Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category

Ok, so I give in and compile this driver. Now I need some way to get it onto the system. I’m working with Ubuntu 7.10 Server (alternative) which only seems to accept floppy drives. No problem though, I’ll just use Live CD and mount my USB pen into the system.

So I download Ubuntu 7.10 Server and burn it to CD and boot into that. But I don’t get Live CD, I get a text based installer. Strange. Does Server not come with Live CD anymore? (Did it ever?). So I give it and decide to use a Desktop version, I don’t have Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop so I end up going for Ubuntu 7.04 Desktop instead as I have that downloaded and burned to CD already.

After for what seems to be forever of booting up and another age after selecting start or install Ubuntu I get a load of errors about X and I get a shell prompt. Fantastic.

I come back to it a few days later and try to boot it. It just stalls on verifying DMI pool data. Having taken the DVD-ROM out to use for a different computer I insert that back in. This is after reseting the BIOS to fail safe and not getting anywhere, the fiddling about with it and not getting anywhere.

I finally get it to boot of the DVD-ROM with any disk I have to hand – it turns out to be Windows Server 2003. It goes through all the setup and tells me it can’t find a hard drive. I restart and hit F6 to load additional drivers this time (even though it loads HighPoint RAID drivers by default). I ask to specify the drivers. Windows tells me to insert the drivers into drive A:. I don’t have a drive A:. Awesome.

So the plan from here is to turn my Windows server off so I can take the floppy drive out of that, turn my Ubuntu server off so I can get it to, plug that into my new file server then put everything back together again and hope it all works. What is the betting it won’t?

Continuing to play around with Windows Server 2003 I found out I needed to install Visual Studio (as just as a got a Windows install, Mangos removed their pre-compiled Windows binaries and said you had to compile your own). Luckily I can get that to play around with through the academic alliance licensing my school has so it’s more of an inconvenience than a stopping point.

It turned out to be quite a sizable inconvenience though. I downloaded the ISOs and burned them to CD. But when I tried to install it (several times) it would get to about 75% done (that’s on CD2) and then complain about not being able to read a file. Apparently, this was a problem with Samsung DVD-ROM drives (random) so I eventually resorted to installing Daemon Tools and mounting the ISOs that way.

That got me a little further but it just complained about other things. I ended up clicking ignore on two files, which looked fairly important, to be honest, but I was beyond caring at this point. It eventually installed and wouldn’t you know it, even compiled the Mangos files and everything.

So I’m moving on although now I’m having problems with phpMyAdmin of all things lol. Apparently, it’s not the idiot proof even though it’s just a case of extracting the files to a directory and opening it in your web browser. Cletus, try to dump something in the lake…

Stumbling through a series of blogs I noticed that the debate over Google punishing sites for selling text links has flaired up again.

Having read over Danny Sullivan’s post, while I agree with some of the points, I think it’s important to state why I disagree with others. First of all, I feel like Google is telling me what to do with my site. It seems hypocritical that I am being told I cannot sell text links on my website from a website which generates the majority of it’s revenue from selling text links!

Secondly, yes I am free to ignore Google if I wish, continue selling text links, Google can’t tell us what to do. But of course, in reality, they can. Google provides a huge amount of traffic, often more than any other source. They effectively have a monopoly on search engine traffic so we have to follow their guidelines. When Microsoft abuse their massive market share there is public outcry, competition commission get involved, etc. But when Google say “you’re not allowed to make any money from simple text links anymore if you want anyone to visit your website” few people seem to see a problem with it.

On that point, I think it is also important to point out that Google is explicitly doing this maliciously. This isn’t a few algorithm roll-out designed to re-adjust the search engine results so that you get better results. A lot of it is human review of websites to decide whether they are making money or not and punishing them accordingly.

Finally, it’s certainly worth noting that there will be civilian casualties from this move. Because, when it comes down to it, there is no way to differentiate between sites that are buying and selling links to gain PR and sites that are just buying and selling links innocently. How about sites such as my network which aren’t even selling links but just link to each other? I mean, are hyperlinks just banned now or what?

I have finally re-gained my internet connection after being offline for over 12 hours. I still have awful noise margins though. My browsers refuse to load web pages because they are so used to it being down that they aren’t even responding to hard refreshers any more. MSN also outright refuses to connect. And if I want to check the status of anything it takes my modem longer than a web page the other side of the world to respond and when it does it fails to load some of the images and/or CSS.

I never had to deal with any of this BS on cable.

Does anyone remember when Google used to have web results?

I finally figured out what was wrong with one of the computers I am currently troubleshooting. The motherboard wasn’t getting enough power. It wasn’t that I had forgot to connect something, it was that my PSU didn’t actually have a 12v power cable. So I ran down to Maplin to get one of these and finally got the machine up and running.

Having managed to install Windows Server 2003 I booted up to find that it defaults to the classic Windows 9x look still (as does Windows Server 2008 I believe). It’s quite minimalist when you start it up, there is a security configuration help file on your desktop and the recycle bin in the bottom right corner. Also the system tray is empty – completely. There are quite a few other querks too such as it still ships with Internet Explorer 6 and it won’t let you change the security levels.

I’ve yet to fully play around with it as a server though so the fun is yet to come.

My new CPU having arrived for my would-be Windows server arrived yesterday so having 10 minutes or so before uni I decided to install it and boot the machine up. So I took the old CPU out, put the new one in, connected everything back together again and plugged it all in and booted it up. The lights on the front of the case now come on. That’s it. Still no output to the monitor! I’m not entirely sure what could be wrong with it now, I’ve replaced the motherboard, I’ve replaced the CPU, I’ve replaced the memory. That’s basically everything in the machine. What else could be wrong?

Well, another day, another few hundred pounds piled into my file server.

I’m now on my second motherboard, third RAID implementation, waiting for a hard drive to arrive back from CCL, second graphics card, the list goes on.

My new RAID card arrived this morning. I eventually managed to get it installed and wired up. I didn’t want to go in at first because the card was bent (physically) but I managed to get it in. I then booted into the BIOS setup to find my hard drives were registering was SATA-150.

I took them out and after some searching around was told I needed to remove the jumpers on them. Apparently Seagate ship all their hard drives set to run as SATA-150 rather than SATA-300. So I removed the jumpers and put everything back together again.

Booted it up again and created the RAID partition. Booted up into Ubuntu 7.04 Desktop via the Live CD to see what would happen if I tried to install it. It couldn’t detect any drives. So I downloaded Ubuntu 7.10 Server (alternative install) and ran that but that couldn’t detect any drives either.

High Point so supply the source code so that you can compile your own drivers which is what I may end up doing. There are no instructions on how to do this though and most of the people on the Ubuntu forums generally agree that it doesn’t work with Ubuntu. It seems to want me to save it to floppy drive though. I don’t have one. Why would I?

So I could always just give in and install Windows Server 2003, that should be nice and simple right? Well, almost except according to the install instructions on my manual I need to boot into Windows Server 2003 (you know, before I’ve installed it) and run the software to burn the driver to floppy drive (which again, I don’t have).

The moral of the story is this. If you are thinking of building yourself a file server with RAID, to save yourself a lot of hassle, rather than doing it in hardware, simply write down every binary digit by hand onto a writing pad. It’s a lot easier.

Every time I move onto a new computer I realise how some of the default Firefox settings annoy me. Such as it searching Google.com instead of Google.co.uk. Luckily it’s easily fixed by adding Google UK from the huge list of available search engines on the Mozdev page.

Today my replacement motherboard finally arrived. Huzzah! I eagerly installed it into the computer, put it all together and got ready to connect the ATX power cable to the board. But wait, it isn’t long enough. How does that happen?

So that afternoon I ran down to Maplin and picked up an extention cable. I then plugged that in allowing me to connect my motherboard. I pulled the monitor cable out of the back of my desktop, plugged in a power cable and started the computer up.

Nothing happened.

Apparently the motherboard isn’t dead (despite us testing every component and working out it was the motherboard). I’m sure I did test the CPU but that it the only thing I can think is wrong. I’ve tried two motherboards, the first with a graphics card I had just bought and the second motherboard had integrated graphics so it’s very bad luck if it was one of those.

So now I have two motherboards for this machine. And the one I’m not using in the machine is bigger than the one that is installed in my machine so it doesn’t fit in the box or even the anti-static bag so it’s currently sitting, wrapped in a carrier bag, on my desk. Fantastic.