Steve Kemp's Blog

New computer is working in a nice stable fashion although with no working USB for no reason that I can fathom. (Plug in a device and nothing happens. No kernel messages, etc)

I will document this properly a little later, and update the map to match.

All told the new machine is:

• Motherboard: Nvidia Nforce N570 SLi Chipset
• Processor: AMD X2 AM2 4200 Dual Core
• Memory: 1Gb. (2×512Mb)
• Disk: 1×320Gb SATA drive.
• Graphics: PCI-Express ATI Radeon Extreme AX300SE

The graphics give me 1280×1024 which is as much as I can handle on my 17” TFT display, and didn’t require any non-free drivers.

I wandered into a couple of local stores and said “I’m looking to buy a graphics card, what do you have in the PCI express flavour?”. The answers ranged from:

• Nothing .. sold out.
• NVIdia .. something .. £100+
• ATI Radeon £39.99

So whilst I wanted to get an NVIdia card since they traditionally have had drivers which work for me I was happy to get the cheaper one and hope for the best. As it turns out I’m using xserver-xorg-video-ati with no problems and playing DVDs over NFS works without any visible lagging/artifacts/errors.

The system has 512Mb to itself, and the rest set aside for Xen guests. Right now I have six instances of Sarge running with 64Mb each. Things are nice and snappy :) (Since debootstrap failed on the 64 bit install of Sarge I had to download pre-made Sarge images, but still a painless process.)

Talking of Xen I found a weird problem where when starting up a new Xen guest the host would lose networking. I think this is an artifact of the NVidia 4 chipset – but adding irqpoll to the boot flag(s) seems to have fixed it.

OK enough about my new toy(s). Happy Holidays

(No complaints about my new cheesy Christmas Logo yet. Result!)

Tomorrow, all being well, I should receive a new desktop computer. I ordered it upon Boxing Day so the turnaround is pretty good.

Right now I have two desktop machines:

yours.my.flat

This machine is occaisionally used by my partner, but primarily exists to remotely backup my various servers. It runs rsnapshot to do a full rsync of four machines every six hours.

vain.my.flat

This is my day-to-day desktop machine. It is going to be replaced, and this will be rotated into the backup machine. The machine yours will sit in a closet for a couple of months then be donated to somebody local.

As with all the machines I've bought recently the new one is coming from Novatech - (Another company whos website has a suprising hostname.)

The interesting parts of the spec are :

• AMD X2 4200 processor
• 2 x 500Gb SATA drives
• 4Gb memory

The biggest difference to me will be the significantly increased disk space which means that I'll be able to remove the external 120Gb USB hard drive I currently house my MP3 collection upon. By retiring vain and moving my current desktop machine to be the "random guest machine" and backup host I'll also have a lot more space for storing backups upon. (Full database backups every six hours; I'm paranoid...)

Having 4Gb of memory will also mean that I can run more than 2 or 3 Xen guests at the same time.

My plan is to setup at least the following guests:

• sarge.security-build.xen
• etch32.security-build.xen
• etch64.security-build.xen
• etch32.desktop.xen
• etch64.desktop.xen

The desktop machines will run GDM / X11 and will be available for logins via xdmcp - so that I can have a fully seperate working environment which is pristine and easily regenerated. Giving 5 xen instances 256Mb of memory each will leave me with close to 3Gb of disk for the host and that is three times what I hav enow!

All in all I'm looking forward to the new machine enormously a bargain at ~ £290.