Hot Banana, it’s Been a While

So it has a been a while since I last posted anything on my alleged blog. There may be more Thundercats stuff at some point since I’ve watched the second season and I’ve watched some other cartoons that will we worth chatting about at some point.

This is more of an update of what’s been happening:

I went to Australia for a year.
I came back and got a job at a Data Recovery company.
I started a web comic with the first person I met in Australia.

I should probably elaborate on some of this, but first I’ll tell you about my awesome plans for a file server that I have.

I left my old computer in Australia; I’d shipped it there with my bike and then decided I could only take one back. I took the bike. I got a nice laptop in Malaysia, but it would never have the same graphics power as my old gaming machine. I can’t really justify building a beast again just yet, but a file server…

The idea came from work. Two weeks in and I realise I’ve never set up a RAID before. There comes a time in a proud nerds life when they just have to go for what they love. Like get a triforce tattoo or make a file server. So I dug an old friend out. This was the computer I had before I bought my beefy gaming machine. I have run Windows XP, 98 and a few versions of Ubuntu (until the Unity releases) on it. There is no reason it shouldn’t be able to run a nice fat file server! The mainboard is a ECS 755-A V1.0 with a K8 (754) socket Sempron 64 3000+. That 64 means it’s bus width is 64bit, it only has one core! It has 2 sticks of DDR400 which provide 512MB each and a “mystery” hard drive. A couple of optical drives, a third party version of a GeForce 5200 (128MB) and a fair few fans finish off a reliable old computer. I needed a RAID controller and a WIFI card: the on-board RAID controller only supported 0, 1 and 0+1 where I wanted RAID 5; though the ECS 755-A V1.0 has an on-board NIC and modem, I am upstairs away from the router.

I popped the latest openSUSE live CD on a USB stick and put an additional hard drive in there in case the “mystery one” wouldn’t play. Sadly I had forgotten that the 400W PSU only had molex connectors and the new (only five years old) SATA drive could not be powered. No problem, I’ll get a new PSU. Tried to switch it on and nothing. No beeps, whirs or grinding noises. There was a hum from the PSU so I got out a multimeter to test it. TL;DR the switch had broken so I started it by jabbing the power jumpers with one of the multimeter probes. Success.

KDE and Gnome were not so enamoured with my faithful steed, but IceWM worked a treat and gave me a Windows 95 style desktop to play with. As I was changing the keyboard settings to UK it produced the displayed screen. For non-Linux folks this is probably the second worst message you can get. The worst is the same thing without the “not” which means it was successful in writing nonsense all over your data. Not a big deal for me since I hadn’t installed anything yet, I was just messing with a USB stick that would not save any settings. At first I thought it was the unbranded RAM (it doesn’t even have a manufacturer’s name on the chips), but the more I thought about it, the more I remembered that the mystery drive had caused all kinds of problems previously. I unplugged it and everything has been working lovely since. The new RAID and WIFI cards are recognised by the OS as is everything else.

I will get a new case since I am currently using two bare wires held apart by a clothes peg as an on/off switch and I think I need a PSU that is less than 8 years old. I will get these end of next month when I get paid again and then I will get a pile of hard drives to go with it.