uppercase numbers

You can read more about it on the discussion thread here.  Long story short, because resellerratings.com felt that I was infringing on their trademark by using the words “reseller ratings” to describe the activity on one of my subforums.

Activity that consituted about half a dozen posts and maybe a few thousand views since the sub forum’s inception.

So they bullied me and threatened me in to legal action until I changed it.

So it’s changed now and that’s the end of that chapter.  But the moral of the story is important here.  Corporations are slowly stripping away our civil liberties.  Bloggers have to watch what they say or risk receiving cease and desist letters.

Donate to the EFF today :)

I was feeling up.  By flashing the 1740 and 2320 controllers with special configurations which prevent them from acting as boot drives I am able to have them active on my motherboard at the same time as the ICH10R.  I also discovered that while the 2320 does not work at all from the second PCIe x16 slot it does work fine from the first one.  And I was happy to discover that the 2320 will read the RAID5 array the 1740 made.  I got my backplane installed and my hot swap trays mounted up with the drives and a fresh install of Windows XP and everything was working great.

And then I decided to do an Online Capacity Expansion.  I wanted to go from three 1TB drives in RAID5 to four 1TB drives.  I started the rebuild process and it all seemed to be going swimmingly.  An hour later I came back to check the process of the rebuild and…

The computer went to sleep.  It went to sleep in the middle of the capacity expansion and the RAID controller couldn’t cope.  The failure alarm started to go off, the rebuild was halted and I couldn’t restart it.  My only option was to reboot the machine.  It came back up, the original array was inaccessible but the OCE started again from 0.0% automatically.  I thought that maybe it was a good sign.  Maybe it would pick up where it left off and just make things work again.  I let it run for 14 hours to finish doing whatever it was doing.

It didn’t work.  The result was an incredibly broken array with a weird size and busted partition tables.  I’m really bummed.  I have most things backed up on to USB drives.  I didn’t really loose anything I can’t get back from bittorrent.  But I’m just more annoyed than anything.

I can’t even START getting data back on to the array because it insists on ‘initializing’ itself.  Whatever that means.  It contains no data but it’s going to spend all day parity checking itself for no apparant reason what so ever before I can format it.  It still says it’s a 2TB array and not a 3TB array for some reason so yeah… whatever it’s doing I have to let it do.

So much for my idea of letting my fileserver sleep when I’m not home.  The stupid Highpoint controller doesn’t deal well with it for some reason so I can’t risk it crashing again on a rebuild.  Crap.

Well, I installed the RAID controller in either of my two PCs and it pretty much keeps either from POSTing.  That’s a total bummer.  I tried to next day another one from the Egg but if I get it before the weekend I’ll be surprised.  It sucks to have to wait and spend another $N in shipping.  But on the other paw, I needed to order a 24p ATX power cable extender and an 8p EPS power cable extender.  The new Enermax PSU I installed doesn’t quite reach from one side of the cube to the other.

I’m more than a little worried about this configuration though.  The Highpoint 1740 still refuses to work on the Asus P5Q3 board even after firmware updates on both.  I still get the “No enough space to copy PCI ROM” error.  It just sucks that my ancient IC7 can run the 1740 and use it’s onboard Intel RAID, but the ICH10R on the new one won’t play ball.

Even if the 2320 works where they 1740 fails, I’m not sure it’s going to read from the data array on my three hard drives.  I could destroy the array simply by plugging the drives in to the different RAID controller.  Sure, it’s backed up somewhat.  But it’d be a bad thing none the less.

Meh, I’m sick of thinking about it.  I need to find a better solution to this problem.  I really might have to get a new motherboard :(

I continued the buying spree, I mean, doing my part for the economy.  Microcenter is evil.  Their prices are usually competitive enough to warrant not buying online.  Their sale items are usually great deals.  And sometimes I really like just being able to look at products in meat space.  Instant gratification and all that, even if I have to deal with dreaded sales tax.  I’d rather pay my 5% to UPS than the state I think.

I went in for a new RAID controller.  I’m using a Highpoint 1740 right now.  It’s a PCI 4 port SATAII RAID5 controller that works quite well and has Linux support.  I’m happy with it and it even supports online capacity expansion.  I have this second x16 PCIe port staring at me though so I wanted to get a x4 or x8 PCIe version of the HighPoint card.  Maybe even one with 8 ports.  The Highpoint 2310 looks like what I want.  Microcenter didn’t have this or anything close unfortunately.  I did end up buying the 2300 model there.  It’s essentially the same thing as the 1740 but only PCIe x1 which means it probably won’t be any faster or better than the 1740 I already own.  PCI is 1Gbps and PCIe x1 is 5Gbps.  But for the same price I can get the 20Gbps one so… I’m going to take it back and order the 2310 from NewEgg.  Or the 8 port 2320 maybe.  So hard to decide…

And I would like some faster throughput.  I’m using RAID5 which has ugly write speeds but stripe like read speeds.  And I bought another 1TB Western Digital 5400RPM “Green” drive.  So I’ll have four of those on the array and that will certainly be more data than a PCI slot can deliver.

I bought two 1TB drives actually.  I needed another for a USB enclosure because the 250Gb drives I have in them now are very old, dying, and are not large enough to easily back up the data I need to back up.  These 5400RPM drives run much cooler and are a great fit for an external enclosure.  Plus I can use eSATA with my P5Q3.

Against seemingly better advice, I’ve decided against just running with software only RAID even though my new motherboard has more SATA ports than I can count.  I really don’t like setting up RAID in Linux and any performance gain I can get out of a decent controller card is ideal.  Plus I like the thought of taking these drives and controller out of this computer and installing them in any other computer and not having to mess around with it too much to make it work.

The last waste of money, I mean, economic stimulus was the BFG 9600GT.  I absolutely needed a PCIe video card (even though I have a perfectly good PCI Nvidia 6200).  BFG has a nice warranty and with the rate of failure I seem to have for video cards that’s okay fine with me.  I needed to go Nvidia since it has better Linux support.  And heh, better Windows support for that matter.  Also if I run any Cuda apps, such as F@H GPU client, the 9600’s moderate speed will work nicely even though I won’t be gaming on this card.

So I have quite a bit to do this weekend.  I’m just waiting for my backups to finish so I can throw the new kit in.

Purchasing a KVM isn’t an easy task.  The brand names aren’t necessarily well known, the prices vary wildly for the same features, information isn’t forthcoming from many of these overseas manufacturers, and product reviews are often very negative biased.  I guess they just aren’t a mainstream product yet.

The review bias is an interesting phenomenon.  You’re average junky CPU cooler will often have a zillion positive reviews for no good reason what so ever.  People are just more liable to be happy with certain products than others regardless of the actual quality.

I purchased the IOGEAR GCS1762 KVM a month ago and I really dig it.  The price was a little steep but at least it came with cables I didn’t need.  I purchased much longer cables to run to my Cube which sits about 3-4m away from the LCD and keyboard.  This doesn’t seem like a very large distance but companies are cheap with cable lengths these days even though you can get extra long chinese cables for very cheap.

This assumes you know which polarity of cables you need to buy for your KVM.  And it’s not always easy to determine this unless you have good product photos.  You also need to get a KVM with replacable cables.  It’s a crime when cables can’t be detached.

My old VGA KVM, also an Iogear, worked just fine but VGA over a 4m cable is incredibly blurry and hard to deal with after a while.  But it was at least USB.  And it didn’t have any emulation.  And that’s a good thing.  I don’t know what problem emulation is supposed to solve.  But emulating a missing monitor, keyboard, or mouse really just seems to cause problems for most people.

If you don’t emulate a keyboard or mouse than at worst you might get a ‘Press F1 to continue’ keyboard error on boot which you can maybe disable in BIOS anyway.  The most typical issue you run in to without emulation is a slight 1-2 second lag time when you switch PCs before the USB devices re-register.  Having dealt with this delay for many years I can assure you it’s never been an issue.  Even when I was in the middle of a game.

Monitor emulation doesn’t seem to have a purpose.  Without it, my computers simply boot up in their ‘last known good’ state.  And everything just works.  When a KVM has monitor emulation, if you boot the PC and that PC isn’t selected on the KVM, the KVM tells the PC that you have some bog standard VGA monitor.  Windows responds by setting the resolution to something that is wrong.  And Vista/Nvidia seems to INSIST on putting the Start menu on my second monitor, the one not attached to the KVM, because I assume it wants to put that on the monitor with the largest resolution or something.

I have to go in to the Nvidia control panel and fight with it for about 3 minutes before I can get everything to show properly on the primary display again.  Why the Start menu EVER moves off the primary display is beyond me.

When a KVM emulates a keyboard, sometimes the extended features of those keyboards don’t work.  The media keys, the scroll wheels, the volume controls, the lights and LCDs, etc.  You might not notice unless you have a Logitech G15 but well I do.

The GCS1762 doesn’t seem to have much in the way of keyboard/mouse emulation but it can be gotten around by using the standard USB ports on it instead of the ones labeled keyboard and mouse.  It does have the annoying VGA emulation though and that really bites.  If I don’t remember to have the right PC selected when I boot it, the video gets totally screwed.  But it’s my only complaint.  It switches fast, my images are crystal clear, and I can even switch via keyboard commands which my old one couldn’t do.

It also has a serial port on it for updating firmware.  I can’t imagine what you’d need to do that for but perhaps you can find a firmware that disables emulation.  That’d be worth a look.

Anyway, if you’re in the market for a KVM, Iogear isn’t a bad choice.  I can’t speak for most other models except for Belken which also seem to work just fine.  Just don’t spend too much, get one with removable cables, and the smallest amount of emulation possible.  Read the reviews as there are always people complaining about the problems with emulation on the ones which do it poorly.

Well, rectangular anyway.  After months of whining I finally ordered a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM for the Cube.  Just as a reminded, this machine is used for file serving, general office work, bittorrent, and video editing/encoding.  Basically my stable, bogged down machine.  I keep the other free from cruft so it’s faster for gaming and is more fun to overclock.

The Cube will be getting the Asus P5Q3.  This is the second I’ve purchased.  The first was actually the P5Q3 Deluxe which Abi is using in her desktop.  Apart from the lack of WiFi, which works nicely I must add, I’m not sure what’s different between the boards.  Asus has the problem of making lots of little model revisions on each board and it’s a bunch of work to try to figure out which boards are better than others.  For $150 though it’s a hard board to beat.

Why no LGA 1366 board?  They’re kind of expensive still honestly.  Also I wanted to upgrade my gaming rig with a new processor.  It’s currently running the Q9450 which is an excellent processor.  It just doesn’t overclock very well.  Also, games just don’t benefit from the four cores.  Most games don’t even benefit from a dual core.

So I ordered an E8400.  These chips are almost guaranteed to hit 4GHz.  And at that clock rate, any non SMP games are going to run better.  This is an aging chip but it still seems to be the ’sweet spot’ right now.  $165 still seems like a lot of money for an old dual core.  I guess it’s the demand on the thing.

A DDR3 motherboard needs some DDR3 RAM.  My gaming rig needs RAM more though.  My current Corsair RAM is only good for 1600MHz.  That’s really not too bad.  But the RAM is often running at 1200-1300MHz because it can’t keep up with the FSBs I’m running.  I found that 1600MHz DDR gets a bit limiting fast.  Now, truth be told, RAM speed isn’t a critical factor for most things unless you’re swapping a lot of textures from RAM to video memory.  GTA4 seems to do that a lot as do some other games that allow you to set high view distances.  It’s generally better to have more video RAM but… well, I really wanted to try some 2000MHz DDR3 just to see if I’d get any more performance out of better dividors.  Sometimes it’s the case that weird dividors can increase latencies.  I don’t know if that’s the case here but let’s find out.

I went with some truely horribly colored RAM.  Patriot Viper PVS34G2000LLKNB.  4G worth this time instead of the 2G I currently have (which Vista64 hates).  I went with the Patriot because it was cheap and I’m sick of Corsair RAM dying.  Yes, I’m really scared of the high voltage this thing is rated at.  That tends to kill RAM fast.  And yes, I’m scared of the Patriot brand.  I haven’t had luck with it in the past.  But for $180 I get a flash drive and a copy of 3DMark Vantage too.  I was sold.

I think the RAM is a crap shoot.  Assuming it runs at it’s rated speed when I get it, I’ll be surprised if the RAM has any longevity.  I hope by that time we have some faster, and more affordable, DDR3 around.  If 2000MHz RAM makes any difference in performance that is.  It’s possible that the cheapest and slowest DDR3 is just as viable.  Just get a brand with a decent warranty.

Patriot’s website claims to have a limited lifetime warranty on the Viper RAM as long as you don’t modify it in any way.  I’ve heard that it’s hard to actually obtain an RMA though.

This RAM is also only rated for 2000MHz on the Nvidia i790.  How it will react on my P5E3 X48 is unknown I guess.  Crapshoot.  My experience in the past with this Nvidia only thing with other products is that they work just as well on Intel chipsets.

Since the Cube isn’t watercooled and I don’t actually have a cooler for it, I had to pick up this.  I really do like Zalman products.  A little costly, a little pretty, and definitely not the best performers.  But usually quiet and well made.  And for a machine that will be on 24×7, quiet and well made is important.

So I have a project for the weekend!