Category: Tech

I’m sick of my webserver machine. The problems I mentioned previously did not
go away and I’m far too lazy to diagnose it. So fuck it, might as
well build a new one to end all problems.

Planning stage. I want a small and quiet one. So I guess I’m going SFF (Small
Form Factor). The Shuttle-brand SFFs have an appealing look. But I have not
decided on a specific model/make. This will have to wait till I next visit Sim
Lim Square.

CPU, definitely Athlon64. Something that operates with low power yet high
performance. Users report having it running at 36 degrees celcius but they are
using stock HSFs. If I’m not wrong, I have to use the built in HSF in a SFF
chasis. Speed? Anything above 2000+ just to keep it cheap. Cool n Quiet feature
of Athlon64 CPUs is another good reason to get it. During idle, it downclocks to
about 1GHz and reduces power consumption. Less heat as a result. And if your
fans dynamically adjust their speeds according to CPU temperatures, they will
also spin slower and thus, run more quietly.

Rams, don’t think I need to look for any specific brand. And considering
they’re very cheap nowadays, I’ll be going for 2 sticks of 512MB.

Harddisks, prefereably 3, but I’m ok with 2. Since this will be a webserver,
I’m looking to having mirror raid for redundancy. If 1 dies, my data
is still safe on the other. Perhaps 2 80GB bricks. 8MB cache, 7200RPM, SATA! I
just love the small, easy to unplug, SATA cables. And yes, a quiet one. Still
need research to find out which brand/model. If there’s space for a third one,
it will be used for storing my anime videos.

Graphics, a cheap ATI 9600PRO will do. Or even cheaper acceptable ones.
I may want to watch DVDs and animes on this. I’m still against onboard graphics
because of a horrible experience I once had with Intel’s onboard graphics.

Sound, onboard sound will be fine. I’m sure most SFFs have onboard LAN and
sound device.

DVD writers are cheap now. But I don’t know if I should get one or just wait
till Blu-Ray and HD-DVD ends their battle.

And I want to get rid of the 17″ CRT monitor. Mentioned before, it has blur
text. Renders images too dark. Coding on a 17″ LCD with 1280*1024 resolution is
my reason for getting one. Not to mention saving SGD$10 on my monthly
electricity bill is also a plus. Budgetting SGD$300 for one.

Now all I need is a little more determination to do some research. Damn my
lazy ass…

I’m in favour of creating websites from writing raw html codes. Which is to say, type out every single HTML tag in a simple text editor. With this mentioned, I will proceed to rant on how much I hate Dreamweaver.

At work, I had to edit an existing webpage. Move this logo here, open up that space over there, blah blah. So I saved a copy of the site onto my harddisk. Opened up the index.htm in Firefox, used the Web Developer Toolbar plugin to render a red-dotted outline on the invisible tables so I could get an idea on how everything is laid out. Turned out to be a mess of columns and rows only a computer can comprehend.

This mess of rows and columns could be greatly simplified just by adding 1 or 2 more tables. It could even make the code more readable.

Next worse thing, since this is a computer program, it has completely no idea how to generate user-friendly filenames for images. So it automatically generates filenames like craptastic_1-1×1, craptastic_2-1×3, craptastic_9-2×4.

And I have no clue why there’s fragmented images of a single-color bar, whose color is the same as it’s background. Not to mention those images come in both jpg and gif formats!

Oh, and there’s one more important factor for a fucked up dreamweaver-made website, a noob Dreamweaver user.

For this blog of mine, I threw in a quick INSERT sql statement at the end of
every page request to log down the IP, referrer, date and time so I can get a
rough idea of where my visitors come from, how did they come here and when. Rest
assured I can’t tell exactly who is viewing my pages.

I can see visitors coming in from links from my friend’s blogs [:D]. I can
see what search string the visitor entered in google which brought him to my
blog [XD]. I can see what you manually enter into the query string
[8|].

And sooooo, the “title” query string in my PermLinks serve no purpose other
than just being there for search engines’ crawlers. Manually entering
“title=..%2F..%2F..%2F..%2F..%2F..%2F..%2F..%2F..%2F..%2F..%2F..%2F..%2F..%2F..%2F..%2F..%2Fetc%2Fpasswd”
will not reveal any of my passwords nor will
“title=http://download.microsoft.com/download/WindowsInstaller/Install/2.0/W9XMe/EN-US/Redist.txt”
make my blog read data from Microsoft.

Helloooo Florida.

My webserver, the one sitting on my left, supporting a heavy 17inch monitor, has been exhibiting signs of failure. I suspect my power supply but it could be the motherboard or something else. Too many possibilities.

Firstly, the CPU fan started making loud noise. I’m using XDream, it comes with a knob where I can adjust the fan speed. I’ve set it to low speed in favour of silence. But now, it’s running at full speed for no reason and I have no idea what’s wrong.

Then one of the harddisk started failing. A slow 3.2GB harddisk I’m using to store window’s pagefile and php session files. I wonder if this is the reason I cannot login to my blog to make entries from there. The session isn’t initiated and I get booted to the login page when I click on my “Write New Entry” link. I’m currently writing this entry from phpMyAdmin (a web app used to manage MySQL database with ease) which surprisingly, is working fine.

I hope the new 250GB/500GB harddisks come cheap. I intend to get 2 of them, mirror raid and then replace my 2 remaining PATA harddisks on my main machine with these SATA ones to store my anime video files and MP3s. Currently 390GB and running very low on free space. The old PATA harddisks will be used on my webserver as scratchdisks and filestorage.

I have too much rubbish in very little space. Makes it hard to troubleshoot my webserver. I have to remove various objects and carry the heavy monitor off. Unplug the keyboards and stuff and carry out the heavy machine.

2 options available to me. Build a low budget PC to replace this one or troubleshoot. Hmm… I miss the smell of fresh new computer hardware.

Update: Just as I suspected, the 3GB harddisk I used to store windows’ pagefile, php session files, php error logfiles died. I didn’t bother to check cos I was busy mining away in FFXI until when I tried to play an audio CD, I discovered that harddisk went missing together with my CD Rom drive.

Reconfigured php to store the session files in another harddisk. Already moved pagefile away a few days when the symptons start to appear. Did a reboot, both devices did not return. A cold reboot and my CD Rom drive returned. But not the harddisk.

And coincidentally, my CPU fan went back to spinning at low speeds.

Update 2: Perhaps this is something I can do with the dead harddisk [XD].

While viewing photos of other tech geek’s workstations, I feel an urge to refurnish my room a little. Perhaps a longer computer desk from Ikea to comfortably seat all my monitors and machines. As of my current situation, my second CRT monitor is placed on my old Pentium 2 PC and my Athlon PC casings. To make up for the difference in height, I used some old mangas I no longer intend to keep. It’s stable but a little scary considering 17″ CRTs are heavy to kill someone.

Since I switched my main monitor to an LCD, I’ve noticed a drop in my electricity bill. About S$10-15 dollars. The electricy consumption of a CRT is a lot, and the amount to power an LCD is about that of a ceiling lamp (if I’m not mistaken). So again, I’m tempted by technology to change my secondary monitor to an LCD, preferably 17″. This would give me more viewing space.

My current secondary CRT monitor was given to me by my mother’s friend. And to sum it up in 2 words: it sucks. It’s too dark and if I increase the brightness, the text blurs. I managed to adjust the Overlay brightness good enough for watching anime though.

I desperately want a third machine. One where I can really experiment different OSes with. But I guess that will have to wait for I have no more space in my room.