Sgi Indigo2 Project

2019-03-04 | #Geekyness #IRIX #Nostalgia #Retro #SGI #Silicon Graphics

I like Unix workstations, and I may have mentioned it more than once that I like a diverse computing ecosystem At my first real job, Legato Systems Inc., I was part of the SAN Device Qualification team. We all had a Windows and Unix desktop. I was lucky enough to get a sweet Sparc Ultra5: I know, look at that disaster... I'm sorry, I was young, messy and not the stellar employee I am today The observant reader will notice my Ultra5 is not actually on the monitor, and there is a familiar box under the desk.


The Return of Multichannel Audio

2019-01-22

A while back, I noted my sloppy clean-up job when I ran my CAT6 cable under my house. I was able to address that, and, finally mount my surround speakers as well as my center audio speaker. It has been far too long since I packed away those read surround speakers. Sometimes you move around and shuffle your stuff from place to place long enough, you forget what you have in storage.


kbd75 keyboard build

2018-08-05

I like hobbies, and my multimeter. Since I’m not a real engineer (I just pretend), finding accessible projects that let me use my soldering iron and multimeter are high on my list. The mechanical keyboard trend really grabbed my interest, and I didn’t want to just buy one and be done. Nooooo, I had to make it a real experience and justify my tools. Not really, I just wanted to do something more than just plug it in.


Wiring My Home

2017-09-13

Years ago when I bought my first home in Antioch I ran cat5 all over the house. It was fantastic. It gave me the flexibility to put computers in any room, or have my server inside or out in the garage. Wifi was pretty much only used for the Tivo and laptops. This was 2004 after all. Lets skip forward a few years, to 2011 when I moved and had to deal with a rental for the first time in a looong time.


harman kardon avr firmware update

2017-01-08

About 7 years ago, I wrote this post and at the very end I said: I’ll hold of on the firmware update, if I dont encounter an issue, I’ll leave it alone. Well I have finally found an issue! How exciting yes? I recently purchased a (used) PS4, for the “soul” purpose of playing Bloodborne. But Mike, isn’t that really weird to get a PS4 for one game? No, and maybe that could be a completely different article if I ever decide to update on a regular basis.


pdfcrack

2016-03-30

It took over a week of pdfcrack running on my desktop, and it finally found the 6 character password that was set on a PDF Before we changed from Kaiser to Blue Shield, I had Owen’s medical record produced for us. It was not cheap either, and it came with a password set on the PDF. Well, I had saved the PDF to my google drive, but, I apparently did not unset the password.


fedora and broadcom nics

2016-03-21

I think I have come to terms with the fact that Dell servers ship with exceptionally poor onboard devices. The cheaper broadcom ethernet controller have had a less than stellar track record, across both BSD and Linux systems here. Before I Google it yet again, this is the boot option required to install Fedora 20 onto a Dell server with a broadcom controller: modprobe.blacklist=cnic,bnx2i This will not load a kernel module during install, which crashes the Anaconda installer.


Flipping to Amazon

2016-02-12

A good friend of mine has been nice enough to host this site for me. When I moved to the beautiful redwoods, it became apparent that with the fluctuating power situation, I would no longer have the same kind of uptime. With the transition, Christopher was also nice enough to let me host my site over https. I am one of those people that sort of believe in encryption everywhere, even though my site does not transmit any user data.


thermal grease

2016-02-01

Before and After After rebuilding my home server, my primary fear was death by over heating. The first utility I setup was Munin, as well as loading the thermal sensor KLD’s: root@server:~ # kldload coretemp root@server:~ # kldstat Id Refs Address Size Name 1 12 0xffffffff80200000 179ddd8 kernel 2 1 0xffffffff8199e000 4a50 coretemp.ko 3 1 0xffffffff81a11000 1f1698 zfs.ko 4 1 0xffffffff81c03000 3331 opensolaris.ko root@server:~ # dmesg Jan 24 16:35:20 server kernel: coretemp0: <CPU On-Die Thermal Sensors> on cpu0 Jan 24 16:35:20 server kernel: coretemp1: <CPU On-Die Thermal Sensors> on cpu1 Jan 24 16:36:21 server kernel: ichsmb0: <Intel 82801GB (ICH7) SMBus controller> port 0x4000-0x401f irq 19 at device 31.


ceph ocalypse

2016-01-15

This story began with upgraded Ceph from Hammer to Infernalis, thinking it was the next stable release. The upgrade was a little rough, there were some major changes to ceph, a big portion of it was that is switched file permissions from root to ceph, an unpriviledged account. With some downtime, we ran a recursive chown across all OSD volumes (we spun un a tmux session for each drive, 34 drives in each server)