Denis Lemire's Site

Like every other Maxtor I’ve deployed in the last several years, the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 (6Y120L0) 120 GB drive in this server was throwing multiple read errors and threatening to fail at any moment.

As opposed to waiting for its imminent death, I decided it was time to do some upgrades.

Not wanting to invest in a PATA drive in 2008, I added a Promise SATA300 TX2 SATA PCI controller card and a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 750GB (ST3750330AS)

No hardware upgrade is ever complete without the complementing software upgrade. During the procedure I also opted to upgrade the system from FreeBSD 6.2 to the nearly production ready FreeBSD 7.0 RC2.

In spite of the long hours of work required to completely setup a new FreeBSD installation, everything went smooth. FreeBSD plays nice with the new controller card and everything is now up and running and back to normal. The old 120 GB drive was getting a little cramped anyway, the extra breathing room is going to be nice!

Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) was released yesterday. Overall the improvements are huge. Amongst other things driver support for my aging four year old laptop is nearing perfection.

The only thing that did not work out of the box is my trusty Keyspan USA-19HS USB to DB9 serial adapter. Primarily my laptop is used as a portable tool for on-site network administration. This work often involves configuring various enterprise grade hardware via a serial console. Needless to say, this is functionality I depend on.

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The only thing to date that I’ve missed from the dark ages of using Windows XP Pro is the built in Remote Desktop capability. RDP is one of the very few things I’ve seen come out of Redmond that actually worked beyond a satisfactory level.

Nearly three years ago my work machine was replaced with a PowerMac G5 running OS X Panther, ever since I’ve been looking for an equivalent solution for those occasions when I need GUI access to my desktop via the company VPN.

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Being a technology enthusiast I had a very hard time waiting until October to give Leopard a test run on my Mac Mini.

I decided to give the beta build (9A527) a test run to see what I have to look forward to when the family pack I’ve been eye-balling finally hits store shelves.

Unfortunately, unlike my initial impressions of Tiger, Leopard has already given me enough gripes and annoyances to dampen my excitement towards its release.

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Like most whom are geeky enough to run a home server, I run my server headless (no keyboard or display attached). This is convenient 99% of the time (namely for everything excluding operating system upgrades or occasions where you firewall yourself out of your own machine while tweaking IPFW rules)…

Traditionally I avoided this problem via a PS/2 KVM switch between my server and desktop PC. That solution met it’s end when I ousted my last desktop PC. In order to continue with the KVM style setup I would need to find a KVM equipped with USB keyboard and mouse ports and both VGA and DVI display ports, which apparently is not easy to come by short of some very high end setups.

It seems more often then not, the old fashioned strategies yield the greatest success. I opted for a NULL Modem cable (1969 called, they want their RS-232 back) and a Keyspan USA-19HS USB to Serial adapter for the Mac Mini.

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