Good day everyone and welcome back to an August edition of a DoogieLabs site update. So I’m back in Colorado until around the 24th, it has been nice to be back although it has taken some time to adjust to things. I have dearly missed my friends and it was great to see everyone and talk to them again. Since I am back here there are some underlying tasks that I have been needing to perform that I’m going to be able to do whilst I’m out here. I repaired the HP laptop that Elise was using and broke the screen hinges on, which tore up the rest of the case. So after bringing a couple parts machines back with me and swapping things around it is all up and running. Another thing that I worked on was the bomb shelter server. When I left originally I had a SunFire V120 in the basement ceiling at my parents house. I left this server here in place of the giant V880 that once was here and it has been chugging away just fine over this last year. I have used it for various things off and on, and decided to further experiment with it. I have decided to dump Solaris and install FreeBSD 10 for Sparc64. I wanted to do a bit of a speed and size / space comparison as well as use BSD to implement something server wise to see how it works out. I’ll probably just end up making it a mail server, but we’ll see. I have always liked BSD but have never taken it beyond installing it and messing around here and there. So I am going to play a little bit and potentially take it to the next level.
Videos will be sporadic as far as uploads go whilst I’m here visiting. I don’t have my awesome video editing machine to create content with, I really tried to have something worked out before I left and came back but it didn’t work out that way. If I can do something in a single take and get it out to YouTube I will be doing that, and I will definitely have more content to add once I get back.
I broke my X32 Thinkpad, this made me a sad panda.
I was laying in bed working on BSD stuff, and a few other things that I do specifically on my X32, and then broke it. I’m not sure how this happened, I fell asleep and at some point my laptop ended up on the floor. As I slowly awoke the next morning and glanced down at my laptop I noticed the battery light was blinking orange. This was odd, since it was plugged in. After falling in and out of slumber for a few hours I finally woke up and tried to turn it on, the system would power up and not POST. Both screen latches were broken off. The best I can figure out, it overheated at some point after I fell asleep, and then it fell off the bed altogether. This machine is a 1.8GHz Core Solo, so not a fast machine at all. As a matter of fact, if you can find them for sale they are often priced at well under $100. When I looked on eBay and couldn’t find another X32, I looked for replacement motherboards and it looks like one could be had for around $150. This was extremely disappointing as I am not ready to spend $150 on a laptop not even worth $100. This really made me sad because even though I have faster machines, this was the laptop that I used every day. It has Windows XP and a real DB9 Serial port with a real hardware UART. It was nice having USB2.0 in my X32 instead of 1.1 and lower overall clock speeds in my X31. I still have my X61T, but so much was done on the other laptop I’m working to resolve that issue. Luckily, my mom still had my old X31 thinkpad and I can just stick the hard drive in there and use it that way for now. Although I’ll probably be swapping system boards so I can still have the outer casing of my X32 with all the stickers on it that it has collected over the years. I need to phase it out though in favor of a new machine, but I have no idea what I should get. I need something in dual core that is capable of taking at least two batteries, with a screen that can be read out doors in direct sunlight. It’s hard to find another computer that I can actually tune vehicles with and have hours upon hours of battery life. Ugh.
Apple Powermac G5 Debian Server Update!
It has been over 100 days since my implementation of an Apple Powermac G5 tower in place of the SunFire V880 system. Things have been great I’d say, I still haven’t got backups fully implemented yet, but the system has certainly been solid. My server has taken everything that I have thrown at it and then some. I even use the desktop environment as a 6th monitor on my desk using synergy and I’m very happy to have a Linux machine right there at my finger tips. A little while after I had setup the machine initially I was able to obtain another PowerPC G5 tower, and this one instead of being PCI-X with DDR1, was actually PCI-E with DDR2. I was able to remove the hard drives from the old machine and plug them into the new machine without too much headache. It *almost* booted straight away, however I had to adjust the device path because the SATA controller moved from 7 the device tree to 9th. Both systems were dual 2.0GHz, with the older machine being dual 2.0GHz Processors and the newer machine being a single dual core 2.0GHz processor. Since the late 2005 model was dual core and of later processor design, it consumes half the power compared to the older dual 2.0 single cores. Even though the systems were the same clock speed, as expected it was an order of magnitude faster. I really hope to find a quad processor motherboard, cpu, and power supply here soon. I want to go balls to the wall with it.
The best part about that? still nowhere near as fast as my PowerPC System P5 IBM tower. *wishes he had drives*
No additional progress has happened on the survivalbyte or motorpedia sites. Additional information about these will be available soon 🙂
That’s all for now, there is so much more to discuss, but I am going to work on prepping some other things. I have a neat video coming up later this week 😀