WebLog - 2007 and Older

December 9, 2007
I put my NEC EHCI USB2 PCI card into Mughi. It's one of the very few 3.3V PCI cards I have, was curious if it worked, and it does! Linux found it and now I can use USB2 devices with the Itanium box.

November 19, 2007
Yeeks. I bought a Gigabyte G31 uATX board for the Core2Quad. I stuck the C2Q on it with 2GB RAM (it only has 2 slots...sigh.) Hooked it up to my spare Antec SL300, and powered it up. Works fine. Now it's O/C time, so far it seems like it's taking it fine.
Oh. And don't let the fan wire rub against the fan. Causes unnecessary noise.

November 13, 2007
Mughi appears to be working happily and stably with Gentoo Linux now. NFS and YP/NIS is working, so those who have accounts can use it. Sigh. I wish people were more enthusiastic about Mughi like I am, I'm getting tons of requests for people wanting to buy my (unused) C2Q chip over Mughi. IA64 - the way 64-bit should be. Love special machines, not stuff that can run all your mundane software... :-(
Started looking at Xen for ia64...

November 8, 2007
I tentatively named my Itanium2 Dell PowerEdge 3250 (OEM: SR870BH2) "Mughi" - the big cat in the Dirty Pair (original and OVA) Anime series. Didn't quite match up with the "new" Mughi in the Dirty Pair Flash series though.

November 6, 2007
Around 1PM my new pet Tiger arrived via UPS. It was a bit beat up and hungry when I saw it in its paper cage. Weighs a lot, that 65 lbs was not kidding. I let it out, fed it and played with it a bit. It roars. It did not like being fed the Gentoo 2007.0 ia64 CD I tried. Will have to see if it will like the Redhat RHEL4U2 cd. Nice kitty...

November 5, 2007
Daylight savings time ended on Sunday...
Hopefully my SR870BH2 will arrive tomorrow...

October 29, 2007
The Itanium2's name is pending to be 'Rose' from Full Metal Alchemist, or Rose DeWitt Bukater, the fictional character in the movie Titanic for all you nay-sayers... but any other suggestions?

October 26, 2007
Well, I hope the Dell Power Edge 3250 comes...
The PowerEdge 3250 is a Dual Itanium² 1.3GHz with 256K L2, 3MB L3 cache each. 4GB of ECC registerred DIMMs. 2U Rackmount. Appears to not have tertiary/redundant power supply.
The current trending name for this machine is: (???)
I hope the seller pulls through and ships it.

October 25, 2007
Woah, lots of acquisitions lately. NOT intented.
A Core2 Quad Q6600
A Dell Poweredge 3250
Now I don't know what I'm going to do...

October 22, 2007
Got a Wintec Industries Pegasus Dual DVI ADD2 card (SDVO) for my Foxconn G9657MA board/Core2 Duo E6700. Thought there was no way to use the less power hungry onboard graphics with DVI, but this looks like it works, and also have two DVI ports!
Also orderred a new battery for my ipaq rz1710.

October 21, 2007
F**KING ssh bruteforcers!
All authorized users: The pending change may require some changes to your connection. I will be moving the default free-for-all port to a different port from 22. Port 22 will still be available, but you will have to "knock" to access this. The tentative solution is to require everyone to use https:// login to click on a link to unblock port 22.
Yes, this will require double logins if port 9022 is block on your side of the firewall (including myself. I will have to suffer my own roadblocks.)
More details to follow. Gosh, I hate blackhats.

October 14, 2007
Noticed some spammer is using my poor poor machine to take on reply-to of SPAM. And the reply-to email addresses are random and invalid. I wish I could stop these but I don't know what I can do to prevent someone from forging their return addresses...

October 13, 2007
Started playing WoW again after my sister sent me a 10-day free trial pass.

October 11, 2007
Changed directory browser of login.cgi a bit, a bit easier to tell which files are symlinks.
Fortune Cookie of the Day:
"It's over your head now. Time to get some professional help." :-(
LEARN CHINESE: Don't matter (not related) mae yao guan xi

October 10, 2007
Power outage for around 2h:45m around 7PM. Whole neighborhood was out. Sorry about the downtime, there goes 99.99% uptime, I think I'm still OK for the 99.9% but cutting it close with upgrades and DSL outages.

October 7, 2007
Finished watching Ah! My Goddess!(AMG) TV Season 2... Once again, just like the other AMG anime, this was really funny. I don't know why Anime seems much more interesting than any other type of TV show, only thing I can think of is that when drawn, the rules of physics, other sciences, and temporal placement need not apply :) Whoever could make an infinite room? (Granted, I liked The Matrix... but Animatrix wasn't that great.)

October 2, 2007
Noticed ftpd is broken for anonymous users. Ftpd really serves no purpose now. Killed it. Upload a file? Use secure shell scp, mail, or use web login.
Reenabled ftpd and telnet for local (10.0.0.0/24) users for the time being. Then again I'm not sure of the value of this to remote users...

October 1, 2007
Finished watching Paprika. Once again it's another weird anime. Megumi Hayashibara!!!

September 23, 2007
Found a corruption bug in the upload routine. Basically it's detecting POST headers improperly and interpreting a new section in the file instead of adding it. Fix is... Done! ... changed state machine a bit. However, it's not perfect and there still are files that can be corrupted by this - I'm not quite sure yet how to generalize the fix. However, all cases that I know of will result in files that get written SMALLER than what the original file was, so watch the file sizes carefully. Please let me know of any additional corruptions.
Friend from MD was over for the weekend since he was in the state for a computer systems consulting gig. We went to the a Hamfest today and got some weird stuff. Picked up a fairly long power strip that hopefully will ease wiring congestion in my computer room. Found out out that MacOSX and Ubuntu 7.04 on his Macbook Pro seems to have issues reading Joliet ISO9660 ( growisofs -Z /dev/sr0 -l -J -r directory) DVD-Rs (?!??!)... shocked...

September 17, 2007
I added some code that would let people who have logged in through login.cgi to bypass wpicture picture shrinking. It's very primitive now and very easy to cheat, but it will be fixed up soon. I guess mostly because I know there's a problem I want to fix it... In any case, enjoy, authorized users!

September 8, 2007
I bought the 750G disk. Stuck it into Ouka. This disk is insane, not just the sheer size of it (it's 3x the largest disk I've gotten, and now is in the same machine as the 250G - so just about 1T of space in Ouka), it's also really quick, at 75MB/sec sustained read. That's more than 10MB/sec faster than the next fastest disk I own. Finally a faster disk (ended up with a lot of disks topping out from 50-60MB/sec), as well as... Scary!
The disk is being used as a backup disk, sorry. There's no way I can back up this disk, so I'll use it to back up other disks. The 250G disk that was the backup disk is now primary rootdisk for Ouka.

September 6, 2007
Finally tried my F5D7000 Belkin PCI 802.11g WiFi adapter. It uses the RaLink RT2561 chipset. The drivers I found were quite primitive as the usual iwconfig commands do not work, but instead they have to be programmed in at module insertion time. Plus the driver does not work as-is with Linux 2.6.22. Hmm. A lot more work is needed for this driver to get it up to the quality of the other drivers...

September 5, 2007
Well, finally finished Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya... Somewhat disappointed this first time through though. The episode ordering might have had something to do with it, but seemed to be a whole series of fillers and nothing gets accomplished??? Perhaps the secondary ordering would have made more sense where the near "fatal" world rendition was the final episode. Weird. Just like any other anime :)

September 3, 2007
Normally I don't write about anime but my sister told me to watch "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya." Haha... another pretty funny one...
Updated login page to let people create text files, which sort of reneges on my plan to not allow file creation for security reasons. Be sure that there will probably be some restrictions not already added for this feature.
Having some difficulty deciding what I want to do with disk storage. My 4x120G RAID5 has a capacity of 360G, and someday it will fill up. Trying to decide what to do when that happens. The RAID is nice because I get instantaneous redundancy as soon as a sector is committed. However it means I have to get identical drives or suffer waste.
Other issues I'm contemplating is the SATA/PATA switch, upgrade of Doujima to dual-core, and re-using disks I already have. Currently I have a PATA 250G, two SATA 200G, a PATA 160G, and a SATA 160G to consider building another array. Ideally it would be RAID5 so I'd need 3 disks. The PATA 250G and SATA 160G are currently used in Ouka, so Ouka would need a replacement if I were to use them. Was tempted to get a PATA 750G and RAID the two 200's and the 250G, but that would lead to 250GB wasted.
As nice as a 4-disk RAID is for space efficiency, I'm not sure about the power consumption of the RAID... Argh! Tough decisions!

August 30, 2007
I hate people stealing my bandwidth! Will you stop it please? Download the *#(@%#ing picture and put it on some other machine! DON'T USE MINE UNLESS YOU KNOW ME IN PERSON!
From now on, all references to myspace or some sort of wordpress will result in upside down pictures.
GRR.

August 22, 2007
Tried to resize my store partition. It did not work so well. So I had to backup, recreate, restore the volume. At least it's now defragmented.

August 20, 2007
Sorry, I crashed the USB subsystem, had to restart machine. There goes 5 mins of downtime, sure makes it impossible to keep the 99.999% uptime going...

August 16, 2007
Telnetd has finally been disabled for external users. (everyone, for the time being. Probably will re-enable for local use only.) Please use secure shell or the web to login - check out the left sidebar and log in that way. This means ftp as the last unencrypted entry point which shall be phased out ... soon ...

August 12, 2007
Got rid of the animated GIF, moved to old entries page. I tend to idle with this page and wasting the CPU power to let Skuld recharge wasn't such a great idea :)

August 10, 2007
Haven't had an update for a while.
Watched Ah! My Goddess! (Ah! Megami Sama!)(AMG) TV Series1. This series is pretty funny!
<- That's my favorite character in the series :)
And I still don't get why in the OVA it's Urd who gets the vacuum cleaner, and not Skuld... More fitting of her to make a machine (that could even fly) like that :) (then again there are some mods on her broom...)
Granted Urd would probably be the laziest and it'd make things easier ...

July 26, 2007
Added text file editing to login. Now authorized users can edit files without downloading and re-uploading!

July 25, 2007
I ended up getting a fortune cookie that read:

You need to talk to
someone about what's
on your mind.

Learn Chinese-Girlfriend
(chinese characters) neu pun yau

July 15, 2007
Wow. For the longest time I had a web self-modifying shell script to use as a counter for the main page. Well, of course shell script CGIs are evil, and a self modifying one doubly so. Changed it to a lean perl script now. Didn't reset the counter though :)
Also updating wpicture caching and also added a directory browser and thumbnailer mode. Not particularly useful for external readers, but great for internal users to automatically generate thumbnails for pictures.

July 13, 2007
Happy Friday the 13th!
Created a library for wpicture and login, they seem to have a lot in common.

June 29, 2007
About 95% done with transition to Apache2.
Remaining tasks:
mod_gzip(punt?)
Fix log file tracking

June 26, 2007
About 80% done with the transition to Apache2.
Remaining tasks:
mod_bandwidth, mod_gzip
Fix log file tracking
Ensure logfiles are being written to the right place
*** SSL CERTIFICATE CHANGED ***

June 25, 2007

Upgrading to Apache2

June 20, 2007
Still finding bugs in wpicture.cgi. Fixed another one.

June 18, 2007
Cleaned up that mini login screen in the left sidebar. Works a bit better now. You might want to make sure it's actually loading in that webpage and not some fake page - it's produced by the same script as the normal login page.

June 17, 2007
A happy or sad day occurred: I have decided to kick World of Warcraft out of my life. Too many little things pissed me off about the game. The biggest reason is all the grinding needed to get heroics done, which is in turn needed to get into high level dungeons. A couple of small bugs ticked me off that caused a lot of wasted time, if playing in itself isn't enough of a waste of time. The game actually made me angry. Why should I pay to play a game that makes me angry... it should be something I go to when I'm angry for other reasons. Isn't a game good for blowing off steam for other reasons, to actually enjoy instead of be frustrated? Goodbye WoW!!! and good riddance! ... at least until they fix all the bugs.

June 16, 2007
The Foxconn G9657MA board has been proving to be quite a challenge to turn on and off. Board bug methinks, still could be psu issue but I doubt it. This thing is *fast*. Having two cores it's considerably faster than any other machine I have. Emerges pretty much fly, even without distcc. Linux-Wine-WoW unfortunately doesn't work quite yet. If/When it works, then I can pretty much claim that I've defeated Onyxia, or rather, Microsoft, at least for now.

June 11, 2007
Well, I guess I did it, orderred a Core2Duo system. Borrowing a CPU from work. Using the CNPS-7000AlCu that I broke and patched with the 80mm fan. Sorry, anonymous users won't be able to use it, as it will be used in the PVR machine which is not used by this webserver machine. Of course those who have accounts likely can use it. This webserver will be side-graded to a Northwood P4 from the PVR as it uses slightly less power than this Athlon... it's not the CPU, it's the graphics board that I need to keep paired with the Athlon and I need to get rid of the athlon's graphics board.
I fixed wpicture a bit, sped it up by memoizing past compressions - it now will cache previously grabbed pictures and will make my machine run a whole heck of a lot faster. External users will see a slight speedup on serving these "cached" images.

May 9, 2007
hmmm. Massive corruption on my gentoo base install disk. Oh well, not like that's a big deal. Integrated login into main webpage. Need to start phasing out all htaccess webpages. Removed old entries and stuck into old entries.

April 14, 2007
Finished my taxes *eek*. I owe. Also released version 0.3 of my web login script for authorized users. I like it a lot. Hopefully no bugs, it'd be a security hole...

March 20, 2007
Sigh. athcool causes so many problems. Discontinued use of athcool after a disk subsystem crash a few days ago.

March 1, 2007
Bought a new capacitor for the dual slot-1 board and solderred it in. The board seems to be stable again! Probably will not be migrating back to that board, the Athlon seems so much faster with the Promise Ultra66 running a disk per channel and the onboard SiS SI7012 channels also a disk each...
The PCI SATA board seems to work fine with the celeron board, but was having tons of problems with the P3 board for some reason... also having a cdrom inserted still causes the VT6412A-based SATA board to not get through POST.

February 23, 2007
Woes don't ever go away. Either Nvidia's driver or athcool is causing random crashes. Quitting X11 after using it seems to be the best workaround. Sound is also quite garbled by athcool...

February 16, 2007
Found the athcool program. Using this program appears to cool down the CPU according to lm_sensors. Will need to try to measure power consumption of the machine now, but if it really did cool the machine down, then this machine is now good to go for permanent use. Hooray for a large upgrade to Doujima! Too bad, Kei is now gone...

February 11, 2007
Well, decided that the old dual slot-1 board needs new caps but don't have any on hand to replace them with, plus solderring them in is going to suck. So likely that board's retired after 7+ years of service :-(
The P3-1000 is pure awful, even worse than the celeron-1200 at 1364 even with its faster 133MHz bus. So the Athlon XP2200+ will be staying for at least a little while to drive the RAID. Thus, Kei is gone now, Subaru will be put back together, and I don't know what else may change in the near future.

February 7, 2007
Experimenting with Athlon XP2200+
Wow the RAID is fast now!
Updated RAID status script to show resync/rebuild status.

January 31, 2007
Machine not stable.
Using P3-1000 now

January 26, 2007
Took the plunge and went to RAID-5 4x120G disks on this server, sorry for the downtime and reboots while trying to get it setup and tuned.
Machine is now: Celeron-Tualatin 1200@1364MHz, 112MHz FSB
Promise Ultra66 driving four 120G disks in RAID-5 method, 360GB total useable space

January 24, 2007
Finally got around to experimenting with WPA-TKIP. Been using WEP for a long time. Wonder if anyone figured out my WEP key, it's a pretty silly key. Will keep it a secret until I fully rid my LAN of WEP though hehe. Probably will be switching everything over to WPA soon, or use this little crappy CompUSA/Edimax router instead of the WRT54G for WPA. Then keep the WRT54G as a spare... and/or start hacking it :-) Key issue is whether the Edimax can handle supporting QoS...
Still waiting for Linux-2.6.20 release so I can upgrade all my boxes.

January 16, 2007
The Burning Crusade, World of Warcraft released.

January 7, 2007
Ok, so I'm weird. I grabbed a crappy fan (a *really* cheap one, one that doesn't even have a full box frame though it is a box fan!) and ripped the fan blades out. Unfortunately it was an 80mm fan, the CNPS-7000A is 92mm. The spindle shaft also is slightly shorter than the Zalman default, an 92mm Qualifan RDH9025B. It'll still work, just a little less efficient and possibly noisier... haven't tried reinstalling it yet.
Subaru is back together again, well, at least the 120GB HDDs are inside the case and screwed onto the bracket. It's booting off of the Promise Ultra66 without too many issues; it seems the raid1 partition is least happy when the three underlying disks change device names -- oddly enough, the raid5 partitions seem to gracefully take controller changes.

January 1, 2007
Happy New Year! And my ADS Tech InstantTV Deluxe PCI-MCE (MCE-306) is now tuning and recording TV in Linux! Unfortunately I shatterred the fan on my Zalman CNPS-7000A AlCu on Ouka while cleaning it with an air compressor. Sigh.

December 31, 2006
Well, the RAID-5 experiments continue and appears to be functional. Linux software RAID-5 has some issues - I/O performance is quite miserable. At least it should be good failure redundancy. Still trying to determine whether this is ready for transplanting onto Doujima - for a bit of speed (nonexistant) and reliability (looking good!)

December 29, 2006
Another dosage of snow... another 10"... Time to put the snowblower to the test!
Alas engine decided to seize! :-( Guess I'll have to do it the old fashioned way...

December 27, 2006
Got my snowblower working! This thing was dead for at least 8 years... Filthy gas in the carburetor. Cleaned out.

December 25, 2006
Merry Christmas!

December 20, 2006
Updated the webpages to be a little more contemporary instead of ancient since it's been snowing all day with blizzard conditions. Not pretty at all in terms of being stuck. 18" of snow. on my driveway.

The remaining entries are for my reference only.

Decenber 18, 2005
Purchased MSI 865PE Neo3-F Motherboard for Yuri for the Prescott P4 Processor 650.

October 2, 2003
Purchased Abit IS7 Motherboard for initial Ouka.