Its the onset of Fall and the leaves are starting to make a mound in the backyard. There's been some rain as well. With the seasons changing that also means the room temperature as well.
This morning was the first time I ever saw the advantages of RAID 6.
Actually, the single advantage appears to be stability in the face of two-(2) failed hard drives. For some reason Slot-6 and then Slot-1 started to act up and drop out of the RAID. Now, I know there's nothing wrong with them and my efforts to check the temperature history should little variance. What I did to recover was to simply pull out, dust off, then jammed (literally) the drives back in. This seems to have worked and the RAID just went ahead and rebuilt itself.
Scary, with several NAS once in a while making beeps you get to a point of ignoring these please of alert. Literally the first time Slot-6 fell it wasn't even apparent to me that something was going on as the QNAP is a heavily used file server with gigabytes of transfer going on at all times of the day.
So was it really the weather?
I was going through some forums as well just now and did see some reports similar to what I had just described. Some say firmware on the NAS, some say its the WD20EADS drives -- to me it was the weather and I'll stick to my theory unless something else comes up. :-)
Did this experience help me to reconsider aiming for RAID 5 and recovering 2TB? Maybe, just a little.
However, if things push forward and I get the chance to transfer the main download/upload function to a data center ...? 2TB back for storage please, thank you very much!
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Phoronix Test Suite on Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 (draft in progress)
A bunch of Dell desktops landed in my possession about last week. That is now a total of four-(4) machines that I can pick and choose from for my ultimate gaming and workhorse :-)
Machines:
Dell Dimension XPS Gen4
Dell Dimension 9200 (2)
Dell Precision 470
Now these machines are about four-(4) years old and I have absolutely no plans on upgrading them except for possibly RAM and hard disk space. My main interest is which of them houses a better graphics card; secondary would be the
Graphics Cards:
ATI Radeon
nVidia 7900 GS
...
Processors:
Intel Xeon
Intel Core 2 Duo
...
My initial tests using Windows were inconclusive, and most of the tests I saw required a purchase. I don't plan to test for the rest of my life or monetize this, so a free version is preferred. This is were I stumbled upon PTS.
After burning the Desktop Live version which was noted to be a pre-release, the final decision was since Ubuntu Jaunty desktop was already installed then just install PTS from the repositories. Boy was I wrong, it is now taking a little more than just a few clicks and root password! The sizes of the test packages are enormous particularly since the test we are after is phoronix-test-suite install gaming. Detailed below is my progress to get this going.
Package
The repository package for PTS is outdated at version 1.0. Thats not what we need so need to install from Phoronix-Test-Suite.com downloads particularly the Ubuntu .deb package.
Dependencies:
Make sure that the system is prepped to have all the compiling environments just in case: sudo apt-get install build-essential
We'll need the basic PHP packages and extensions that will allow us to save the results in the future as .PDF or .PNG
sudo apt-get install php5-cli php5-gd php-fpdf php5-ming
The Demo Live DVD has all the GUI front-ends needed, it doesn't seem to be the case with the downloadable v2.0 update. We'll need to install PHP-GTK, There is an unofficial .DEB installation and that also should work according to some reports. You can also try: sudo apt-get install php5-gtk2
If all else fails you can install PHP-GTK by hand. NOTE: It may be needed to run Step #5 and edit php.ini to get the everything working after all.
In case that doesn't work there's also a good install flow here, just make sure to also visit the official download to fix the login issues when using CVS.
OK, so far this is where I am at and will update as things progress.
One issue that seemed to pop out was that due to the huge amount of downloads of the same stuff for several systems it may make sense to consider having a cacheing proxy installed in your network path. This led me down an alternate idea of speeding up and securing my network with Squid Proxy.
So far the downloads have taken 24-hours using AT&T UVerse speeds, 256-bit AES PLC, and an old 3Com hub.
Machines:
Dell Dimension XPS Gen4
Dell Dimension 9200 (2)
Dell Precision 470
Now these machines are about four-(4) years old and I have absolutely no plans on upgrading them except for possibly RAM and hard disk space. My main interest is which of them houses a better graphics card; secondary would be the
Graphics Cards:
ATI Radeon
nVidia 7900 GS
...
Processors:
Intel Xeon
Intel Core 2 Duo
...
My initial tests using Windows were inconclusive, and most of the tests I saw required a purchase. I don't plan to test for the rest of my life or monetize this, so a free version is preferred. This is were I stumbled upon PTS.
After burning the Desktop Live version which was noted to be a pre-release, the final decision was since Ubuntu Jaunty desktop was already installed then just install PTS from the repositories. Boy was I wrong, it is now taking a little more than just a few clicks and root password! The sizes of the test packages are enormous particularly since the test we are after is phoronix-test-suite install gaming. Detailed below is my progress to get this going.
Package
The repository package for PTS is outdated at version 1.0. Thats not what we need so need to install from Phoronix-Test-Suite.com downloads particularly the Ubuntu .deb package.
Dependencies:
Make sure that the system is prepped to have all the compiling environments just in case: sudo apt-get install build-essential
We'll need the basic PHP packages and extensions that will allow us to save the results in the future as .PDF or .PNG
sudo apt-get install php5-cli php5-gd php-fpdf php5-ming
The Demo Live DVD has all the GUI front-ends needed, it doesn't seem to be the case with the downloadable v2.0 update. We'll need to install PHP-GTK, There is an unofficial .DEB installation and that also should work according to some reports. You can also try: sudo apt-get install php5-gtk2
If all else fails you can install PHP-GTK by hand. NOTE: It may be needed to run Step #5 and edit php.ini to get the everything working after all.
In case that doesn't work there's also a good install flow here, just make sure to also visit the official download to fix the login issues when using CVS.
OK, so far this is where I am at and will update as things progress.
One issue that seemed to pop out was that due to the huge amount of downloads of the same stuff for several systems it may make sense to consider having a cacheing proxy installed in your network path. This led me down an alternate idea of speeding up and securing my network with Squid Proxy.
So far the downloads have taken 24-hours using AT&T UVerse speeds, 256-bit AES PLC, and an old 3Com hub.
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