Cable tidies

I got four of these cable tidy racks from Ikea (well Mum got them) and fitted them under my desks, wow they are great! I have absolutely no cables on the floor now – no power bricks, no network cables, phone cables, USB cables, nothing! They are all tucked away from sight under the desk at the back by the wall. Its also good that the power bricks get a bit of airflow there rather than sitting on carpet, plus it means Pico the cat can’t eat the cables – as she has already done with my Sky remote sender!

New Cat: Picasso

Mum, Pip and I went and got rescue cats today. Three little grey ones. My cat is called Picasso after my car (as Clio is after my old car) and Pico for short, which means small, and is also the text editor part of the Pine email client, to keep on the techie theme πŸ˜‰ Clio is a bit scared of Pico for some reason, despite the fact that Clio is about ten times her size – at least we think its a β€œher”!

Server outages

My server has been up and down for the last couple of days. After almost constant Emailing between myself and my host, we figured out that some numpty in the datacentre was using a PXE boot with DHCP and had stolen my IP, which means the switch must be a bit shit when it comes to storing ARP tables, and who uses a routable IP address to PXE boot from?!

New Fileserver

M&D are back from their trip to Brighton and have brought my new fileserver components back with them. The build went pretty well – almost as quick as KK’s Quad build. The main problem was swapping the SATA cables around to get the boot drive on /dev/sda, its a bit tight with all six SATA ports utilised! I put the Intel Retail Core2Quad HSF on instead of the smaller one that came with the Pentium Dual Core, well it fits and is just a bigger bit of aluminium, so why not?

Fan Club

The fans in my PC’s power supply and on its graphics card are acting up these last few days. I’ve sent for a new PSU, a huge 650W one with a 120mm fan. So when that arrives I’ll probably take this one apart and see if I can replace the fan with a standard 120mm one I’ve got lying around and then maybe use it to rebuild my old fileserver into a desktop machine or something.