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.