The toman diaries

When your host crashes

søndag, februar 13, 2005

Powertech, the nice firm that hosts the free home.no.net domain, had a serious outage on friday. At first it seemed as if they were having a simple reboot, but as the hours went by I started getting suspicious. First of all, my website wasn't responding. Then their pop3 mail service wasn't responding. Then their FTP server "couldn't change directory to my home" (This ftp server is running on a different system I think, since it is always accessible.)

So something went really wrong, wonder what.. At least ehy have backup. I got all my mail over again to my pop3 yesterday, and it also seemed as though my website was up and running at about 18:00 CET.

I was wrong. - Looking at my log-file, they had actually restored my website from the 27 jan. I got the impression they were going to restore it from a day or so back, since they said that any modifications the last day would not make it. The 27th is quite a few days ago, and unlucky as I was, they had taken the backup while I was modifying some of my php scripts and had therefore gotten a few faulty scripts with them. I didn't see this yesterday since one of the scripts check if I'm me, and if so it doesn't run any of the counters. It was only when I saw my log I realized something was wrong since the I had modified the output format to be less verbose.

Luckily, I've gotten into the habit of running wget -m ftp://my.site.com to make a mirror (eg, backup) of the site every time I make important changes.

So take it from me: Make backups! ;-)

A new graphics card

torsdag, februar 10, 2005

I just got a new graphics card for my PC. I initially ordered an Asus card with an nvidia mx4000 gpu and 128MB ram. It worked, but only for a few minutes at a time. It simply forze up my screen, couldn't move the mouse or use the keyboard. So I returned it and got a new one in a week. Same behaviour with that. - Frustrating

After exchanging some e-mails with PS Data, they agreed to send me an AOpen card with an nvidia FX5200 GPU on it, same amount of memory. This new card actually cost 100NOK more than the old one, but they actually proposed to sending it to me for no extra charge! Nice one :)

As you can imagine, since I'm actually writing this, the new card works, and it doens't hang for anything. The old one worked when I turned off agp acceleration completely in Linux (passing the option "nvagp" "0" to the nvidia driver via xorg.conf).

The only thing I'm having trouble with now is running the 3DMark 2001 benchmarks on it. Sometimes 3DMark itself hangs, sometimes I get the imfamous "infinite loop" BSOD.

The results I've gotten so far without any hanging is 2194 3D Marks with 2xAA on

I wonder if it might be the limited cooling these card have, both have no fan at all, but the heatsink on the FX 5200 card is about twice the size of the MX4000.

PC case Cooling

søndag, februar 06, 2005

Like I said, I just got a new PC.. Not much to write about it, except its a lot better than my previous one :) If you want to know what parts it consist of, look here.

I've always been facinated by physics and technology, and cooling is a physical science.. Cooling a PC efficiently seems like a nice thing to do, and not too expensive either it turned out.

When I first started the PC and ran it for a while, I didn't really notice it was hot, and it probably wasn't either, compared to other untrimmed PC's. But since the case has a hole in the back meant for an 80mm fan and the CPU is almost exactly horisontally aligned with this hole, I started thinking about mounting an air duct to cool the CPU better. I decided not to use another fan, instead I let the cpu-fan do the job of sucking the air in. Now, what should I use for a duct?

A standard solution for ducting seems to be to use, exactly, flexible duct-pipes you would otherwise use in ventilator systems. Surely it works, but getting one with a diameter I neeed would prove to be difficult since the cpu fan is 60mm and the hole in the case was 80mm.

Standing in the kitchen flushing the remaining milk out of a cartoon (we recycle them), I got the idea of using just that, a milk-cartoon. It is about 75mmX75mm, ideally suited if I only use some tape, siccors and some construction skills.

Sorry I dont have a digital camera, so I'll do an ASCII draqing for you:

No I wont, just kidding.

But did it work? I'll let the numbers speak for themselves. This is after the temperature has stabilized after about 45 minutes of running folding@home.

As you can see, the result with the fan blowing the hot cpu air out of the case is far superior to any other solution.