Fettled any computer stuff today?

[Afasoas]

Just scratch-built a PC - my first nuts and bolts build since I were fifteen.
Everything worked at first boot - which is good. Pity I don't get to keep it as it's of a fairly reasonable specification.

[tiermat]

Mrs T's laptop (one I bought in 2009 for our trip to Aus) had a cat induced interaction with the floor, breaking one of the hinges in the process.  This is the same laptop that the screen died on a couple of years ago and, when I replaced the screen, the audio died shortly afterwards.

So a plan was hatched to rectify the situation, which I carried out last night.

1) remove HDD from laptop 1
2) remove same from laptop 2 (the one I have used for the last couple of years as my desktop machine, but it has working hinges and sound, plus is an upgrade all round on laptop 1)
3) put HDD from laptop 1 into laptop 2
4) put HDD from laptop 2 into laptop 3 (a spare I have had sat around for a couple of months now awaiting time for me to do just this to gain an upgrade on laptop 2)
5) power up laptop 3, change BIOD setting from UEFI to Legacy, so it will boot.  This then just worked, job done on that.
6) Power up laptop 2, find that the video, wireless and network drivers are not part of Win7, nor will the default ones work, so use laptop 3 to download the right drivers from the Acer site, copy to USB stick then apply drivers to machine.  Reboot, apply driver, reboot, repeat ad nauseum.
7) Eventually Laptop 2 is working, all data intact and no need to re-wotsit Windows (I suspect it is because I swapped from a Acer to another Acer)

Time taken, all told, including testing, 1 hour.

[Afasoas]

Stripped the Lenovo desktop down. Rerouted the cables, removed a thin layer of dust. It now runs about 10 degrees cooler.

I'm never buying a propriety desktop again. It was like spaghetti in an mATX case with cables running everywhere. I can't believe how much cooler it's running now that there's no cables fouling the air intake fan.

[Woofage]

Replaced a dead (well, mostly dead) network switch. Mrs W's internet speed was down to modem standards and even retrieving e-mail was a struggle. No one could print either. On the plus side, I now have a spare power supply .

[Afasoas]

Quite a lot of fettling going on here just now.

The new NAS/Server is up and running. So far I've installed Ubuntu Server and ZFS. I've created zpools (In my case they are arrays of disks) and I've copied most of my data over to them. All that remains is to sort out permissions so that I can actually access them.

I've also put the "firewall" inside a tiny ITX case and installed a 50mm fan. Unfortunately the fan is noisier than expected, so I'm figuring I either have to find some way of regulating it or store it in the garage. I'm not planning on using it until there's some ethernet connecting the garage/lounge/study. The firewall itself is a motherboard embedded Intel Atom processor which in theory could just be passively cooled, but I'm much happier blowing some air through the case.

Oh and a little power meter arrived today so I've started working out the energy requirements of various bits of kit. The all singing/dancing desktop seems to average 0.08 kWh 's under low load/idling conditions and the Syno NAS box so far 0.03, not having been left alone long enough for it's disks to go into stand-by. I'll be intrigued as to what the server works out at in comparison.

[Feanor]

I finally shut down a monsterous old P4 tower which had been my Domain Controller for many years.

I'd put up a couple of HP micro-servers a few years back, and transferred most of the FSMO roles over, but never got round to finishing the project.
All roles and Global Catalogs now transferred.
Old DC dcpromo'd back to Member Server and shut down.

All seems stable so far.
DCDIAG seems to have found all the FSMO role holders where I expected.

I'll leave the old machine sitting there for a while before physically removing it, just in case.

It's noticeably quieter and cooler in the server room now.

[Biggsy]

The Corsair PC tower case I got has too-fiddly power and reset buttons, so I've wired some external illuminated switches in parallel and put them in a box on my desk.  Added switches to turn drives off and on via relays, too.  Fan controls next.

I'm having to force resets on this stupid machine very often lately.  Mouse and keyboard often dying after resuming from standby, despite me trying all the relevant Windows and BIOS options.  Motherboard fault, I think.

[Pingu]

I finally shut down a monsterous old P4 tower which had been my Domain Controller for many years.

I'd put up a couple of HP micro-servers a few years back, and transferred most of the FSMO roles over, but never got round to finishing the project.
All roles and Global Catalogs now transferred.
Old DC dcpromo'd back to Member Server and shut down.

All seems stable so far.
DCDIAG seems to have found all the FSMO role holders where I expected.

I'll leave the old machine sitting there for a while before physically removing it, just in case.

It's noticeably quieter and cooler in the server room now.

The internet's working, Feanor looks happy 

[Chris S]

Been doing some build tests today. Our SVN and CVS archives are held remotely, but I keep a mirror here, sync'd overnight.

It's always comforting to know that a full checkout of Everything from my local server is enough to get the machine's fans whirring nicely  .

[Afasoas]

Been doing some build tests today. Our SVN and CVS archives are held remotely, but I keep a mirror here, sync'd overnight.

It's always comforting to know that a full checkout of Everything from my local server is enough to get the machine's fans whirring nicely  .

I've got some SVN-ness on my radar both at home and at work.

I spent some more time this weekend configuring the new server.

Installed slapd, samba and configured samba to act as a classic domain controller using the ldap back end. Attempted to add a Windows VM to the domain and it failed because it couldn't find the domain controller. I suspect something missing from DNS/DHCP and figured I felt like a break from samba anyway.

So I installed bind9. Got that working fairly wonderfully. Then isc-dhcp-server (dhcpd3) and that's mostly working fine to, complete with DNS updates.

I haven't got back to sorting out Samba yet, as I'm still investigating an issue with the dhcp server. For some reason it's only assigning reserved IP addresses to about a third of the hosts that have reservations, and I can't quite fathom why. I know it's not essential, but I find that partially broken nature of it infuriating and there's no reason (that I know of) why it shouldn't just work.

[tiermat]

Fwiw, Dan, those Atom boards run quite well without a fan, and withstand relatively warm locations (ours lives in a cabinet that used to be a hifi cab, with little ventilation).

My computer fettling, today has consisted of cleaning up the MP3 collection and changing Mediamonkey from using mapped drives to UNCs.

[Afasoas]

Fwiw, Dan, those Atom boards run quite well without a fan, and withstand relatively warm locations (ours lives in a cabinet that used to be a hifi cab, with little ventilation).

Thanks TM.

Borrowing some long ladders anna drill over the weekend. That means hopefully getting a couple of ethernet cables run here and there. We can then make effective use of the firewall and get rid of a couple of wi-fi boxes.

I've just finally got samba working having not had enough time prior to today. PDC with Win7 box that is able to browse and change files on ZFS shares.

Getting there! 

[pcolbeck]

Installing Arch Linux on my new work laptop with a 1Terrabte SSD and a normal hard driver.
urandom is taking a long time to chuck crap all over the SSD at the moment before the install can start.

[Feanor]

Junior's PC.

Presenting complaing: the screen went funny colours and froze.
It's done that a few times when I'm playing a game.
The sounds keep playing ok.
Now, the screen has gone off and there's nothing displayed at all, but I can hear the machine booting and the sounds are OK.

My diagnosis: cooked GPU.

So I pull the graphics card and try the on-board HDMI.
All OK.

Good blast out with the compressor and air-gun.
Re-assemble, and original GPU seems to be fine now.

I've ordered a new one anyway, as an upgrade.
I can always use the suspect GPU in another application, where it won't get worked as hard.

[Feanor]

Fucking Dell and their Fucking non-standard Fucking cases and mountings.
I Fucking hate them.

New GPU for the kid's PC.
Normal modern-spec dual-slot width thing.
Will it fit in place of the old one?
Will it fuck.

It's too tall, ie the PCB and cooler extend about 15mm above the height of the L-shaped bit of the bracket.
The original extended by only about 2mm above the top of the L -shaped bracket.

Not even a bit of dremelling will fix this.
The bloody case will only accept a very limited subset of video cards, it seems.
And the *exact* dimensions are not one of the specs easily found for graphic cards.

I'm trying to visually guestimate from the photos on websites what cards will actually fit.

Fucking Fuckers, Dell are.

[Mr Larrington]

Dell are the Spawn of Stan for any number of reasons including, though not limited to, the wretched XP desktop box I had at the BigCo and the even more wretched XP laptop I had at the BigCo.

What, me, bitter?

[Feanor]

I've just fixed the slowness affliction that was troubling my Thunderbird mail client.

Lately, Thunderbird has been very laggy / slow /not responding.
I'd put it down to one of the news servers ( eternal September ) being slow, and cursed Thunderbird for not spinning the network connectivity off to a separate thread to leave the UI responsive.
But I were wrong.

I'd enabled an AV product on my PC for reasons I can't imagine.
MS Security Essentials, as it happens.

The on-access scan of the Thunderbird Profile folder was hammering the performance.
Excluding it from the on-access scan has 100% fixed the issue.

Now all I need to do is to is remember why I ever installed the AV thing, and then un-install it.

[woollypigs]

Trying to set up owncloud on a small laptop. Then figure out, after I got it running just fine, that I could get it to store the files on a USB drive. Though this caused it all to go tits up and owncloud will not play ball with the DB any more.  Also somehow managed to install it on 127.0.0.1 and 127.0.1.1 go figure ...

[vorsprung]

Computers shouldn't be fettled, they should be beaten with a broken bottle

Just a PoV

[Feanor]

I've just installed one of these:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0024CV3SU

Which allows me to slam naked SATA HDDs into my PC.

I often have reason to connect HDDs to my machine, mostly to recover data from Other Peoples non-booting machines.
Usually, this involves either:
-Opening my PC's case and fucking around with power and data cables, or
-Opening a handy USB disk case and swapping the HDD in so I can get to it over USB.

This simple gizmo is just a feed-thru that exposes Proper Power and Native MoBo SATA ports to the outside world, without opening the case.

If you have the need for such a device, then you will know what I mean.
It's Grrrrreat.

[Kim]

I've just installed one of these:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0024CV3SU

I've used the 3 and 4 drive versions of that in a couple of servers, and they work really nicely.  My only issue is the nasty 40mm fans, which compensate for the improved MTBF of the disks as a result of applied Murphy's Law^[1].  Given sufficient case airflow, you can remove the back panel from the caddy and do away with them entirely.


_{[1] The easier it is to replace a drive, the lower the chance of it failing.}

[Feanor]

The version I bought has no fans: it's a 2 drive bay.
It has 2 SATA power connections on the back to the PSU, and 2 SATA cables to the MoBo.

Just what I need for leeching lUser's stuffs off their old HDD before I nuke it.

Previously, I used a USB caddy thing, which pulled it's power from USB and had a chipset that translated SATA <-> USB.
It was a bit crap.
The USB power thing was a problem, some drives could not spin up.
The protocol conversion was a problem too.

A simple caddy is the Correct Solution for this situation.

It connects directly to the PSU -> No silly USB power issues.
It connects directly to the MoBo SATA ports. -> No silly bridging chipset issues.

[woollypigs]

Sorting out my backup, so that it plays ball with owncloud. Which I got to play nicely in the few tests I did. Hopefully I should be having my files in three places when it is running fully. Which means my backup should be simpler to figure out and keep an eye on. Letting it run amok with 15Gb over night, lets see if owncloud can handle it and that I still have files where I'm hoping it should be in the am. If it does I'll let it play with the rest of the "most often" used files, another ~150Gb. Then the next task is to get it to play ball with the webserver so I can access it from outside the house.

[tiermat]

Fettled a work-related script from using sed and awk, which took it >2:30minutes to run, into one using bash arrays which brought the runtime down to ~30seconds.

I am chuffed, I am.

[Feanor]

First Linux install for a while today.
CentOS 7, with MariaDB which appears to be the new OS fork of MySQL.

I just need a random SQL box ( which I have full admin control over ) to be on the network to demonstrate / train internal staff and external customers on the database connectivity and syncing capabilities of one of our software products.

So it seemed a good time to re-purpose a forlorn old dell box which has been lying in a dusty corner.   IT dept would no doubt not approve of me nuking it from orbit, but heigh-ho.  It's done now!

I actually burned a real physical install DVD from the ISO!
Imgburn FTW!