Category Archives: Hardware

more home server disk

Posted on June 12, 2012 by ward

I blogged almost 3 years ago about my home server upgrade. The thing has been running very reliably ever since, but I am running out of disk space again. So, time for another upgrade – disk only though this time. … Continue reading →

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disk, disk, disk

Posted on July 12, 2011 by ward

I started adding 165 TB of disk to one of our clusters today. This is what that looks like – 55 three TB disks: The packaging was not too great; while all disks were well packaged individually, the big boxes … Continue reading →

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resistor captcha

Posted on November 10, 2010 by ward

Adafruit Industries uses an awesome captcha. For an example, look at the Kinect bounty page (scroll all the way to the bottom).

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microsoft discovers remote attestation

Posted on October 8, 2010 by ward

Via slashdot: Microsoft’s corporate VP for trustworthy computing – Scott Charney – has published a position paper that boils down to remote attestation: let ISPs cut off internet access for computers that are not deemed free of malware. So… how … Continue reading →

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Intel selling crippled CPUs

Posted on September 21, 2010 by ward

Via boingboing.net: Intel is now selling crippled CPUs that can be ‘upgraded’ through the purchase of scratch cards (!) with a code. That code can be entered in the BIOS of the computer, thus unlocking additional horsepower. I’m running out … Continue reading →

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a new home server

Posted on September 6, 2009 by ward

I’ve been running an old Shuttle with a 2.4GHz celeron CPU, 512MB of ram and two 500GB disks in raid-1 as home server for the past 5 years or so. Well, I upgraded the disks in May 2007, before that … Continue reading →

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over to x25-m

Posted on August 31, 2009 by ward

I bought an Intel X-25M SSD drive for my laptop in early June. I got the 80GB version, and this was to replace a Hitachi 7K200-160 – a 160GB 7200rpm drive. Note that the X25-M is generation 1; Intel has … Continue reading →

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recycling a ton of old computing gear

Posted on March 14, 2009 by ward

We recycled at work this week – literally over a metric ton (estimated) of old servers. This is what about two thirds of that amount looked liked: Apologies for the low quality picture – I only had a crappy cell … Continue reading →

Posted in Environment, Hardware, Sysadmin | 2 Comments

howto: replace a PLCC chip with a socket “ghetto style”

Posted on March 1, 2009 by ward

I used Peter Stuge’s “ghetto” method to replace a PLCC bios chip with a socket on an asus m2a-2vm board. This board has excellent coreboot support. The method basically consists of cutting off the legs of the PLCC chip as … Continue reading →

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Dell’s GNU/Linux support leaves to be desired

Posted on October 27, 2008 by ward

So I have a poweredge 2800 with some hardware issues (voltage sensors on the riser card seeing things they should not…). The Dell support folks wanted me to run a DSET report with this tool http://support.euro.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=uk&l=en&s=gen&releaseid=R155882&formatcnt=2&libid=0&fileid=208066 Man – what a … Continue reading →

Posted in Free Software/Open Source, Hardware | 1 Comment