Family Happenings

I’ve had my rackmount servers laying on the floor for a year now. Racks are absurdly expensive and I’m too cheap to pay $700 for 4 aluminum posts and a couple of aluminum angles, so I’ve been scouring craigslist and ebay for deals.

A month ago I found a rack on Craigslist in Tangent, about 30 miles from here. It’s bigger than I need, but the price was right so I got it.

And here it is. It’s big enough to house both our servers, both battery backup power supplies, and have room left over. Best of all, it has a door so you can close everything up. It’s too big to fit through the doors, and it weighs about 300 lbs, so I had to disassemble it and haul it into the house in pieces. That took most of the day. Of course the adult study is in the very back of the house, so I had to haul it a long way.

The small laptop is my 12 year old Gateway Liberty, still running after 12 years of use. I use it as a terminal to access the headless servers.

The small network hub is just for the computers in the study; the main hub is in a closet. The main server (the lower black box) has a dual gigabit connection to that hub which feeds the house, mostly for mythtv. The main server runs the website, the TVs, and provides terminals for me and Noriko. The upper server is the backup server. It doesn’t actually do anything; it just takes snapshots of the data on the main server in case something fails.

I’ve been doing lots of things behind the scenes to plug security holes, make the blog easier to upgrade, and hopefully to make the blog easier to use.

The biggest change for the user has been the change of the login prompt. It’s now in the upper left corner and it should take you directly to the front page. Please let me know if it doesn’t.

The right hand sidebar is now all widgets. The two crittercam widgets aren’t yet ready for primetime, but the weather widget is at here.

Unzip and read the source, Luke. Comments welcome. Email is in the zipfile.

A friend and I rode the inaugural High Pass Challenge back in September. This is a bicycle “not-race”, but you only get your T-Shirt if you finish within 10 hours and you get a medal based on your finish time.

So, it’s not a race, but they give prizes based on time…

Anyway, the ride is up Windy Pass from Packwood, WA. It’s a lot of climbing and a long ride - 115 miles and a mile and half of climbing.

I finished in about 8:45. I was really happy with that result; I got a ’silver’! Yaay!

I’ve taken some pictures of the three-headed monster. The original setup has changed a bit; I replaced the old ATI PCI card with another Nvidia Quadro card to get the video acceleration. The ATI was just not capable of showing moving images without serious jerkiness.

I’ve also replaced the IDE drive with a 15K Cheetah SCSI drive I had laying around. I had an old Adaptec 2940 UW PCI card, bought a terminated SCSI cable from CRRC for $5 (you can still see the price on the cable) and now this machine has a nice SCSI drive. While it tests slower than IDE, in multi-user operations it feels faster.

You can see the three video cards - look for the heatsinks. The AGP card is at the top, one of the PCI cards is at the very bottom, and the third one is one slot away from the AGP card. You can also see the two monitor cables out the back, with the DVI-VGA adapters on them. The small black cable is the S-Video cable going to the TV.

And here’s some shots of the room and the setup. You can see the IR receiver for the TV keyboard above the monitor in the last picture. The system acts just like any other - excpet that there’s only one computer.