That's better!

Ever since I upgraded my main fileserver from RedHat 7.3 to Debian, performance has basically sucked. Somewhat oddly, it showed up mainly on long transfers, reading mail and starting up FireFox in particular, and mainly on slower machines. For a long time I thought it had something to do with NFS file locking (because of the mail) but switching to a non-locking NFS server didn't help.

As it turned out, the problem was one I had seen before: an old, and no longer supported, ethernet card. See, a long time ago a now-defunct company called DEC made one of the best 10/100 ethernet chips, called the "tulip". There was an imitation on the market, nominally compatible, but it required different timings in the driver and wasn't, initially, well-supported under Linux.

Fast-forward a couple of years, and most of DEC gets bought by Compaq, and eventually by HP. Their chip business goes to Intel somewhere along the way, and the tulip gets dropped on the floor (along with the Alpha 64-bit CPU, but we won't go into that). The clones take over, the original tulip driver is now called "old-tulip", and is eventually dropped from the standard installation. A new, non-tulip ethernet card (that cost me all of $4 at Fry's) fixed the problem.

I just backed up roughly 9GB over the network (rsync over ssh) in a little under 3 hours.

A mildly productive weekend

A month or so ago I made a low platform to make it easier for the flower_cat to climb into bed (made especially necessary after she decided to pile a foam pad on top of a mattress that was already about two inches thicker than the one the bed was designed for). The top was a chunk of pine 1x14 I had lying around from an earlier shelving project. Last week chaoswolf's GF stepped on it in just the wrong way and split it from end to end -- turns out the grain was almost exactly vertical. Oops.

So today I went out to Southern Lumber and bought a 2'x4' piece of 3/4" oak plywood. Not only stronger, but it'll match the rest of the bedroom furniture. Finishing in progress.

Yesterday I went to Fry's and picked up a video capture card, to replace the broken one I got in Weird Stuff last week. Turns out the drivers are in the Linux 2.6 kernel. Just as well; I don't have any PCI-bus machines running Windows 98SE or later, which is what it wants. And I finally have SpamAssassin's Bayesian filter trained up; now I have to propagate the procmail script and gnus filtering rules to the other family users.