Gamecache Update: Windows Eats Data Edition
That was interesting. I at least annually wipe my windows boxes to keep the Windows bitrot in check. Over time windows just gets cruft built up. Stuff gets installed, uninstalled or never updated and starts causing problems in the background. These problems can be anything from weird errors, to occasional crashes to the system going… Read more
Rack Consolidation: Finale
Finally, it is completed. I won’t use finished because the implies it will never change…and we all know life is all about change. So what’s the final product look like? The rack is full. Sure if I wanted to I could squish everything together and get a couple of more U’s worth of gear..but i… Read more
Rack Consolidation: Part 4.3
Well got everything installed and completed the initial data replication. I went upstairs and removed all of the servers from the rack. I then removed all of the rails. I then re-installed the rails and then re-racked the servers. The r210 did not make it back as it was dead anyway. The order is now… Read more
Rack Consolidation: Part 4.1
Just like that. Another day arrives and the eBay shop where i bought the hard drives did me a solid. Instead of putting the two pairs of drives into two boxes he jsut shipped all four in the same box. I’ll be giving all the eBay vendors that were involved in my build excellent feedback… Read more
Rack Consolidation: Part 4
Finally got some parts in for the 520 that allow me to start getting it put together. I have half of the SAS hard drives, the SD card connector(don’t want to say SD card card..<G>), an extra 64 gigs of ram, all of the drive caddies, and of course the SD cards themselves. Read the… Read more
Rack Consolidation: part 2
I got the 520 in and began poking around. First of all I fired up the machine as a test and it booted fine. I then ran the lifecycle controller’s firmware updater. This machine was far far behind so i told it to install all of the updates. I stuck with it for a few… Read more
Rack consolidation project finally begins
I had recently purchased a Dell Poweredge R420 to replace my aging R310 server that acts as my central storage node. I began to have need to have the ability to run virtual machines and FreeNAS does support running virtual machines. I found out my R310 CPU is too old to run vm’s under… Read more
GameCache Project Updates
It is working out better than I anticipated. Right now the eldest has been installing all of her games on the G drive. I found out one of her games is nearly 200 Gigs in size. Holy crap batman. She can easily chew through more than 400 gigs of storage just with the games she… Read more
One Thing i like about zfs
*Game Cache Update* Is the built in compression. For vm’s you can sometimes get 5-10x compression because vms are mostly empty space. ZFS does compression transparently. Right now as part of the eldest’s game cache her system thinks it has written 75 gigabytes of data. ZFS compression has reduced that down to 52.5G in the… Read more
Game Caching update
I made an earlier post about an experiment I am running. So far so good. The eldest is having to put her games onto the new G drive her computer sees. The magic of ISCSI makes it appear as a local hard drive even though it’s on a network server. I am a HUGE fan… Read more
An interesting FreeNAS Experiment
I came across an interesting use case for FreeNAS. My eldest daughter likes games that are huge. Like 100-250 gigabyte huge. I simply cannot afford to keep adding SSD storage to her machine. I will not do hard disks as main storage..under Windows 10 it’s too painfully slow. What Lawerence had done was taken a… Read more
More 737 MAX details emerge(Long post warning)
Get ready for a long post folks with embedded links. For previous posts please look in the 737 category. Yesterday’s post gave some details about the 737 MAX issues. Karl’s post yesterday goes into greater detail: Let me note up front — I’m not a pilot. I am, however, a software and hardware guy with a… Read more
The 737 MAX is not the first aircraft affected by computer issues
Quantas flight 72 nearly crashed after one of it’s sensing computers got inconsistent data from it AOA(angle of attack) sensors. It seems that AOA sensors also cause a freekout of the MCAS software system aboard the 737 MAX series. The reason the MAX has MCAS is the engines. The engines on the MAX 737 are… Read more