Spent most of yesterday night and a good chunk of today getting the wife’s dad’s new computer up and running. Decided to go with an HP Pavillion d4100 with a dual core AMD 64. Spent an hour or so disassembling his two old computers and moving the hard drives and DVD burner into the new one. Then the rest of the time was spent online downloading about 60 MB or so of software and security updates. Over dial-up. With a modem that kept resetting itself every few minutes until I could get some new drivers downloaded and installed. That was the painful part. The rest of it went fairly smoothly and uneventfully fortunately.
I’m really liking this HP Pavillion we got him. It’s a bit of a monster case, but has plenty of expansion room with 4 5.25″ bays, 2 external 3.5″ bays and 3 internal 3.5″ bays. Tons of room for stuff. Of course filling them all requires an additional IDE card (2 come on the motherboard) or other kind of internal interface. The case is nice and roomy inside, and all the components are easy to get to without having to contort your hands or anything.
About the only thing I’m not pleased with is the stock fan that comes with the CPU cooling system. It’s a variable speed system, so you can hear it whir up and down as the CPU temperature changes. But when it spins up to full speed, boy does it make a racket. It’s louder than both the power supply and main exhaust fan. I don’t expect the dad-in-law to push the system hard enough that it’s much of a bother to him, but if it was my system, the stock fan and cooler would be the first thing to go.
I think he’ll be pleased with the new system. It’s much zippier than the old one, and hopefully it stays that way (as long as he keeps from installing too much junk on it like the old one).
That dual-Opteron system again
Last year, a dual-Opteron system caught my eye, so I priced one out to see what I’d need. Of course now that same system is pretty much obsolete, but I thought I’d check and see how the price changed between then and now.
| Part | Quant | Price | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tyan Thunder K8W | 1 | ||
| Opteron 246 2 GHz | 2 | ||
| 512MB Corsair |
4 | ||
| 1 | |||
| Maxtor 250GB SATA HD | 2 | ||
| Sony DRU-530A DVD+/-RW | 1 | ||
| Thermaltake |
1 | ||
| Samsung 193S 19″ LCD | 1 | ||
| Enermax EG651P-VE Power Supply | 1 | ||
| Extras | $100 | $100 |
Total cost: $4200.40 $2389.15
That’s quite the change in price over a year and a half. It’s stil a system that would be more than sufficient to cover my computing needs for the next few years. Naturally I’d probably want to replace some of the components listed above with newer items, which would no doubt bump the price back up. I wonder if two dual-core Opterons would fit in this motherboard…
Sys admin truths
MisterOrange threw up a list of top 10 systems administrator truths that anybody with any sysadmin experience will easily relate to.
The follow-up was a list for the Users: End-User Troubleshooting Tips, which is also something all sysadmins should be able to relate to (having been Users at one point in their lives) and all Users should take note of.
Found at Slashdot
httpd 2.2 compile funniness
Noticed a few days ago that Apache httpd 2.2 was released, so I grabbed a copy and went through the usual build/compile process.
Everything was going pretty smoothly for a while, then ground to a screeching halt with:
/usr/local/apache2/apr/build-1/libtool –silent –mode=link gcc -g -O2 -pthread -o htpasswd htpasswd.lo -lm /home/eugenem/Temporary/ServerStuff/Apache/httpd-2.2.0/srclib/pcre/libpcre.la /usr/local/apache2/apr-util/lib/libaprutil-1.la -lgdbm -lmysqlclient_r -lexpat /usr/local/apache2/apr/lib/libapr-1.la -luuid -lrt -lcrypt -lpthread -ldl
/usr/local/apache2/apr-util/lib/libaprutil-1.so: undefined reference to `apr_dbd_mysql_driver’
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[2]: *** [htpasswd] Error 1
Not entirely sure why apr_dbd_mysql_driver isn’t found in libaprutil. Think I might have to go back and see what compile options there are for apr-util. Perhaps something didn’t get compiled into it for some reason.
80 column display, extended memory, RAM drive paradise!
This review of the HyperDrive III sent me hurtling down the road of computer nostalgia to my Apple ][+/][e days. The days of the green screen and 80 column card (so much screen space for editing!) with a whopping 128kB of extended memory, which I created a RAMdisk on for blazing fast compiles (for back then anyway) and instant data storage (before transferring to floppy). My Applie ][e had a total of 256 kB of memory, including what was on the 80col card, which for back then was alot of memory.
Oh, those were the days.