There is one problem with this trip though.  We shipped the equipment on the second of July.  It cleared customs in the middle of last week, but DHL has no idea where the stuff is now.  Hopefully we can find the equipment tomorrow, so that we have time to install before the end of the week.  I have another trip planned to our datacenter in Phoenix beginning on Sunday so it is going to be an interesting couple of weeks.  Of course my papers and finals for my online classes fall in these two weeks too.  But the experience will be good…as long as we can locate the servers.

Click to see Pictures.

View of the beach at Ocean City.

The blue rocks at Blue Rocks Campground.

Allen at the top of the mountain.

Me at the top of the mountain.

The view from the top of the mountain. Unfortunatly it was a very hazy day.

The rattlesnake we came across on the trail. We were about three feet away before we saw it. It started rattling like crazy and slid off the path. By the time we were out of the way it was in this rock. Click the picture to see a video of it rattling.

The huddle at the Eagles training camp.

It is good to see J.R. Reed back on the field.

Always good to see Donovan Mcnabb.

Mcnabb hands off to Brian Westbrook.

Westbrook carries the ball.

Brian Dawkins intercepts the ball.

Dawkins is one ripped guy.

Brian Dawkins signs autographs for fans.

But I thought about it more, and realized that PECO (our electric provider) has really shot their uptime statistics for this year. We usually lose power for approximatly a total of 24 hours a year. This is 99.7% uptime. In my work in the IT department with an ASP, this amount of uptime is unacceptable. We have to have at least 99.99%. Well with this 70+ hour downtime, PECO’s uptime for this year will be 98.5%. Ouch. Somebody would get fired in most IT shops for that kind of poor uptime. But there is only so much you can do when trees fall on your power lines. This would make a good case for lines buried in the ground. One good thing this kind of storm outage does is raise awareness for disaster recovery. At least at my company we have already made changes to our plan, and ordered more equipment that will help ensure our office will still function after any future storms may try to shut us down. (We almost lost one important old dev server after a power surge on Tues night. But after several hours on the phone with HP we got it back in order.)

So PECO, turn my lights back on. I want to build a linux server this weekend. (Before I go to the beach next week)

The first thing that I learned was that Dell support people will bug you until you fix your computer. A hard drive went bad in one of our production servers. So I called Dell Gold support (which thankfully has american techs.) to get a replacement. After a lot of discussion, the tech told me to run a firmware update which would fix the issue. So I had to explain to him that it was a production server, and to do the fix he wanted would require me to schedule downtime and then go in to the hosted environment on a Saturday and perform the fix. So finally I got him to send me a replacement drive. But even since I have explained to him that the server is in a hosted facility an hour away from my office, he still calls me everyday to find out if the drive worked. I hate calling Dell tech support. But I have to to get parts under warranty.

Another thing I learned was that biometric fingerprint scanners do not recognize your finger if you have a cut on it. To access the hosted facility where our production equipment is kept, I have to have my right index finger scanned. I had a bad paper cut on it last week, and the scanner wouldn’t pick it up. Fortunatly there was a security gaurd there who accepted my photo ID and let me in. Seems to me like that could be a flaw in biometrics.

Another lesson is that high transactional SQL databases should be built on a Fibre Channel san instead of an ISCSI san. We have been researching a san solution from EMC for our database for several months, and have been recently evaluating an Equallogic ISCSI system. It is a sweet system that is easy to setup and maintain and doesn’t perform well with sql server. They gave us a demo unit, which we were able to get running with our database in very little time. But after testing it out and comparing it to our current system, which uses the SCSI drives in the server, we found it to be slower than our server. They told us some special tweaks to do, but that didn’t make it any faster. After some discussions with some smart EMC engineers, we learned a bunch of things that explained it. This is definitly something to remember for the future, and something to keep an eye on in the industry.

The last thing that I learned was that big relevant new articles can be annoying. This has happened to me several times, but not as bad as last week. Slashdot discussed an article that claimed a huge security hole in a particular version of RealVNC. Since we used to use RealVNC on a regular basis, many people panicked. I had noticed the article several days before when it first came out on a different website, and took the time to verify that the one server we still use vnc on did not have that version. We were completely safe. Then Friday morning, my inbox was cluttered with emails from people asking if I had seen it, and would we get hacked. I had to answer numerous emails explaining that we were fine, we didn’t even use VNC anymore, and besides, we already had other security features (like hardware firewalls, and vpn) which would assure our security even if we had the vulnerable software. It is pretty annoying when well-meaning people, who have no idea how the system is set up, make a huge deal over something that I have already seen and looked into. But I am sure that is something that I will have to deal with for the rest of my IT career.

Motherboard

The motherboard is the most important part of any computer. I wanted to go with an AMD based computer, because I like their performance, and they are also much better performance for your money. I went with an ASUS A8N-VM CSM micro-atx motherboard. This is a Socket 939, Nvidia nForce 430 chipset board. This motherboard has everything on it. Sata raid, 1000mb lan, 6-channel audio, 1394a, and Nvidia Geforce 6 video. I like this board because it has Nvidia integrated graphics, with vga and dvi ports. Now integrated graphics aren’t exactly the greatest, but with my budget, a good video card wasn’t going to happen right now. The graphics on this motherboard are pretty good. Not great, but much better than my laptop. I’ll get to more specifics later. Plus this board has a PCI Express x16 so it will support a better card. For $60 it was a great deal.

CPU

I went with an Athlon 64 3200+ Venice Socket 939 cpu. From all the benchmarks I have seen, it is one of the best performers for the price. I got mine for $154. It operates at 2.0 ghz, has 2 64kb L1 caches, and a 512 kb L2 cache. It also has a 1 ghz bus. I have read that this cpu can be overclocked pretty well. I have read that it has been clocked at 2.4 ghz with stock cooling. I haven’t tried any overclocking, cause I don’t want to fry anything(I can’t afford to replace it).

Ram

I went with 1gb of Kingston ram. $67 is about an average price for 1gb ram. Eventually I want to get another gig. The motherboard can support up to 4gb.

Case

I got an Athentech A100SC270 Silver. It is a nice looking silver micro-atx case. It has a 270 Watt power supply. It has two internal 3.5″ enclosures, 1 external 3.5″ and 1 external 5″ enclosure. The case is sturdy, and quiet. It has 2 fans in the back, and space for a third in the front. The side panel has a grill for extra air flow. It also has two usb ports and a headphone jack in the front. It is also $45. The only complaint I had with the case was that I had to remove the plate for the motherboard ports. You can see what I mean in the picture below.
Hard Drive

I used a 250gb Sata hard drive that I had been using in an older computer I already had. If you shop around carefully you can usually find a 250 gb drive for under $100.

Other

I installed a DVD-rom drive that I had sitting around. Eventually, I will get a DVD burner for around $40, but for now I wanted to save a little. I also installed a TV Tuner card that I had sitting around.

Monitor

I use a Dell 19″ LCD monitor at work, so I bought the same one for this system. It costs about $250 from Dell. Of course I wanted to get the 20″ widescreen LCD, but it was $200 more. This is a great monitor. It is nice and bright, with 1280×1024 resolution.

Setup

Setting up the computer was very easy. I bought all of the parts off of Newegg.  This is the best online retailer of computer parts.  They have great selection, good prices, and fast shipping.  The case provided good instructions for installing everything. In under an hour I had all the components together. This is a picture of the inside of the computer.

And the back panel.

Since the cpu was 64 bit, I wanted to try out Windows XP 64 bit edition. It installed pretty easily in about 20 minutes. The motherboard driver cd had all the 64 bit drivers. The drivers for my tv tuner I found off of PlanetAMD64. XP 64-bit requires all the drivers to be 64-bit. It does not use 32-bit drivers. The only driver problem I have had so far would be with the Cisco VPN client. There are no 64-bit drivers for this program, which I use all the time for work. I have solved my problem using Virtual Server. (something I will blog about more in the future)

Performance

The computer runs very fast. Doing all my internet browsing, and other office stuff is very quick. Playing music, or watching videos while doing other work is very smooth too. I am not a very big gamer, but I do occasionally play some games. It is definitly not the fastest system for games. My 3dmark03 score was only 1152. This is pretty lousy. The poor performance is due to the integrated graphics. It is Nvidia geforce 6 graphics though, so it isn’t too bad for game that are over 3 years old. I tested in with Far Cry, which is a standard game that is used for testing 3d performance. With all the settings to Very High and at 1280×1024 resolution, I got about 11-18 FPS. This is definitly not playable, especially in big fights. With all settings at low and 1280×1024 resolution, I could get about 40-60 FPS. This is pretty good, but the graphics look pretty bad. Still it is much better than the laptop that I had before. I also noticed that I got better frame rates using the 64-bit version of Far Cry versus the 32-bit version.

Conclusion

For $400 for the computer, I think this is a very nice system for office work, media viewing, or a home server. Of course for $200 more, you could get a bigger power supply and a Geforce 7800 and turn this into a decent game computer. I haved loved having a better computer, since I am upgrading from a laptop. I would definitly recommend this setup to anyone looking for a quality, inexpensive computer system. Email me if you want any advice about building a computer. Also If you want me to build one for you, I can do that for a good price.

This is the snow in my backyard on Sunday morning.

This is my front yard on Sunday morning. The next picture is Tuesday morning.

This is the rock pile in the woods behind our house. This is the snow on them on Tuesday morning.

Our front yard before we started rakiing!

Our rakes. The one on the right has got to be an antique.

After 30 minutes of raking we have our first pile.

Allen jumps in the first pile.

After 2.5 hours we have 4 piles.

Allen starts raking our fifth pile.

After 4 hours of raking we combined our five piles into one large pile.

Now comes the fun!!! This is me diving into the pile!

Allen jumps from the rock! Watch it here.

I do the same!

I do a front flip into the pile. Watch it here.

Allen is in there somewhere!

Our final pile. Notice all the unraked leaves in the background.

We still have plenty of leaves left to rake.  And there are many more on
the trees. Maybe when our soreness wears off we can make an even larger
pile. We still have to find a place to put all the leaves we raked up, so
they don’t kill the grass.