Chris Worfolk's Blog

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.

It’s strange how much people can change. It’s also perhaps worrying that I am now old enough to have people I haven’t seen in so long to be able to say that. That said, perhaps they haven’t changed at all and if time has done anything, it has simply changed your perception of them. Thus resulting in the discrepancies between your perception and the person themselves.

Last night was Wendy House. It’s been a while since we had a good turn-out to Wendy though last night was really something that would have to be stretched to pass as an old school turnout. Only a small selection of the circle made it down (though a better performance than reason months at least) and of those that did, even less stuck around until the end.

All in all, it was quite an unexpected selection of faces that lasted the night. Gaz decided to come down, who given he is only doing a very limited second year this year, I haven’t seen in uni for many weeks. John’s appearance was also a much welcome one as we haven’t seen each other in a few months so it was good to catch up.

Finally I also ran into Krystina who I haven’t seen since high school. It took me a double take to recognise her as the perception I had of her was similar to that of most people I knew at high school – not a particularly good one given I class most of them as failures with no hope of ever achieving anything with their life. In reality she was looking great and provided some quality gossip, which is really the most important thing. It was great catching up as we had both high school and The D to talk about.

So there you have it. Seeing old friends again, just another great reason to go to Wendy.

I read an interesting article on FastCompany.com recently about Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg entitled Hacker. Dropout. CEO. It discusses the origins of Facebook and is well worth a read.

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.

I feels like ages since I’ve had a night out. Mainly because it has. I actually haven’t been clubbing since the start of term (before then even) as far as I can remember so I headed down to The Fav to catch up with the TKD social. Managing to get an entire drink in there my lack of conscience got the better of me and I headed down to Wire. Got there at 11 and left at 1ish, so it wasn’t too bad, I just dislike how much indie I don’t recognise. All in all, not a bad night.

Having come off a weekend of non-stop fun from the student activities conference during the day to closes at work during the night (neither of which saw us get out before 3am) it’s been a long weekend. Indeed a long few weeks. Thankfully I managed to get home for around 10 last night and after having done a few important jobs I pretty much went to bed and got a good night’s sleep in which seems to have recharged my batteries.

Getting down to some work though it really occurs to me just how much we have to do – so far we have coursework for GI31, DB32 and SY33 as well as 3 GI31 labs and 7 SY33 labs. Granted this has been over the last three weeks as a lot of it is weekly lab exercises but this is as well as all our PD31 work and our final year projects (which also has a big deadline this week!). While I’m already wading through most of the exercises, it;’s a scary thought to think just how much work could build up if you don’t keep on top of it.

This weekend the union held it’s first annual student activites conference which replaces the old committee training. Apparently you have to turn up in order to get your funding and they did take registers but who is betting they don’t actually withhold anyones funding for not turning up?

I turned up at 11 yesterday, as did everyone given it’s an 11-5 Saturday and Sunday event. It actually started at 11:30 with a short introductory session. There were then hourly (for the most part) sessions being run in the ARC and Riley Smith for you to pick which ones you went to.

Sunday was a whole different story. Not having finished work till gone 3am, I didn’t get up until 11 so I didn’t make it there until 11:30. At which point I found a notice on the door saying “conference begins at 12:30.” Awesome, I got out of bed without enough sleep for that. It gave me a chance to get to down to Maplin though and I arrived back for another short introductory session in which Leslie Dixon and the pro vice chancellor (or a pro voice chancellor) of the university gave quick speeches.

The content was on the whole uninformative. That is from my perspective as someone who is currently in their 4th term of office on a society committee so it would be interesting to see what the new comers thought. However I didn’t come away from the first day feeling like I had learned anything at all or really done much useful. Today was slightly better, I quite enjoyed the “how to be a great leader” session.

I don’t think the turn out helped. We have something like 200 societes each with 3 executive committee members. That’s 600 people. We had about 50 on the first day and about half that today. I felt sorry for the ARC staff, Andrew and everyone else involved in it as they had clearly put quite a bit of work into it and nobody was really using it.

Still, lessons learned for next year I guess.

With my life quickly being drained of any reason to live, the A-Soc social was cancelled so I headed over to Christianity Explored. Half way through or so some random guy, looked about 35-40ish, comes in who didn’t really know what was goining on and decided to sit at the back rather than actually join in (is that not a bit strange?).

As things drew to a close he started chatting to me. I engaged him in conversation and we talked about various things. He asked me to come out while he had a cigarette but I decided given it was cold. The session ended and I headed for the exit. We got outside and he started talking again.

Andrew: “Are you bisexual?”

Andrew: “Have you ever tried it?”

Andrew: “Maybe you would like it if you tried it”

I’m sure you can see where this conversation is going…

As you may know, I’ve been having a bit of a problem getting my long awaited file server up and running that I ordered months ago. It was a fairly continuous theme through posts like this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one and this one.

I finally got it out and plugged everything back in again (sort of, not know really what needed to be plugged back in internally, I thought it all was but apparently not) and turned it back on to come up with the age old problem of verifying the DMI pool data.

I go into the BIOS and reset the settings to fail-safe defaults. This time when I try to boot it records an update success on the verifying DMI pool data moves onto the next line, which is blank and leaves the cursor to blink indefinitely.

Having given up on the motherboard I started looking around for alternatives. I start browsing around but have to ignore most models because they simply don’t have any specification. You would think basic things like what ports a motherboard had would be included. Apparently not. How am I supposed to work out which motherboard I want if all there is, is a BS paragraph uptalking the company?

Having abandoned CCL’s website I head over to eBuyer in hope of better specifications. There is some improvement and I decide to do a little more research on one specific motherboard. I head over to Asus’s website which causes an error every other page that can for some reason be solved by refreshing several times until it works. As usual the product name on the retailer website doesn’t match the one given by the manufacturer so you just have to guess which models match up to which names.

I finally find what I think the specification I want is which mentions RAID support, hurray! However, it seems to suggest it only supports them on two ports. Yes, suggests, it doesn’t go as far as to make it clear but it says “support is provided by x and x” which I take to mean support is not provided from the other ports. Which would also explain why you can do RAID 0 or 1 but not 5.

Having done some researching around, it doesn’t look like there is a solution. Basically, from what I can see, all of the RAID options require a driver. This is utterly retarded as it means you have to install an OS and install the driver before you can use RAID. So how do you install your OS on a RAID configuration? The answer apparently, is that you don’t.

However, I’m not even sure about this. The Intel documentation for one of it’s RAID cards that I was reading explains how to install the driver when installing Windows which suggests that you may be able to do it then. Why, why, why is this so complicated?