New Router

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As good as the old machine I got from TAFE, the router is in need of an upgrade.

Now normally I need no reason to do this, but for the sake of convincing myself my reasons are as follows:

1) The current computer isn’t optimised for power efficiency (newer motherboards are surely more efficient)

2) The power supply seems to be making funny noises (could just need a dusting but meh)

3) It currently doesn’t natively support 1Gbps LAN (needs PCI addon card)

and finally:

4) It doesn’t have SATA, requiring the use of another PCI card to include the media backup drive in my setup (which is currently only working in one direction).

So here’s what I have in mind:

 

CPU:

AMD Intel
Cheapest:Sempron 140 2.8GhzSingle Core 45w x64 Cheapest:Celeron Socket 775 E3400 Dual-core 2.6Ghz 65w
$31 $47
Ideal:Athlon II X2 255 Dual-Core 3.10Ghz 65w Ideal: Core 2 Duo E6600 3.06Ghz Dual-Core 65w
$61 $67

 

Motherboard:

AMD Intel AMD Old Motherboard
ASUS M4A78LT-M-LE

Socket AM3+ Integrated GFX + DDR3 Ram + 1x 1Gbps LAN 

ASUS P5G41T-M-LX Socket 775+Integrated GFX + DDR3 Ram + 1x 1Gbps LAN  Gigabyte GA-M56S-S3 Socket AM2 (supports AM3 @ 2000MT/s)+ DDR2 Ram + 1x 1Gbps LAN
$55 $59  $0

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Memory:

Kingston 2GB DDR3-1333

$17

 

Power Supply:

Vantec ION2 CAN-460C 460Watt

$45

Extra requirements:

Low power consumption

Integrated Graphics

Integrated Dual-Gigabit networking

Or a Free PCI port

 

Using Old motherboard:

Requirements:

  • ·         CPU (Supports AM3 at lowered bus speeds)
  • ·         RAM (DDR2 only)
  • ·         Power Supply
  • ·         Graphics card? (temporarily use 8800GTS I guess)

 

CPU: 

Sempron 140 $31

RAM:

Kingston 2GB Value $29

Power Supply:

Vantec (As above) $45

 

TOTAL Cost:

AMD Budget AMD Ideal Intel Budget Intel Ideal Using Old Mobo
$31 + $55 + $17 + $45 $61 + $55 + $17 + $45 $47+ $59 + $17 + $45 $67 + $59 + $17 + $45 $31 + $29 + $45
$148 $178 $164 $184 $105

All prices are taken from MSY and were all in stock at the time of writing.


I would personally like to make a new machine (less the case), my experience with ad-hoc new/old part swapping is not exactly stellar.

That said, I have just been reminded of another motherboard I have left over: the M2N-SLI Deluxe; But that might be overkill in retrospect… it was designed for high performance more than anything (though it would mean I only need a power supply and a CPU to get it going.

 

*sigh.*.. i’m gonna need to think about this..

Linux ‘screen’ command

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Just a quick note about an awesome tool I’ve discovered on my travels.

The ‘screen‘ command in a linux shell.

This neat little tool allows you to run a remote shell (via SSH in my case) and run a command so that it doesn’t die after you exit the SSH session.

Normally when you exit an SSH session while a command is being run you will kill any processes being run by that session. With screen, you basically tell it to leave that particular session in the background (running) and you can come back to it at any time and check on its progress.

I’ve found it particularly useful when I’m using Rsync to dump the files from one computer to another (as in my current predicament.

So basically your essential commands are:

localhost@user:$ screen

This makes a new screen so you are given a new shell in which to type any commands you need to run in the background.

localhost@user:$ screen -ls

This will give you a list of current screen sockets open. Note the socket number so you can get back to the screen you want.

localhost@user:$ screen -r [screen socket number]

This command will reattach/restore the screen you had running to the front so that you can check on it’s progress. If at this point you exit the shell the session will still remain and you can use the same command to restore it again.

 

Once you are finished, just type exit and it should kill the socket and drop back to the standard shell.

If for whatever reason it doesn’t drop the socket (check with screen -ls) you can either leave it (I doubt it would use much memory anyway) or use the command screen -wipe and that will destroy all sockets that have been made.

So that’s it. What a useful tool, and very easy to use.

As always with Linux, it has many more options than described here, so you can check the man pages on it (man screen) or just screen –help will give you most of what you’ll ever need.

Later.

Media Drive saga continues..

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A couple of months ago I did something really stupid and installed an OS onto the wrong hard drive (due to sata drives being automatically moved to /dev/sda, and maybe a little stupidity on my part). So after much time wasting and much frustration, I ended up getting another 2TB drive and dumping what files I recovered onto it.

Now that’s all well and good but it appears that I have a fair amount of corruption on the recovered files. As I encounter corrupted files I can note and re-encode them later from their original Blu-ray/DVD sources.

Anyways that isn’t my primary issue at the moment; After I duplicated the recovered files off the original NTFS drive I wiped it and reformatted as ext4 so as to ensure I didn’t encounter issues with the linux implementation of NTFS (nfts-3g) – which I have encountered before. So that went smoothly, I Rsync’d the files back from the media PC (where I installed the new drive) and shared it in SAMBA. All of which happened relatively smoothly, which is strange for me, and I was finished by the next day.

Problem.

After a while I noticed that a transfer from the SAMBA share would never successfully complete and would seem to fail at random times (but usually the same place). I assume this has something to do with the corrupt files that occupy the drive but since I have no real fool proof way of figuring out which are corrupt and which aren’t (codecs are pretty damn good at guessing and the rebuilding pieces on the fly) , I’m stuck in a bit of a bind.

In the end I decided to reformat the EXT drive as XFS owing to its great track record in delivering media files and handling big HDD sizes. Luckily, IPFire has an addon for XFS support and even includes tools to make the XFS filesystem and make an XFS partition.

As I type, i’m running Rsync on the router, copying the files of the media-pc (it does take a while copying 1.6TB of data =D) over to the newly created XFS drive.

That all for now, hopefully this works and I can report on the performance figures of the XFS file system and if it solved my problems.

Later.

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