Upgrade for the V880!

I got the cable in that I have been wanting for a very long time. . I decided to make a video of the installation process, pretty neat! I ran a UnixBench routine at the end for a real world filecopy example. I have noticed that there is a slight performance hit when copying to the raid versus a  a single disk. I suspect that this is because it is

Late Sept News Part I and SGI Woes

SGI, HPC with cost as no object; but what did reliability cost? SGI has been a very interesting new road for me, it was the better part of 10 years before I was able to clinch ahold of Octane2 un-obtainium. After gaining a better understanding of how the Octane / Onyx racks work with their NUMA Link and Crossbars, I knew that I wanted to have one as a server.

News and Blog for September 5th, 2012

With the Sun Server at home, work has been a bit crippling especially when combined with moving. As some of you know, I have been using SunRays in my shop ultimately consolidating the number of full computers I would need running around the place. Now I have found myself in a situation where I'll be working in a separate place completely on electronics design, computer issues, etc. I want a

pbzip2, Multithreaded bzip2 application

Since I have a MASSIVE amount of parallel processing at my disposal it can come in real handy when working with extremely large files. This week I recovered a full terrabyte drive that had a completely hosed NTFS partition on it. After dd'ing the entire disk into an image and recovering the files it's time to format the drive an put our recovered data back onto the disk. The corrupted

A moment in vintage computers

One of the items that was included with my last pallet of stuff that I picked up was a new in box vintage IBM Thinkpad external CD-Rom drive. This is an option that you just don't see anymore, so I figured I'd make up a video and share. I have another video coming up soon as well. I wanted to finish editing but due to recent events the server had

Blog and news for Friday, July 22nd 2012

Maintenance Notice! The Icebox server will be moved to a new location no later than August 31st, 2012. We expect the move to take a few hours and there will be minimal service interruption. We expect the move to take place on a Sunday evening. Please continue to check back and I'll post an exact date and time once arrangements have been made. Whats up! Things have been very busy

How to read and write data from and to tapes in Solaris / Unix / Linux

I did not write this myself, This lovely howto was originally located at: http://www.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de/staff/hvoss/TapeHowto.html .. However since it was wiped clean off their website I decided to re-post everything in its entirety here. Thanks Hauke for writing such a wonderful how-to probably a very long time ago. To everyone else, enjoy :-) This How-To describes the commands to be used to write data on a tape and how to retrieve

LCD Monitor has been repaired!

My Prized 25" Flatpanel monitor lost it's back light about a month ago. As it turns out, one of the CCFL tubes ended up getting a short in one end. The short caused the panel to get really hot forcing me to run the display at reduced overall brightness, and then the problem got worse when it started to take multiple attempts to get the display to come online. The

News and Blog for Monday, June 11th 2012

PAYPAL SHOPPING CART UPDATE: I have been made aware of an issue with the PayPal shopping cart where when you click on the checkout button you are left with a blank page. After combing the server logs on this issue and finding nothing, I finally caught a break last night when testing in the latest internet explorer, it gave me an error message regarding opening a secure page in a

News and Blog for Tuesday, May 22nd 2012

Working away getting more done. I have some new stuff to share, I have picked up some vintage computer goodies. I am now the proud owner of a pair of functional Silicon Graphics machines (Octane 2 and O2) which [caption id="attachment_606" align="alignleft" width="500" caption="I may be in windows, but most time is spent in Solaris"][/caption]             I also haven't really shared my new alarm panel

News and Blog for Thursday, May 7th 2012

Back after a very hard week! Some of you may have noticed that last week the icebox server was down and unavailable for use. This was actually a result of my boneheadedness in thinking that a 25watt PCI card is some how hot pluggable. Compound this with being sick at the beginning of the week, so that brings us to story time: As many of you know I have been

News & Blog for Tuesday, April 3rd 2012

Whats up everyone! Summer is getting closer, its nice to see it consistently warm outside. Then with yesterdays snow, I was reminded how much I REALLY like it when it's warm outside. I really hope that it's here to stay. Does anyone remember Pine, or alpine? This may seem a little weird but I'm still a fan of using the txt console for everything. Burning CDs, e-mail, web pages, its

News and Blog for Tuesday, March 20th 2012

Whats up all!   I have been pretty busy with stuff here at the shop. I have had a few repair jobs, and a couple of unforeseen projects. The first repair job is recovering or resetting the BIOS password in a Dell Inspiron 1000 series. Since there is no security chip on this particular machine, and the password is stored on the eeprom that holds the bios itself, I actually

What the whole thing changed again!

I decided to change up the site again to something a little more user friendly. I wanted a CMS that is flexible, popular, and multi platform. So I found word-press. The software seems really secure, and nothing is without its give and take. There are a couple of things that I have needed to adjust to make this possible, but so be it. This software is worlds easier, and that

Critical Mass

So I found out that more rent is owed at the shop than I was expecting since my partner backed out. I am ready to sign the new lease, but need to get this paid first. Time to kick it into high gear! I am a bit of a slacker in getting the tour video of the mobile PCs finished, but have listed them on Craigslist. I have listed the

New Video! Tour of my SunFire V880

I decided to post up a video showing the ins and outs of my Sun Server. I am actually almost finished up with everything on it. IF YOU KNOW ANYONE THAT HAS THE SUN PCi II Drivers PLEASE LET ME KNOW ASAP! I cannot find them anywhere online thanks to a once awesome computer company going out of business. Anyways, enjoy: I am also working on a video for the

New Arrivals!

I awoke extra early to pick up the DoogieLabs goodies, a little addition to the inventory. I know that PC Servicing is not going to completely cover the bills, I found a deal that I couldn't pass up and picked up 18 police car computer workstations. 1.8Ghz, 512Mb Ram, 40GB HD, completely loaded with features like wireless and video capture for the dash cam. Each computer has a touch screen

New Server!

So with the Server issues that I have had it got me thinking about more expensive hardware, the good stuff. Computers that are meant to be servers, designed with fault tolerance and built with decently branded components to avoid the cap explosion that killed the Powerhouse server, and the generation of server before that. I do get that to some degree I will never be able to avoid these issues,

It’s back up!

Finally got the server back up and running, it blew ALL of the capacitors! yuck Here is a shot of the load testing, seemed to work just fine. It was not very fun to fix, this is the SECOND DELL that has taken a shit on me when used as a server. I am finally fed up, even though it's fixed and will probably last forever, I think it's time

Setup a Repeater to create an instant wireless hotspot from out of reach networks

Everyone needs wireless, sometimes around town there are wireless hotspots left open at shops, libraries, and other places that you can connect to. Sometimes you may find yourself across the park but out of wireless, or maybe youre someone who has a large plot of land and wants to get wireless at an outbuilding, or to control a robotics project. Here is a solution that can be had with a

News and Blog for Friday April 29th, 2011

Whatsup everyone! Almost the end of the month, got a few things going on, some experimentation and renewed motivation.. I have been doing mostly electronics still, I get people coming in for car stuff here and there, but my main focus has been playing catchup on setting up the electronics lab so I can crank out experiments and projects. The Holset VGT Controller and instrument cluster solutions ebing two of

Blog for April 16th, 2011

So I was digging through some stuff earlier today and I forgot to post these! I always like seeing how computers compare to one another in their different processor configurations and such. I have been pretty good about comparing my servers to other servers. In benchmarks I have always been more interested in servers / unix setups versus gaming machines. When it comes to benchmarking my systems personally I use

Blog & News for Sunday, February 20th 2011

So much has happened over the last month and a half, lets start with the latest and work backwards. .. I now have a shop! I signed a 1 year lease on a 2860Sq foot shop space, complete with office and showroom, I am going in with my buddy Mike on it. We're looking at creating a performance shop that caters to all related tendencies... Including computers and electronics! The

Blog for Wednesday December 23rd, 2010

12/23 Update: Some goodies came for the Van, the 1st part that I have bought for it in a while. (other than hose-clamps lol) They are to replace the broken visor clips I have: As far as I was aware, only the drivers side was broken, but I was horridly wrong, both of them were! Wow glad I decided to replace them both (besides just the color lol) Installed and

News for Thursday, November 25th 2010

Whats up! Happy thanksgiving everyone! It has been almost a month since posting, I have been getting settled in but lets take a look at whats been done so far. I moved into a 3 bedroom 2 bathroom house, its a very large place inside and has an over-sized 1 car garage. Fortunately, the Corrado is able to en-habit this parking space unless a current project does, in which case

News and Blog for Monday, July 19th 2010

Hello everyone! Quite a bit has happened since I posted here last, so lets take it from the top. Albert has been doing great since the timing belt break. I have driven a few hundred more miles and things are sound, other than it's pig rich. It will be another couple of weeks before I am able to afford the needed Dyno time to finish sorting things out tuning wise.

News and Blog for Wednesday, May 19th 2010

Was going to post over the weekend but just ended up busy at work (busier than most Mondays) and I was too burned out after I got off to really deal with much else. Actually, they changed my schedule around for the week so that makes things harder still to find time between everything to post. First off, the car show on Sunday was great, I was only able to

News and Blog for Friday, April 16th 2010

I have added a page that goes into great detail about what's involved when adding a chip socket to an ECU. I figured why not get some more pages up, this one is kind of short but certainly informative. Still working on the hour here and hour there type of schedule, I have continued on with polishing the intake manifold. I got one side rough polished, I really need to

News and Blog for Friday, March 26th 2010

Well, we received a ton of snow here and along with it came blinks in the power. There was no actual power interruption at my house but there was enough that it reset my server continuously and blew every capacitor inside! I wasn't aware of the events for quite some time, when I received the phone call about the dirty power happening at the house the ups was already shut

Blog Entry for Sunday, January 24th 2010

Many things are happening around DoogieLabs. Once Project that has been in the works for over a year now is my own custom digital instrument cluster that will replace the factory aging cluster currently in the van. (Corrado will be getting one as well but it will be full color) I have been searching for displays for sometime, I wanted something that could be constructed for a reasonable price.. I