nuxx.net
Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.

Category computers

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June 25, 2003

I figured I’d post this again since I didn’t have much detail last time…

Here’s the specs on that computer I want to sell:

P4a – 2.26 GHz
512MB PC1066 RAMBUS RAM
Asus P4T-533 Motherboard
Soundblaster Audigy (provides sound and IEEE1394 for iPod)
GeForce 4 Ti4200 256MB RAM (Gainward GeForce 4 Ultra/650 TV/DVI Golden Sample, I believe)
Adaptec 2940UW SCSI Card
8x Yamaha SCSI CD-RW
Plextor UltraPlex (32x, I think) CD-ROM Drive
IBM Server-class 10/100 NIC
Mylex eXtremeRAID 3000 Fibre Channel Controller w/256MB Cache
30m Fibre Channel HSSDC<->DB9 Cable
Custom external fibre channel enclosure supporting four drives.
Four 9GB 10,000RPM Seagate ST39102FC Drives
Nikao Doggie Case
Ultra Quiet Power Supply

There are pictures of everything available here:
Doggy Case: http://www.dingleberrypie.com/gallery/doggie
Fibre Channel Enclosure: http://www.dingleberrypie.com/gallery/fibrechannel
Fibre Channel Benchmarks: http://www.dingleberrypie.com/gallery/fc_benchmarks

The 9GB drives can be replaced with any size Fibre Channel drives, which are all available cheaply off of eBay. In the machine’s current configuration, it’s benchmarking with disk reads and writes that are over 160MB/sec (http://www.dingleberrypie.com/gallery/fc_benchmarks/aac). Faster disks or a different RAID config could change this both ways.

Also, I’m looking at selling this machine because I want to get a PPC970-based PowerMac G5. It works perfectly fine and is fully functional as my home workstation. I’ll reinstall XP and have everything tweaked before it gets to whoever wants it. I’m thinking $1600 for the main machine, fibre channel array, and connecting hardware.

What do you think?

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$$$

June 24, 2003

Oh, one other thing. I’m looking at selling my PC. Yes, it works perfectly fine. I’m just thinking I want a PowerMac, and I won’t have a use for a PC if I get that. Here’s what it’s got:

Pentium 4 2.26 Ghz
512MB RAMBUS Memory
Intel i850e Chipset
Gainward nVidia GeForce 4 4200 Video Card
8x SCSI CD Writer
Plextor UltraPlex (32x) CD-ROM Drive
Adaptec 2940UW SCSI Card
Creative Labs Soundblaster Audigy (w/ Firewire)
IBM 10/100 PCI Server-type NIC
Ultra-cute Doggie Case
Especially quiet power supply.

The only thing missing from making this a complete computer is a hard drive, which I don’t have because I was using an external Fibre Channel array.

Anyone interested? I’m thinking $850 for this…

UPDATE: Make it $1000 and it’ll have a 120GB hard drive in it and XP installed and tweaked for it.

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…

April 22, 2003

I’m thinking of moving nuxx.net to being hosted straight out of my house. All I’ll be doing is mail and the current amount of web hosting that I am now, namely /gallery and random stuff in /images and /pdf. The only thing I could think is that it might be good not to do my own primary DNS, that way if my IP changes it’ll be real easy to point things to the right place. We’ll have to see… If I have time after the blind install I’m going to watch Powaqqatsi while working on getting exim or sendmail, apache, php4, random imap or pop3 server, and bind running on golgotha (the file server). Or maybe bind should go on the firewall itself… Or maybe djbdns… I’m so confused! heh.

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:(

February 6, 2003

Gah, what a time for /var/storage/Large to start clanking. :(

And, broadq QCast Tuner seems to crash jdk1.3.1 under FreeBSD 5.0. Hmm. Moving back to 4.x wouldn’t be that hard, but recompiling Java would be a chore.

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Maybe it’s the caffeine…

February 6, 2003

I just had an interesting idea:

You all know that random number generators are not truely random, as they generally get their input from something that could theoretically be predicted (temperature, radio background noise, etc).

I think it would be interesting to see if a person could be used as a random number generator. The data could be fairly easily gathered by sitting a person down at a speech recognition device that will respond to ‘one’ and ‘zero’ or ‘yes’ and ‘no’, recording them as bits in a key. If the person were to rattle off 1024 yes/no or one/zero answers, then you would have a 1k key. My presumption is that if you told a person to randomly pick one of the possible answers, they would tend to get fairly random after a while. But, it would be interesting to see. Standard tools for analyzing randomness of data could be used to see just how truely random the person is. It wouldn’t be hard to collect a number of high-bit samples from an individual, nor would it be difficult to collect samples from any number of people, allowing for proper analysis of a human-based random number generator. It’d also be an especially geeky way to generate PGP/GPG keys.

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Hurray!

January 20, 2003

Yay! I *FINALLY* have a functioning laser printer at home. See, in 1995 my parents got me a LaserJet 5L for Christmas. The thing always worked fine. It prints great, everything, but after a while it developed the typical LaserJet 5L/6L feed problem, much like they all did. It turns out that there is a place called fixyourownprinter.com which sells kits and instructions for fixing common printer problems. So, $30 and about half an hour’s worth of work later, my printer works fine. Woo! I also threw in a spare toner cartridge I’d had since 1996/1997 and physically cleaned the printer up a bit, and now it’s like new.

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PS2 HDD

January 19, 2003

Hrm… So I got a Playstation 2 network adapter. The curious thing is, it seems that there are connectors for an IDE hard drive as part of the adapter. It doesn’t fit a Western Digital hard drive that I have, but maybe another? Possibly Quantum… They seem to make a lot of disks for OEM applications like Tivos, etc.

UPDATE: This picture make it look like a Maxtor disk along with a bit of hardware to mount the drive more securely. I just need to see if I have a Maxtor disk around anywhere…

UPDATE PART DEUX: Okay, I should do a little more digging next time. The PS2 Linux dmesg output from this page indicates the following:

PlayStation 2 IDE DMA driver
hda: Maxtor 4D040H2, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0xb4000040-0xb4000047,0xb400005c on irq 41
hda: Maxtor 4D040H2, 38146MB w/2048kB Cache, CHS=4863/255/63, (U)DMA

So… Yeah. It is a Maxtor. And since the PS2 Linux kit ships with the same network adapter, all I need to do is find one of these drives. Or any old Maxtor. I wonder what the machine will look like then… Or how the disk needs to be formatted for games to support it… It’d be nice to have the QCast Tuner also support playing from a local disk. It’d be nice to be able to play off of both the network and the local disk. Or imagine if there was support to rip audio right into the local disk… Mmm… I wonder how fast the PS2 would actually be at doing audio compression?

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Local News Sucks

October 17, 2002

Gee. WDIV / Channel 4 just had an aweful story about war driving. What a load of garbage. Hey, guess what? You just learned more about war driving from this post. Yep, that’s how detailed it was. I’ve captured it and I’ll upload it somewhere later. I screwed up and made PCM audio, so I have to rip that out, redo it as MP3 and readd it. Aww, screw it. I’ll just up it now. It’ll be at http://www.nuxx.net/files/wardrive.zip once it’s done uploading. Feel free to take it. It’s ~58MB, though.

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It’s @713

October 16, 2002

This probably should have been handled as a continuation of this thread, but, oh well. Does anyone here remeber Swatch’s Internet Time. It came to be around 1996 if I recall correctly. I’ve always thought something like this would be a great idea, but we could all do it with GMT. If everyone always worked on GMT, things would be a lot easier. Of course, this would be easy for geeks to get a grasp on, but imagine trying to tell ‘normal people’ that Friends comes on at 0100 and that they get up for work at 1130. Oh well. Just another point where tradition takes the lead over techonological innovation. Like Imperal and Standard measurement over Metric.

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