In b4 lock!

I just snagged two 300GB Seagate ATA disks with the phat five year warranty. Very slick. I can finally setup a RAID 0 backup array. I also happened upon a four port Ethernet adapter from Adaptec which is going to end up in my firewall box, negating the need for the three PCI NICs I have in there now. Should be fun. Still looking around for another decent 64-bit gigabit NIC for the file server. I missed out on some 3COMs and a few BCM5700 reference boards. PCI-X is tasty.

If it ain’t broke…

Read the rest of “Mixing sound in software with ALSA and KDE’s aRtsd” »

After upgrading to a gigabit (GbE) switch and recycling my old 32-bit D-Link DGE-500T, I found my NFS performance to be absolutely abysmal. I was pulling around 1.9 MB/s over NFS from my file server. That’s poor, even for 100Mbps Ethernet, and surely for 1000Mbps.

Read the rest of “Gigabit, bus bandwidth, and NFS” »

I have been using the stock S-Video to RCA converter that came with my Dell Inspiron 3800 for a couple years now. It’s a cheap little converter that’s hardly shielded and barely 1/16th of an inch thick. I replaced it with a cheap cable from Radio Shack, but after a year that cable broke and the color information ceased being transmitted.

Read the rest of “Monster S-Video 2 Actually Makes a Difference” »

With BartPE you can boot a native XP environment and run all those magic utilities you need to recover a box that’s been damaged by a trojan, worm, or other failure. Cool.

Often times easier than recompiling the whole kernel, when only a single module needs to be rebuild inside the tree. Of course, you need to keep your source tree around and dirty.

Read the rest of “Rebuilding parts of the 2.6 kernel tree” »