On the events of today.
I was going to go to the North American International Auto Show to run my yearly scans of what vehicles exist which might be suitable replacements in case the Jeep up and dies as it is likely to do. Instead I woke up at noon, with no motivation to drive across the state.
Last night, I had decided to move my server guts to their new case. My new desktop is up and running, so I figured the server could use a face lift too. Today I continued this task, watching as it became the perfect example of a small thing that grows into a day long project.
So, I started moving things into the new case. OK, simple enough. Discovered two things: one, the new case had some proprietary Dell rail system for drives and I didn’t have the rails. Second, it both cases had the ingenious case fan that doubles as a processor fan. Beyond my standard dislike of this “cheating” it posed problem because the fan and shroud didn’t mate with the new case.
Given this second issue, I decided that I might try using my old desktop board / processor / RAM with the server HDD and RAID setup. Not a good idea, the system continually crashed trying to get into windows. Next, I tried a quick hack to my old system drive to enable RAID-5. It found the drives, but didn’t show them as a coherent array (either because I did the hack wrong or because it was a new system). I should have known better than to even try this, and was more than a little worried that I had destroyed the entire array.
I moved the hardware back to the original configuration, half in the new case half sitting on the desk next to it and breathed a sigh of relief when the array recognized and was healthy. Next, I declared utter frustration with Dell and their proprietary case BS and ordered a cheap new one. I really didn’t want to put money into a case for something that is more or less hidden and never accessed by a human, but at the same time, the contents of that PC are far more valuable than those of my desktop, so having drives flopping around all willy nilly was just not OK.
So, now I wait for the new case which should arrive some time next week.
Second nerd announcement: I moved my router from DD-WRT to Tomato firmware for the second time and it Tomato appears to run circles around DD-WRT with regards to connection quality and speed.
Maybe tomorrow I will actually care to go to the car show… we’ll see.
Also, I want to buy a television, so I have to keep an eye on Circuit City for liquidation sales.
