I just upgraded the BIOS on my Intel DG43NB motherboard. What a malarkey! You go to Intel’s website and they’ve helpfully provided a bootable CD ISO for Linux users, so you don’t have to use their Windows utility. Well it turns out the CD isn’t actually bootable, dunno what they’ve done but going back at least five versions it seems its not bootable, so good QA there, plenty of forum posts about it too, so that’s three CD-R’s wasted.
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!
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 😉
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 “her”! They’re getting on better as time goes on – at least occupying the same room at the moment.
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?!
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? I cleaned off that thick grey thermal paste crap they bundle, and applied a thin coat of Artic Silver 5. The whole box would be silent if it wasn’t for the 120mm case fan I have in there, which is whining a bit, never noticed it before with the noisy HSF from the AthlonXP-M. The CPU is at 36c at the moment, pretty much idle, so I’ll have a go at overclocking soon, although the Intel BIOS looks a bit basic for that sort of thing.