indiboi.com

Since directly wiring the LEDs to the lan cards didn’t exactly work as planned I created a little ‘device’ that plugs into the parallel port. This is mostly just a prototype and cost about $5 to make with Radioshack parts. I didn’t want to spend the mondo cash on getting ‘cool’ white/blue/violet LEDs… a single white one costs as much as I paid for everything to build this!

I’m still working out the actual software to drive it. The original bit of software would only light up two LEDs, for eth0 TX & RX, but since I have both eth0 and eth1 I needed something better. I think I found it, but just need to test it first.

Here’s an image of the front of the “blink-o-tron” and an image of my horrible soldering job on the back.

Sometimes something is so awful that you cannot help but laugh the entire way through it, Do the Lindows Rock.

I had this ‘brilliant’ idea to mod my network cards & case for the Monet router so that I could have network activity indicators (LEDs) on the front. In a sense this is fairly straight forward, solder wires going to the new LEDs onto the ’stubs’ on the underside of the card.

I’ve done some soldering before, but I’m not exactly good at it. I decided just to be on the safe side I would do only one of the two LEDs on only one of the two network cards. No major issues during the soldering, network cards lit up and I have the secondary LED working too, so I get ready to celebrate my achievement with some apple pie and tea. I sit down at the computer and realize that I cannot ping the router… uhoh. What could be wrong?

I hook up a monitor and keyboard to the router and realize I can’t ping the internal network. I reboot, blah blah, still nothing. I make the assumption that I have somehow damaged the network card, remove it, get a new one… still doesn’t work and I get this “kernel: eth1: PCI error 0×800000″ in the message log for either of the cards in that PCI slot. I take the new card and put it in the last remaining PCI slot and amazingly it works perfectly.

I didn’t ruin the network card. . . I ruined the PCI Slot?! The only thing I can think of occuring was that perhaps a tiny spec of solder got onto the connectors and lodged itself into the slot… I find that somewhat hard to believe, as I would have expected any solder ’stray’ solder to have fallen off… and it wasn’t like I was being messy and getting solder everywhere, lol.

I did a bit of googling for that error and the two hits both dealt with this model of Netgear card; I found that rather interesting, but not exactly helpful. That sort of error is apparently a parity problem… it rather bothers me that I probably fucked up the PCI slot… but for now it isn’t too important since I don’t technically ‘need’ the slot. It just hampers any future expansion, heh… since I sort of toyed with the idea of eventually adding a wireless card… I guess I’ll check it carefully later.

No more soldering for me… at least when it comes to potentially damaging pricey hardware.

I have the Clark Connect box up and running finally and the results:

GRC Port Authority Report created on UTC: 2003-11-26 at 23:28:47

Results from scan of ports: 0-1055

0 Ports Open

0 Ports Closed

1056 Ports Stealth

———————

1056 Ports Tested

ALL PORTS tested were found to be: STEALTH.

Yay! :-D

That isn’t terribly surprising though, heh. So this morning I was writing about my potential concerns, some proved to be spurious and I had a couple that totally blew past my ability to expect them.

Firstly, the power supply did have the p4 aux power connector so no problem there.

Secondly it turns out that I sort of massively screwed up when selecting the case, but honestly it wasn’t my fault, the case was misrepresented EVERYWHERE including newegg where I bought it. It is indeed nice and small when compared to traditional cases, it is attractive and mostly well designed, except this little “low profile” problem… I take one look at the case and realize that the PCI & AGP expansion slot openings seem terribly short. I take one of the network cards and realize that they’re dreaded “half-height” expansion slots!!! This means that I have absolutely no cards that will fit! Argh! The one Linksys card is low profile, but it didn’t come with a half-height hanger. My options were to RMA the case and wait another week to get this thing working or throw even more money at the problem. I definitely chose to throw money at the problem. I did a little research and a company called Directron sells half-height hangers for Netgear blah blah 311 NICs, it’ll be $9 for two of them. That’s pretty pricey for a tiny piece of metal with a bend at the end and a hole in the middle, but whatever. Pretty much everyone sells those Netgear cards and if my experience with the 310 series is any indication the 311 cards are quite good; so for $20 each David & I drove off to Staples to get a pair. This brings the total price of the router to $156, more expensive than a ’standalone’ router, but it’s okay… I guess. The NICs are now ‘floating’ in the motherboard/case, but considering they’re “low-profile” they’re in there quite strongly anyway so the term ‘floating’ really doesn’t apply even though it’s technically true. I’ll still order the hangers just to be ‘professional’ about it.

The second unexpected issue was also related to the ‘low profile’ nature of this case. We’re using a rather HUGE Thermaltake heatsink, superior cooling effects with it. It’s 70mm square with an adapter for an 80mm fan… unfortunately with all that the height of the HSF is a bit much for the case. The CPU is only a Duron 800 so heat isn’t a huge issue, especially with the massive heatsink anyway, so we have a little 40mm fan attached at the moment… after several minutes of running the heatsink was still quite cool (room temp or so) so I’m not concerned. To be proper about it though I’m going to get a low profile (15mm high) 70mm fan to go on the heatsink.

The BIOS isn’t reading the CPU temp correctly, which was another little wrench in the works, it read a staggerly low 4c. That simply isn’t possible, lol. I’m going to try and get the sensors to work in linux itself so I can monitor the system, perhaps I will use something like HotSanic to monitor and graph such things.

The motherboard indeed does not support ANY ATA33 drives. We went through the Fujitsu, the Samsung, a Seagate, a Quantum until finally settling on a very old 14ishGB Maxtor… I don’t even remember when we got that one, but it’s ATA66 so it worked and we didn’t need to “waste” the 40GB ATA100, phew!

Overall once the hardware issues were finally sorted out the actual setup of Clark Connect was unbelievable in the simplicity! I’m really rather shocked, installing this distro of Linux was easier than installing ANY Windows OS! :D

I switched the existing router to a very high IP and turned off DHCP, we swapped cables and rebooted the cable modem, it pretty much just worked straight away. There were a couple of moments of anticipation and angst caused by David not actually resetting the modem, but once that was taken care of all systems were go. We have a wretched IP now, but I guess it doesn’t matter, heh. I’d grown too used to a nice short one that I could actually remember if necessary.

Oh well, we’ll see how it goes.

Hmm, I forgot about this earlier, but yesterday (the 25th) was this website’s “birthday” of sorts, back in 2000.

I wrote a while back about how I want to build my own sort of Tivo unit based on MythTV running on a Linux core. I’m pretty sure I will go with an Asus Pundit ‘barebone’ system because the cost v. feature comparision is very good. The case is attractive and doesn’t look too much like a computer. Total cost of my “MythBox” will be somewhere between $600 and $700 depending on things like wireless keyboards/mouse, etc. I really don’t think I’d need a keyboard/mouse, since the remote provided by the tv tuner card should do everything necessary, but it might be nice to use it as a “regular” computer too sometimes.

There are a few cases from companies like Ahanix that are absolutely perfect for usage in a home theatre environment; however, they require an absolutely massive budget… $200 for JUST a metal box is far too much to spend for ‘looks’ in my opinion. It would be an additional $150 for the power supply, the ‘cool’ VFD (like an LCD/LED display on a vcr/dvd player, etc), and a ‘remote’ control. So we’re at $350 and still haven’t reached the same level of functionality as the Asus Pundit because there still needs to be a motherboard of course, plus the Pundit also provides a media reader.

I keep looking for something better than the Pundit and generally don’t succeed, but I stumbled across the Cubit P4 system this morning. Whoa! I always wanted an Apple “Cube” computer, but they discontinued them before I ever had significant cash and that was pre-OSX anyway and, er, prior to OS X, eww. Shuttle started up the ‘cube’ frenzy again with their barebone systems and just about every company is starting to come out with their own version. They’re pretty damned expensive too, but it is understandable to a certain extent because all of the components need to be “micro-sized” to fit into such a tiny box. The biggest concern with ‘cube’ or “SFF” cases is the airflow and cooling… otherwise you’d truly end up with a toaster.

Anyway, back to the Cubit P4 systems. That mirrored chrome is extremely nice, but the price isn’t. . . $962.99 for JUST the barebones — power supply, motherboard, case. Just for the hell of it I created a rather minimal config to see how much it would cost to get everything included (also including the PVR-350 card) and it came up to a very Apple-esque price of $1,960.06. *Gasp* While those ‘toasters’ are extremely attractive that’s a hell of a lot of money for the sake of appearance! If I had that sort of disposable income though I’d definitely go for it.

They also have the Cubit 3 version which is based on a rather interesting ‘new’ CPU from VIA. I really think that the Nehemiah C3 processors are a good thing, especially if they ‘take off’ and are able to establish a decent sized market share with AMD & Intel. The Cubit 3 systems are considerably less expensive than the P4 systems, but they’re still in deep space compared to other less ‘attractive’ solutions. Personally I haven’t a clue as to where one would buy a VIA C3 processor anyway, heh.

The router project, which still doesn’t have a ‘better’ name is more underway than it was. The motherboard arrived today, I let it ‘adjust’ to room temp and broke it out this morning, looks nice, compact, etc… It’s a MSI KM2M Combo-L motherboard with the KM266 Chipset. The main reason for going with this particular one was that A) it wasn’t completely generic and B) it has both DDR & SDR slots for memory. I rather like that option because for its current purposes regular old SDRAM is perfectly acceptable and we have TONS of it even when not considering the 512MB chips I recently took out of the Dali fileserver because of suspected ‘badness’ with them. Clark Connect only needs 64MB of ram and I have easily 256MB to put into it.

I did run into an unexpected ‘problem’ though when testing it out. Apparently one is REQUIRED to use the p4 12 volt auxiliary power connector in addition to the standard motherboard connector for power. None of the ‘old’ power supplies have this special connector and as such the board won’t turn on. I was testing it with the components placed on a anti-static matts on my side desk because the proper case hasn’t arrived yet. I’m truly hoping that the power supply in the Inwin case has that special p4 connector; I searched around the net for a while and couldn’t find any definitive info, but I did stumble across a photo that shows that power supply model number with p4 power cable coming out of it so I feel somewhat at ease. Fedex should bring the case this afternoon anyway.

The other potential problem was that the all of the information says that it supports processors from 1GHz up to 2.8GHz, but I have only an 800MHz to put into it. I finally found some obscure document on the MSI website referencing that it would work with CPUs all the way down to 600MHz so all good there.

The third potential issue was one I didn’t really consider at all. When I stuck the components into my brother Matt’s old system (totally unstable, it powers off randomly, etc) neither the Fujitsu 1.7GB or the Samsung 8.4GB drive would get recognized by the BIOS. I chalked that up to the computer just being a hunk of shit, especially after I tested the Fujitsu in my workstation and it was recognized without issue. Matt’s computer did detect the 40GB drive though. It didn’t dawn on me until this morning why that inconsistency could have been and the reason is that the motherboard in Matt’s old system simply may not support ATA33 drives. This worries me because this new motherboard states that it supports ATA66 through ATA133… no mention of ATA33 at all. The older and subsequently smaller drives are most certainly ATA33 while the 40GB Maxtor drive is ATA100. I’ll be justified in my disappointment if the tiny Fujitsu drive isn’t detected by the BIOS because it’s only ATA33. This isn’t a blocker, but it does mean that I need to use the 40GB Maxtor drive in the router; using such a large drive in something like that is an incredible waste. I’d much rather use the 40GB drive in the fileserver and while I can still use it for the same purposes on the router, it just strikes me as a security d’oh to have SMB running on such a device EVEN IF it is specifically firewalled off from the ‘red’ ethernet adapter. Oh well, in about six or so hours I should be able to figure all this out provided that Fedex actually does deliver the case today like they’re supposed to.