The Sailing Bug

Continuing with my tradition of off topic posting here, I thought I would post some notes on my new computer case and assorted goodies that I posted about recently. I have finished of transplanting everything across now and it is almost completed! (more…)

After much consideration and research I have finally decided to get round to the case upgrade for my computer. My current case was designed for over clocking and has been with me for about 4 years or so now. The key reason for upgrading was noise reduction and I have been looking at ways to reduce the noise levels of my computer. To try and minimise noise as much as possible I have ordered the following:

Antec P180 case
Acousti AcoustiPack Deluxe (v2) Acoustic Material Kit
Gigabyte G-Power Silent Blue Light Cooler
Artic cooling VGA silencer
Zalman ZM-NB47J Northbridge Cooler
Silverstone SST-FP52 Silver Aluminium Fan Controller
Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound
Vantec Vibration Dampening Kits for all Case Fans
Vantec Vibration Dampening Kit for Power Supply
120mm Zalman quiet case fan

Phrixus has offered to help build this new case which will be a big help seeing as the bare case weighs 14kgs and the sound proofing kit alone is 3kgs!! Hopefully I will be able to get some pictures and a nice write up done in the next few weeks once all of this stuff arrives and a little review of all the items I have ordered. One thing is for sure is that it should be a heck of a lot quieter than my current case.

Yesterday was a pretty good day for me as I passed the Managing and maintaining a Windows Server 2003 Environment exam I had been studying for a few months and straight away I got to put my new skills to the test. A phone call from Phrixus with a strange networking problem he was having when Dave was connecting his PC to the main DLink router. Basically whenever Dave’s PC was plugged in, internet connectivity went completely from other client PCs on the network and the router needed to be rebooted. After swapping out cards and cables and running a pretty exhaustive series of tests it was discovered that there was a process called mDNSResolver.exe running in task manager. A quick end process tree on that process and a reboot of the router and everything worked fine until the process was started again at the next reboot. The exe file and a couple of DLL files where tracked down to a Bonjour installation. It seemed as though Bonjour had been installed and not quite removed properly as it was still in the services list.
A quick bit of tidying up later and Dave’s computer was running perfectly although none of us could seem to offer an explanation as to why the network went so badly wrong when a pc running Bonjour on it.

After finishing my course on managing and maintaining a Windows Server 2003 enviroment last week, I have decided it will be very useful to get myself a spare PC to use as a test server. I had some old bits and pieces around but in the end ordered a barebones system with a 2800 Sempron 64, 1GB RAM, 2 x Maxtor 160GB SATA harddrives with 8 MB cache. That should run quite nicely then! I have also ordered a new router as I have been so close to drop kicking my old Linksys router over the past week. Next challenge - find an area for the server in my room but I have a cunning plan for that..!!

As of late we have not been out on the boat too often for various reasons so my sailing posts have not been as frequent so I thought I would put a post up about what has been keeping me busy and what will in part be keeping me busy through the quieter months of the sailing calendar - namely I will be studying for the Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator certification. I have already brought a set of books for the core requirements - in total over 3200 pages!!! That should certainly keep me busy for a while.

It has been a while since I last mentioned Asterix and my attempts to get it installed and working on an old machine I had at home. I finally managed to get it installed properly last night on an old machine I had kicking around. This time I was using version 0.9 of asterix@home which seemed to install OK, albeit a bit slowly maybe - that may have been caused by the machine spec though rather than any particular problem with Asterix. It did not take long to configure an extension via AMP (Asterix Management Portal) - a web based configuration GUI. I tried to configure a soft phone on my PC based on a “best guess” method of configuration but that failed miserably so it looks like I will be RTFM at some point for that one. Overall it looks like Asterix has got some pretty cool functionality but I will post more about this when I get to have a proper play around with it.

For a while now I have been just a little bit impressed with Google and its immense ability to find information. To the untrained eye the simple and uncluttered home page looks simple and utilitarian but delve a bit deeper and the flexibility and potential is incredible.

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If you are anything like me then you will probably find that you regularly get home to be greeted with a parcel that has arrived containing something that you have ordered off the internet or via mail order. Normally I can keep track of these and roughly know what will arrive and when. It was quite a surprise when I got home today to find a parcel left for me. At this point I was a bit confused - I have not ordered anything for a while and definitely was not expecting anything. Upon opening the package I see a letter from Microsoft. It turns out that I put my name down for an evaluation version of Windows Server 2003 a while back so that I could have a bit of a play around with it. Due to problems with production they have sent me a free full retail copy of Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 as an apology. I am quite happy with this - especially as I had totally forgotten about the evaluation software I had ordered in the first place!!

I was just browsing Overclockers to see get a feel for prices of a few bits of kit I need for my * box and I almost fell off my chair when I saw the price of gigabit network cards - Less than £10 for a Netgear 10/100/1000 card. Ok so I have not been following the prices of IT equipment much recently but that seems pretty cheap!!! Gigabit betwork upgrade comming up possibily which will really benifit me with my 512 Kbps DSL line and limited home network!

I have just finished installing Asterix (or * as it is commonly referred to it seems) and I thought I would write a few comments on it. I have almost literally thrown together a PC from old bits that I had lying around and it is a complete mish mash of specs. It is my old AMD K6 500 processor with 192 MB RAM, a 10GB primary HDD, a 123GB secondary HDD, a 128MB GF4 graphics card and a CD-RW drive. Unfortunately I have not got any spare network cards kicking around so I have managed to build an open source PBX that can not talk to anyone or anything - very useful! I intend to pop down to see the owner of a local computer store where I have spent a few quid in the past to try and get a bit of a deal on some network cards and a few other bits and pieces I need to get this project moving a bit.
Anyway - back to the * install. It seemed to go fairly smoothly if not a bit slow. I had already downloaded the 0.6 version of the Asterix@home ISO earlier today at work and burnt it to a CD. It was just a case of booting from the CD and letting it get on with it. It did take about an hour or so to install, compile and get to the login prompt. This could be down to memory requirements as I did see a reference to 256MB needed for something somewhere during the boot process. Further investigation required methinks. I have not been able to test out the AMP web GUI yet due to my lack of network card installed. I did manage to login and run a few configuration commands to setup the network and time zone aspects and a few other bits and pieces. I did notice that it does appear to have an inbuilt firewall that can be configured from the command line but again I have not got the box configured hardware wise to have a proper look at this.

All in all it was a fairly straight forward install even for a Linux newbie like me so far but I am sure there will be a few more challenges to come yet! Next things to do are source networks cards and some more memory, reinstall with NIC in place, try web GUI and then investigate IP soft phone options. Once I have managed to get al this working and can do some funky things with it then I will look at spending a few quid on some Cisco SIP compliant IP phones. Fortunately working for a telecommunications company I may be able to get a good deal from someone….!