SuperFail and some fun

I received the C200 and good lord it's hard to open!  The controls/drives being in one removable section is pretty cool but is a huge pain when installing drives...especially when you have adapter boards attached to SCA drives *sigh*

I received the 2 remaining drives I had ordered and installed one into my rx2600.  It seems to be working just fine.  HOWEVER, I installed the other one in the C200 and proceeded to install HP-UX via serial console, lo and behold it gives me I/O errors of some kind and the install halts.  So wondering if it was just HP-UX or what was going on I try to install Ubuntu and it fails too!  Ok so I think 'WTF' to myself and stick it in my Octane2, format it and then write random info to a file.  Eventually I get a boatload of 'BAD BLOCK' errors and what not...ugh well this drive is toast.  So I messaged the person I bought it from and am now waiting for them to respond.

In the mean time I installed 2 of the sun drives from my 711 enclosure into it and they seem to be working just fine.  I also took out some more dead drives from the 711.  So I have 4 dead drives from it now, lol.  Oh well.

More spending

I seem to be a compulsive buyer...actually I know this for a fact.  Oh well *sigh*

Anyway I've recently purchased an HP C200 workstation with no hard drive (has a CD-ROM though) and Extreme Networks Summit 48i switch.  Those should be pretty interesting; I've needed a big switch for a while and I think this one will suffice haha ;)  As I've got this fondness for fibre networks I've found some Alteon switches that should be pretty nice, they've got 12 1000 base sx fibre ports on them and are cheap so I'm going to pick up a few in the near future.

I received 18 of the xbox controllers so I listed 4 3-packs on ebay, one sold and I put up another one, was going to ship it when I was on my way home today but there were too many people at the post office.

Arrival and Disappointment

I got 2 boxes the other day and was very excited to have my new gear. I open the small one first and it's my Compaq mouseman exactly as described (new in a bag) and it's wonderful. I believe it's a newer model than my white one as the connector and model number is different but I'm not sure. Anyway I open the other box which is surprisingly light for having 3 drives in it and lo and behold only one drive is in the box! I sensed no foul play on the box so the seller must have only shipped me 1 drive! How insane, I messaged the person and received a reply saying there should have been 3 drives. I think the person just forgot to put them in somehow and are covering themself.

Later I received another package which contained the O2 motherboard I had ordered, I take it out and hear something rattling around inside. Uh oh, turns out one of the heatsinks had come undone on a chip! I stuck some foam in-between the heatsink and the cpu retainer thing directly overtop of it and it sits there firmly now :P Seems to work fine. I placed the one new drive I received into the O2 to install Irix but the O2 does not seem to want to work with the drive! It works fine in my Octane2 but not the O2...I have no idea why it doesn't work.

As a fun thing I got X working on my Itanic, all I did was take out the FireGL, plug the management board into the motherboard and turned it on. I also set up the system so linux displays system/boot messages through the vga console and serial port 1 while having a login on serial port 0. You wouldn't believe how annoying it is having system messages randomly pop up in your console is...especially a serial console.

As far as a not so fun thing, I'm sick today :( Sore throat it seems, bleh. I had to cancel some plans I had with someone to go to lunch :/ oh well...bleh

Huzzah! an update

Nothing all that exciting has happened since I last updated. I received that matrox card I ordered but the non-x86 systems I have seem to not want to cooperate with it so I'll have to find something else to use on the itanic.

I won 3 18GB 15k scsi drives on ebay last night for 15 bucks shipped, whoo! I also won a black Logitech Mouseman, this is a Compaq branded one but it's the same thing. All I need now is the Wingman version (which is grey) to have all 3 colours, I don't feel like buying the wireless or force-feedback versions as I'd never use them.

I was put into an A+ class in school and tested out of it (woot) so I've only got one class this term (tues/thurs) so I never have to dress up! yay! Anyway I have a hell of a lot of free time now and started actually practicing guitar; I'll probably get a job somewhere in the upcoming week or two (or at least try to find something non-helpdesk) but whatever.

Another fun thing I've been doing is using my tripod to take photographs, I'm really interested in night photography and spent about 15 minutes outside last night messing around with my G6. It's a rather lackluster night camera but whatever (15 second exposure maximum and f/8 minimum aperture).