Category Archives: Hardware

more home server disk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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”

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

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

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