm, hardware and possibilities to build the long-discussed wireless link between me and Michiel. I think I got it now, just need a little hardware and help from Fabian… 🙂

Currently, my plan is to put a Linksys WRT54GL in a waterproof box (which I assume I can easily find at Brico), and put this on top of the roof, right next to the Yagi antenna (so we don’t get any loss over the antenna cable, plus save some money). I will pump up the default 30 mW transmit power to 90 mW (which is what the chip is actually rated for, and close enough to the allowed 100 mW). Power will be supplied over the ethernet cable (so I’d need an injector and something to take it back out, the WRT’s don’t support PoE natively). The ethernet cable will then run down the building, go inside via an air hole for the garages; through 2 neighbours’ garages, back out at the back (that’s where our terrace is), then back into the house through the window of our serverroom, et voila.. Connectivity(tm). Or so I hope it will be…

Waterproof box: 5€ (?), WRT54GL: 75€, WAPPOE: 60€, UTP: No idea. Toys for the boys…

Update:  since I actually bought a new wireless router (Asus WL-HDD) to play with, we should be able to use our current WRT54G instead of buying a new WRT54GL. Good, cause LDLC doesn’t have them in stock anymore 🙁

I’ve got a server here with a “Promise FastTrack ATA100 IDE RAID controller” … Yay 2 extra IDE ports with semisoftware RAID. Not all too useful in a 1U box with 2 drives, unless you’re into that semisoftware bios-windows RAID crap. So… don’t connect anything to it, and all is well, right? Not exactly. When you do that, all you get on boot is a message saying it didn’t detect any disks, hasn’t configured any RAID sets, and asks you to press CTRL-F to enter it’s BIOS or Esc to continue booting. Phew, okay, that’s fine, let’s just wait like 10 seconds and see if it continues booting. Nope, not after an hour either. Why the *bleep* do you have to press Esc to continue booting … especially in a server! Even if you have a disk connected but haven’t configured a RAID set it will stand there waiting for your Esc. (note: configuring a single-drive RAID0 array does the trick there). Add to that there was no option in the BIOS to turn off the controller… So I dug out the PDF manual from Gigabyte.com.tw and found the jumper to turn it off.

But how irritating is this?! I have a Tyan board that also has that controller on board (but with a BIOS option to turn it off) and it does the same thing if you don’t shut it up… Retarded if you ask me… 😐