Chris Meller

When I originally installed Ubuntu on my DecTOP, I didn’t have any problem booting from a USB flash drive or an external CD drive. Reinstalling Debian on the same box, however, was not quite so easy.

For my own future reference, plus anyone else who may run into the problem, the key is to hold down ESC while the DecTOP POSTs to get it to boot from an external USB drive (at least for a CD drive, presumably a flash drive as well). Shortly you should see a CD-ROM check box appear next to the memory test box and you can let go.

I’m considering snagging a cheap refurbished Dell from HCDI Trading to use as an IPCop or m0n0wall firewall / router.

Both Belkin and Linksys have gotten on my ho-hum list for consumer grade routers recently with some poor performance overall. Two different Linksys WRT54G models (the early ones, pre-WRT54G-L branch-off) seem to freak out every few days to a week and die, requiring a power cycle to fix. The Belkin wants to restart itself every time you change absolutely anything in the admin interface, and its wireless seems to phase in and out of quality, even sitting 6 feet away.

I’m hoping that if I move the router / AP out of the ‘central’ role to a more peripheral AP role on the network, things will improve. I also miss some of the flexibility having a real OS and real hardware brings to the table¹.

Another option I’m considering, although a bit more pricey (yet more ideal as well), is a small “appliance” device, similar to the Linksys and Belkin offerings, yet more flexible and powerful.

Due to the increased shipping costs associated with overseas orders, the company I would prefer to deal with, Linitx, is kicked out. Instead, I would probably go for something very similar to the Logic Supply box George Ou at ZDNet talked about in this exact scenario.

Anyone have any opinions? Other great small devices that would make ideal (preferably cheap) solutions? What do you use at home?

1. No, DD-WRT, Open-WRT, Tomato, et al are not real OSes, they just play one on TV. ↩

Just saw “Too many concurrent connections” SMTP error on (gs) GRID.Cluster.1 show up on my Google homepage.

Is there anything else that could possibly go wrong with the Media Temple (gs) service? By my count, thus far we’ve had:

• Storage problems causing downtime
• MySQL problems causing database downtime
• PHP processing power problems causing downtime
• Log processing problems causing log downtime

Have I missed anything? With the exception of actual network connectivity issues to the broken services on the grid, we’ve hit just about everything they could possibly have go wrong….

Don’t get me wrong, I really really really hope (mt) gets these issues worked out. I’m really looking forward to their MySQL grid containers release in March. Being able to edit your my.cnf file is a real advantage if you ask me. The ability to seamlessly scale up and then back down without being locked into a new plan level is also really cool. It just doesn’t seem like they’re ever going to get any new cool grid features built, because they keep underestimating the use of their existing features. Sometimes I wonder if there was really any beta testing of this platform at all before release…

Bought a new LSI MegaRaid 6-port SATA adapter last night, now I just need to build a machine around it¹.

The only slight downside is that the SATA adapter requires a 64-bit bus, which is going to make the rest of the box slightly more pricey than I’d have liked. Oh well, I guess it’s about time I bit the bullet and made a decent box anyway…

Hell, if I go far enough, I may be able to consolidate the domain controller, SQL 2005 (which would, eventually move into a VM), and the Virtual Server 2005 R2 boxes. If they were able to run on some (probably dual-Xeon) box together, I’d have quite a bit of extra hardware laying around to play with.

This is really the part I hate. Now I’ve got to piece together parts from all across the ‘net, looking for the best performance yet the best deal, while trying to balance the desire to get everything from one retailer.

If you’ve got any particular recommendations on where I should head with this project, feel free to chime in. I’m always open to the opinions of greater nerds who watch hardware performance tests like the true geeks they are…

1. Sure, some would say I’m building in the wrong direction, but nerts to them! ↩