I was just having a look at Gnome and KDE as I am thinking of trying *nix on the desktop (currently in use on both server and laptop). I like the look of Gnome, although I've never used either all that much.



What do people like, and why?

Updated Final Spring Timetable

	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
8am	Work
9am		Introduction to Collaborative Systems (31472) Lec, 01 CB03.05.10	Object-oriented Design (31469) Lec, 01 CM05B.01.11
10am
11am				Distributed Computing Architecture (31470) Lec, 01 CB02.04.13
12pm		Introduction to Collaborative Systems (31472) MTP 07 CB02.06.35/CB10.03.450	Object-oriented Design (31469) Itl, 03 CB10.03.450
1pm
2pm			Object-oriented Design (31469) Tut, 05 CB10.02.240	Distributed Computing Architecture (31470) Tut, 05 CB10.04.470
3pm
4pm				Distributed Computing Architecture (31470) Itl, 05 CB10.02.420
5pm
6pm				Networking 2 (31471) Itl, 02 CB10.03.240
7pm
8pm
9pm

I may do another half day of work (or on Fridays if needed).

Spending a bit of money this week! Argh. Anywho.



I picked up 5 IBM thin clients (because it was about the same price as one :p) off ebay the other day (IBM 8363 Netvista N2200).



They have a 233MHz CPU, 64mb SDRAM, Internal CF card slot (for client software), sound card, USB, Ethernet, and a 4mb video card. They can do network boot via PXE and they have also been hacked to support linux booting off the flash card. The linux distro includes XMMS and a Web browser.



They are almost silent and look pretty cool (and are really small). I haven't got them yet, I should get them late next week.



Some pictures:









(check the keyboard to compare the size):

A forum thread about getting linux to work on them

Well I purchased my amplifier today. I tested a fair few.



I looked at:


Denon DRA-295

NAD 320BEE



I listened to:


Rotel RA-1062

Rotel RA-02

Marantz SR 4320

NAD C352

NAD C372

Yamaha RX-396

Yamaha RX-596

Yamaha RX-777

Denon AVR-1705



I was surprised by the Marantz as it sounded poor against the Yamaha and the NAD amplifiers.



I liked the sound of the NAD C352 and C372 (seemed warming than the Yamaha RX series), I wasn't able to test the 320BEE.

I also tested the AVR-1705 (I think it was that model), the only surround sound system. It wasn't all that great.

I liked the Rotel series of amplifiers and the RA-02 connected to a pair of B&W speakers sounded really good.


After going to 3 Hi-Fi shops and spending about 4 hours listening to them I purchased a Rotel RA-02 (http://europe.rotel.com/products/specs/ra02.htm) for $600.



I also ended up getting a Rotel second hand CD player (RCD-865BX) for $150.



I was using a DVD player as my CD player and was VERY surpised at how bad they sound compared to standard CD players. The reason for this is that the laser on CD player is much closer to the CD than in a DVD player.

Snake vs Kangaroo, wow!



More info here

Microsoft has released IE 7 Beta 1, unfortunately only to MSDN members! Which is shocking considering most web developers would not have MSDN subscriptions.

I am going to get my hands on a copy through work and give it a run down. I am mostly interested in CSS support.

I've just done a small upgrade to the search function. You should now be able to search through comments. At this stage you can only do one or the other. There are a few little things I need to work on, but is seems okay.

I needed to copy about 150mb of files between two computers and the only access I had was SSH. So I used Secure Copy (SCP). The syntax is as follows:



scp -rp backup/ user@remote.computer.tld:backup/



This recursively copies the entire folder (in this case backup/) and preserves modification times (add -C for compression) to the remote computer remote.computer.tld with the user name: user



You can also get a windows client here

I was going to post something about this but time ran away from me.

I went to Central Australia for two weeks with the family, here are some photos (about 600mb of source images).

Here are some photos I really like:

This post is following on from my entry about the servers hard drive dying and how I setup Raid 1.

During an automatic weekly backup, my web server's hard drive failed. Luckily I run a database backup nightly and had last weeks full backup.

I decided it was time to move to Raid. Raid 1 uses two hard drives to store your information. When one drive fails the other continues to operate allowing you to install a new drive and rebuild the array.

Please note, Raid is NOT a backup solution.

So I went and purchased two Seagate 80gb SATA hard drives. Since the motherboard doesn't have SATA support I also needed a SATA controller. I decided it was about time to move towards SATA and also the 80gb SATA drives come with an 8mb cache. The old hard drive in the server was the same model but in IDE form (and thus 2mb cache).

So I got home (from the Hunter Valley) on Saturday afternoon with two drives in hand. Later that day I got a PCI SATA controller based on an ALi m5283 chipset.
I plugged it in, setup the Raid 1 through the cards BIOS and loaded the FreeBSD 5.4 CD. I was greeted with the friendly message that no hard drives were detected, damn. I then did some googling and found that there really wasn't any support for this card outside of Windows. Great.

Anyway I needed a solution quickly and it was late. I needed to get a SATA controller from somewhere on Sunday. The only shop open close to me was Adelong and they had one SATA controller based on the Silicon Image 3112 chipset. Another quick google and from the looks of it FreeBSD supported the card.

So I got it home and plugged it in and setup another hardware raid (quasi hardware at least). Well FreeBSD loaded and showed me two hard drives. Interesting. With Raid 1 you should only see one. Looks like it supported the card, but not the raid function. Oh well I thought, software raid should do.

So a bit of google searching and some failed attempts at software raid I found this quick howto.
1. Install FreeBSD on to ad4.
2. Reboot with the Install CD.
3. Enter Fixit mode. (For FreeBSD less than 5.4, use Install CD disc2 as the “live filesystem”)
4. # chroot /dist

# mount_devfs devfs /dev

# gmirror load

# gmirror label -v -b round-robin gm0 /dev/ad4

# gmirror insert gm0 /dev/ad6

# mount /dev/mirror/gm0s1a /mnt

# echo ‘geom_mirror_load=”YES”‘ >> /mnt/boot/loader.conf
# echo ’swapoff=”YES”‘ >> /mnt/etc/rc.conf
5. # sed “s%ad4%mirror/gm0%” /mnt/etc/fstab > /mnt/etc/fstab.new
# mv /mnt/etc/fstab.new /mnt/etc/fstab
6. Reboot

Right looked easy. So I setup my first software raid and the system booted! Great.

I did a gmirror status gm0 and go this output:

gmirror status
Name Status Components
mirror/gm0 DEGRADED ad4 ad6(6%)

Gmirror was syncing up my second hard drive (ad6), so I decided to leave it for the night and headed to bed.

The next morning (Monday) I awoke to the follow error:

ad4:TIMEOUT - WRITE_DMA retrying (2 retries left)

The system was still online, but when ever there was any disc activity the system would lock for a few seconds before doing anything.

I did some searching and it seemed that the ATA drivers had some issues with SATA chipsets. Great.

Anyway there was a patch out for it, so I patched the system and recompiled the kernel. The system seemed to boot somewhat better. But I spoke too soon. As soon as I tried to copy over the backup image, gmirror reported that ad4 and ad6 were disconnected and the system locked up. Fantastic.

Another google search and it simply looks like the SiliconImage 3112 (Sil3112) is a piece of crap hardware. Don't buy one.

A quick call to Bryn and I had a lovely High Point RocketRaid 1520 card in my hands at about 5pm. Over three times more expensive than the first card I tried, and a much larger box, it was guaranteed to work! (also the fact that the card said FreeBSD support on the box :p).

I loaded it up, setup the raid through the bios and freebsd detected it as a hardware raid! Sweet.

Jul 19 21:21:48 metro kernel: ad4: 76319MB [155061/16/63] at ata2-master UDMA133
Jul 19 21:21:48 metro kernel: ad6: 76319MB [155061/16/63] at ata3-master UDMA133
Jul 19 21:21:48 metro kernel: ar0: 76319MB [9729/255/63] status: READY subdisks:
Jul 19 21:21:48 metro kernel: disk0 READY on ad4 at ata2-master
Jul 19 21:21:48 metro kernel: disk1 READY on ad6 at ata3-master

and

metro# atacontrol status ar0
ar0: ATA RAID1 subdisks: ad4 ad6 status: READY

four and a half days, 3 SATA controllers and many hours later, that night the server was online. :)